To claim that the seizing of the wrist could have been deduced from Solomon Daisy’s story by itself is to affirm an impossibility.
And so vanishes the main value of the prediction. If Poe wrote that article in the Saturday Evening Post, he wrote it after having read the fifth chapter of Dickens’s novel.
WHERE POE SUCCEEDED
It may be asked whether Poe discovered anything from his reading of the first pages. The only thing which he may have guessed is the thing which it was comparatively easy to guess. He may have conjectured that the mysterious stranger at the Maypole was Rudge Redux. When this surmise had been lodged in his mind the other deductions follow as a matter of course from later chapters, as the tale unfolds itself. Even if Poe identified the stranger at the Maypole with the murderer it was no great feat, for the murderer is closely disguised, from which any intelligent reader would infer that he has a motive for fearing detection in an old haunt. He is shabbily dressed; he is very curious about the people and events at The Warren; he is suspected as a criminal of some kind by the cronies; he strikes Joe as he leaves. On the road he threatens Varden with murder. This shows us that we have before us a fugitive criminal. He is presented to us with all the marks of a villain in hiding. It may be noted that from Solomon Daisy’s story the inference is that only one of two men committed the murder of Reuben Haredale, the gardener or Rudge. There has also been a difficulty in identifying the remains. This leaves Poe no special credit. There is considerable keenness in his conjecture that the treatment of the Gordon Riots was an afterthought of Dickens. Poe says:
The title of the book, the elaborate and pointed manner of the commencement, the impressive description of The Warren, and especially of Mrs. Rudge, go far to show that Mr. Dickens has really deceived himself—that the soul of the plot, as originally conceived, was the murder of Haredale, with the subsequent discovery of the murderer in Rudge—but that this idea was afterwards abandoned, or, rather, suffered to be merged in that of the Popish riots. The result has been most unfavourable. That which, of itself, would have proved highly effective, has been rendered nearly null by its situation. In the multitudinous outrage and horror of the Rebellion, the one atrocity is utterly whelmed and extinguished.
But facts, as Poe admits, are against this supposition. Dickens says in his Preface:
If the object an author has had, in writing a book, cannot be discovered from its perusal, the probability is that it is either very deep or very shallow. Hoping that mine may lie somewhere between these two extremes, I shall say very little about it, and that only in reference to one point. No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this tale.
This is final. It appears from Forster’s biography that Dickens desired to expose the brutalising character of laws which led to the incessant execution of men and women comparatively innocent. It is clear also that Dickens made a special study of the contemporary newspapers and annual registers. But Forster admits that the form ultimately taken by Barnaby Rudge had been comprised only partially within its first design, and he admits also that the interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close. ‘What has chiefly taken the reader’s fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later chapters, great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable.’ To this I may add that the letters to the artist Cattermole on the illustrations to Barnaby Rudge are very valuable for the fullness and precision of their detail.
DICKENS’S WAY
That it is legitimate to draw inferences from the hints given by Dickens I should be the last to deny. His purpose was to provide hints which, when contemplated with what he called a backward glance, should appear luminous at the end of the story. Their meaning at the time might be more or less obscure, but when from the end of the book one could look back upon its course even to the beginning, he would see that the artist had a purpose all through, and that he was steadily preparing his reader for the dénouement. Of this I give a striking proof, on which, so far as I am aware, little stress has been laid. [104] The Edinburgh Review of July 1857 contains an article, ‘The License of Modern Novelists,’ in which the critic deals with Little Dorrit, and denounces his charges against the administrative system of England. Among other things, the reviewer says: ‘Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period.’ Dickens, for the first and only time in his life, so far as I know, publicly replied to a reviewer. He wrote an article in Household Words of 1st August 1857, entitled ‘Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review,’ in which he turned upon his critic fiercely and sharply. He quotes the sentence about the catastrophe in Little Dorrit, and goes on to say: