Note 3 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.
Barnaby Budge has generally been seen as a fractured novel whose coherence is wreeked by the five-year gap at its centre. This criticism is so entrenched that one could easily trace its tradition; Forster obviously started it (Life, i. 144) and, with one exception, it has not been broken until recently. The one early exception is George Gissing, who called the novel "Dickens's best constructed story" (p. 171). Defences of the unity of the novel are offered by the critics mentioned in the first note and by James K. Gottshall.
Last modified: 1 May 2001