Barnaby Rudge Helping Lead the Gordon Riots (1884): Art, History and Details

Barnaby Rudge Helping Lead the Gordon Riots (1884) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Charles Green (British, 1840–1898).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Charles Green was one of the most successful black-and-white illustrators in Victorian England, known especially for his images related to the novels of Charles Dickens. The subject of this drawing relates to the writer's historical novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, based on the Gordon Riots. Here, Green depicted participants in an anti-Catholic protest against the Papists' Act of 1778, the most violent outpouring of religious hatred in 18th-century Britain.

Object facts

• Title: Barnaby Rudge Helping Lead the Gordon Riots
• Date: 1884
• Creator attribution: Charles Green (British, 1840–1898)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor with traces of graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 25.4 x 17.6 cm (10 x 6 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2013.238

A detail from the museum

This drawing was never published as an illustration, but the character of Barnaby appeared in Charles Green's design for a title page for an edition of Dickens's collected works.

Collection credit

Gift in memory of Helen Borowitz

Further reading listed by the museum

• Victorian Era Exhibition, 1897: Catalogue, Historical and Commemorative Sections. Exh. Cat. London: Earl's Court, 1897.
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.