Among Dickens' full-length novels, Barnaby Rudge has been the awkward stepchild, impossible to ignore and difficult to love. Compared to Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, its predecessors, it is not remarkably rich in either comic invention or moving pathos. It does not glow with the high spirits of Pickwick or the warm, compassionate tolerance of David Copperfield: its best humor is edged with satire, and the pathos is often rather thin and forced. Nor, despite the crowds that swarm through its pages, does its world seem free or spacious: there is, for Dickens, an almost tight-lipped unwillingness to deviate from the intricate and rather grim progression of the story. This may be partly accounted for by the mode of publication: Dickens seldom felt at ease in the short weekly installments which did not leave space to “play around [the story] here and there, and mitigate the severity of . . . your sticking to it.” Some have thought that Dickens' imagination was constricted by subject matter he had systematically “researched” from written documents, even though some of the freest and most vigorous writing occurs in the passages based on history. Whatever the reason, Barnaby Rudge is a rather forbidding and at times even arid book, disturbing rather than reassuring despite the happy ending: in feeling as in technique, it is akin to such later “dark” and comparatively unpopular novels as Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. But I think it is both richer and more firmly and meaningfully organized than many critics have allowed.