Breach of Privilege

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to parliamentary reform and the art of representing the People—two topics that engaged Dickens’s fervent interest as a writer and reporter. It emphasizes the role played by the media in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Reporting the parliamentary debates remained an official breach of privilege until after Dickens’s death, though it was tolerated. The chapter asks how the private is made public in fiction and journalism from The Mirror of Parliament to Dickens’s parliamentary sketches. It offers a history of parliamentary reform intertwined with Dickens’s own family history, while examining the pressures on Parliament to offer a “mirror” of the nation. Next, it returns to Gurney’s Brachygraphy, showing how the unconscious satire of its practice texts concerning legitimate rule reverberated in Dickens’s fiction. The chapter ends with Dickens’s first contracted novel, Barnaby Rudge, a tale of the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reads this historical novel as both a response to parliamentary history and a re-presentation of events Dickens witnessed: the anti-Catholic riots leading to parliamentary reform. These events produced the “breach” birth of Dickens as a writer.