"The Last Night of the Great Riots" — Harry Furniss's twenty-third illustration for Dickens's "Barnaby Rudge" (1910)

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The Last Night of the Great Riots

The gutters of the street and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with scorching spirits. Some stooped with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them.

Harry Furniss

1910

13.8 cm x 9.2 cm (5 ⅜ by 3 ⅝ inches), vignetted

Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VI, 530.

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: The Riot peters out sensationally

But there was a worse spectacle than this — worse by far than fire and smoke, or even the rabble’s unappeasable and maniac rage. The gutters of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into which the people dropped down dead by dozens. They lay in heaps all round this fearful pond, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, women with children in their arms and babies at their breasts, and drank until they died. While some stooped with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them. Nor was even this the worst or most appalling kind of death that happened on this fatal night. From the burning cellars, where they drank out of hats, pails, buckets, tubs, and shoes, some men were drawn, alive, but all alight from head to foot; who, in their unendurable anguish and suffering, making for anything that had the look of water, rolled, hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed up liquid fire which lapped in all it met with as it ran along the surface, and neither spared the living nor the dead. On this last night of the great riots — for the last night it was — the wretched victims of a senseless outcry, became themselves the dust and ashes of the flames they had kindled, and strewed the public streets of London. [Chapter the Sixty-eighth, 533]

Relevant Illustration from the Original Edition

Phiz's dramatic description of the rioters' destroying themselves: The Rabble's Orgy (9 October 1841).

Related Material including Other Illustrated Editions of Barnaby Rudge

Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (homepage)
Cattermole and Phiz — First illustrators: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works" (1841)
Cattermole's Seventeen Illustrations (13 Feb.-27 Nov. 1841)
Phiz's Original Serial Illustrations (13 Feb.-27 Nov. 1841)
F. O. C. Darley's frontispieces and extra illustrations for the novel (1862 and 1888)
Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition Illustrations (1867)
Fred Barnard's 46 illustrations for the Household Edition (1874)
A. H. Buckland's illustrations for The Collins' Clear-type Press Pocket Edition (1900)

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock. Illustrated by Phiz and George Cattermole. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841; rpt., Bradbury and Evans, 1849.

________. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VI.

Created 24 July 2020

Last modified 6 December 2020