Religious Violence without Religion

Ruth M. McAdams, “Religious Violence without Religion: Bleak Secular Stasis in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge” (pp. 243–269) This article analyzes the erasure of religion in Charles Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841). The novel strangely depicts the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780 as motivated by opportunism and score-settling rather than zealotry or anti-Catholic sentiment, effacing both the anti-Catholicism of the rioters and the Catholicism of those targeted. I argue that the novel rejects both the traditional secularization narratives that would follow the social integration of British Catholics as a process and the contrary narrative in which religiosity is renegotiated in response to state expansion. Instead, Barnaby Rudge envisions secularity as already complete, though secular modernity is defined not only by the absence of religion but also by the evergreen presence of violence that is religious only in name. The novel’s bleak secularity shares a sense of temporal stasis with the militant Protestantism it appears to critique. My analysis highlights an instance in which the Victorian historical novel resists progressive time and instead uses the case of religious difference to illustrate the historical constancy of immanent violence.