The End of Dickens's Apprenticeship: Variable Focus in Barnaby Rudge

Abstract

1N A PERCEPTIVE RECENT STUDY, H. M. Daleski summarizes Charles Dickens's technical development as an attempt to understand and probe more deeply analogies between private and public conduct, to use analogy, as Steven Marcus suggests, to link together individual and social spheres-a technique which he perfects in Bleak House [1852-53], Little Dorrit [1855-57], and Our Mutual Friend [1864-65].' While importance of Dickens's art of analogy is incontestable, implication that Bleak House is first successful embodiment of technique must be disputed. His capsule summary of novelist's career is weakened by a distressingly common oversight. Studies of Dickens's craftsmanship have consistently ignored impressive experiments made in Barnaby Rudge (1841), although structural innovations of this work closely resemble justly admired fictional techniques of later masterpieces. In Barnaby, a decade before Bleak House, Dickens fully correlates the individual and social spheres of his novel through analogy. Further, his figurative as well as structural use of time and his creation of a cohesive narrative point of view make Barnaby Rudge a significant departure from episodic early books, a clear anticipation of organically unified late novels.