Interspecies Interdependence in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841)

Charles Dickens was fascinated by disabled people, nonhuman animals, and (as this chapter shows) how the two interacted with one another. Using an approach informed by disability studies, critical animal studies, and posthumanism, this chapter explores how Dickens’s interests in disability and nonhuman animals combined in Barnaby Rudge (1841) through the author’s pairing of the fictionalised raven and the novel’s titular character, who, to use the language of the time (and the novel), is presented to the reader as an ‘idiot’. The chapter argues that Dickens’s depiction of this relationship provides a playful model for what we might call interspecies interdependence. After positioning the chapter’s argument in relation to recent scholarship to show how it provides a new model for reading Dickens’s work, the chapter investigates disabled people and animals in Victorian culture and how they are represented in Dickens’s writings and journals before close reading how Barnaby and Grip’s relationship is imagined in Barnaby Rudge. The chapter ends by considering the extent to which Dickens’s portrayal of this relationship appears to anticipate contemporary understandings of interspecies interdependence and ‘oddkinship’. The chapter also shows how the novel’s contested ending can be read as an animal-assisted alternative to the common trope of disability as a narrative of unending personal tragedy.