20 - The historical novel

Summary

The ambition to write an historical novel framed the early stages of Dickens's literary career. In May 1836 he signed a contract with John Macrone for a novel called ‘Gabriel Vardon, The Locksmith of London’, which he may have contemplated as early as 1833. ‘Gabriel Vardon’ was to be published in three volumes, a standard format established by the novels of Walter Scott, and would culminate in a treatment of the 1780 Gordon Riots, modelled on the scenes of urban insurrection in Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). The second number of Pickwick Papers had just appeared; its huge popularity still before it, Pickwick was classed as a series of comic sketches, ‘a periodical with only one article’, rather than a novel. Although ‘Gabriel Vardon’ would not be published until 1841, in weekly instalments and under the title Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, it has a claim to be regarded as Dickens's first venture in the novel as the genre was understood in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Dickens aimed at the prestige as well as the immense profits won by Walter Scott's Waverley novels (so called after the first in the series, Waverley, 1814). In his lifetime Scott ‘sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together’; by the late 1860s he was still, ‘by several orders of magnitude, the author whose works had sold the largest number of copies in the English-speaking world’.