If the object an author has had, in writing a book, cannot be discovered from its perusal, the probability is that it is either very deep or very shallow. Hoping that mine may lie somewhere between these two extremes, I shall say very little about it, and that only in reference to one point. No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced into any work of fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this tale. This is final. It appears from Forster’s biography that Dickens desired to expose the brutalising character of laws which led to the incessant execution of men and women comparatively innocent. It is clear also that Dickens made a special study of the contemporary newspapers and annual registers. But Forster admits that the form ultimately taken by _Barnaby Rudge_ had been comprised only partially within its first design, and he admits also that the interest with which the tale begins has ceased to be its interest before the close. ‘What has chiefly taken the reader’s fancy at the outset almost wholly disappears in the power and passion with which, in the later chapters, great riots are described. So admirable is this description, however, that it would be hard to have to surrender it even for a more perfect structure of fable.’ To this I may add that the letters to the artist Cattermole on the illustrations to _Barnaby Rudge_ are very valuable for the fullness and precision of their detail. DICKENS’S WAY That it is legitimate to draw inferences from the hints given by Dickens I should be the last to deny. His purpose was to provide hints which, when contemplated with what he called a backward glance, should appear luminous at the end of the story. Their meaning at the time might be more or less obscure, but when from the end of the book one could look back upon its course even to the beginning, he would see that the artist had a purpose all through, and that he was steadily preparing his reader for the _dénouement_. Of this I give a striking proof, on which, so far as I am aware, little stress has been laid. {104} The _Edinburgh Review_ of July 1857 contains an article, ‘The License of Modern Novelists,’ in which the critic deals with _Little Dorrit_, and denounces his charges against the administrative system of England. Among other things, the reviewer says: ‘Even the catastrophe in _Little Dorrit_ is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient period.’ Dickens, for the first and only time in his life, so far as I know, publicly replied to a reviewer. He wrote an article in _Household Words_ of 1st August 1857, entitled ‘Curious Misprint in the _Edinburgh Review_,’ in which he turned upon his critic fiercely and sharply. He quotes the sentence about the catastrophe in _Little Dorrit_, and goes on to say: