Note 2 to Chapter 5 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
Though the novel has been vigorously defended by a few recent critics, the general evaluation is fairly represented by Edgar Johnson: Barnaby Budge, he says, "is the least satisfactory of all Dickens's full-length books" (i. 330). Part of the reason for what seems to me an extreme undervaluation is the peculiar publishing history of the novel, traced both by Johnson and by Kathleen Tillotson (Preface, p. v), in which Dickens postponed writing the novel during five years of various fights with publishers. George Ford argues that this postponement suggests that "Dickens himself had little love for Burnaby, the unwanted child among his early novels" (pp. 42-3). Kathleen Tillotson, on the other hand, says Dickens's persistence through difficulties"'is evidence of his tenacity of purpose and the grip of the original idea on his imagination; not, as has been suggested, of the grudging performance of a task" (Preface, p. v).
Last modified: 1 May 2001