and am going in the next number to tear the prisoners out by
the hair of their heads. The number which gets into the jail you'll have
in proof by Tuesday." This was followed up a week later: "I have let all
the prisoners out of Newgate, burnt down Lord Mansfield's, and played
the very devil. Another number will finish the fires, and help us on
towards the end. I feel quite smoky when I am at work. I want elbow-room
terribly." To this trouble, graver supervened at his return, a serious
personal sickness not the least; but he bore up gallantly, and I had
never better occasion than now to observe his quiet endurance of pain,
how little he thought of himself where the sense of self is commonly
supreme, and the manful duty with which everything was done that, ailing
as he was, he felt it necessary to do. He was still in his sick-room
(22d October) when he wrote, "I hope I sha'n't leave off any more, now,
until I have finished _Barnaby_." Three days after that, he was busying
himself eagerly for others; and on the 2d of November the printers
received the close of _Barnaby Rudge_.

This tale was Dickens's first attempt out of the sphere of the life of
the day and its actual manners. Begun during the progress of _Oliver
Twist_, it had been for some time laid aside; the form it ultimately
took had been comprised only partially within its first design; and the
story in its finished shape presented strongly a special purpose, the
characteristic of all but his very earliest writings. Its scene is laid
at the time when the incessant execution of men and women, comparatively
innocent, disgraced every part of the country; demoralizing thousands,
whom it also prepared for the scaffold. In those days the theft of a few
rags from a bleaching-ground, or the abstraction of a roll of ribbons
from a counter, was visited with the penalty of blood; and such laws
brutalized both their ministers and victims. It was the time, too, when
a false religious outcry brought with it appalling guilt and misery.
These are vices that leave more behind them than the first forms
assumed, and they involve a lesson sufficiently required to justify a
writer in dealing with them. There were also others grafted on them. In
Barnaby himself it was desired to show what sources of comfort there
might be, for the patient and cheerful heart, in even the worst of all
human afflictions; and in the hunted life of his outcast father, whose
crime had entailed not that afflic