Chivalric Ideals Reflected in the Working-Class Character of Barnaby Rudge

This paper, by focussing on the locksmith Gabriel Varden in Barnaby Rudge, examines how Charles Dickens presents his working-class character as a model of chivalric virtues such as courage, loyalty, honor, Christianity, protection of the weak and the feminine, and physical manliness. This paper also examines how Dickens expresses his distrust of the aristocracy in this novel. Furthermore, it discusses why Dickens preferred the working-class people to the governing aristocrats in his vision for social leadership. The Victorian Age was a highly class-conscious period when the injustice of social inequality caused the extreme plight of the lower-class people. By endowing his working-class characters with chivalric qualities, which had been exclusively applied to the upper class, Dickens attempted to narrow the gap between social classes. He sympathetically tried to relieve the oppression of the lower-class people by showing their potentiality to lead society by means of human virtues.