Lord George Gordon

Lord George Gordon was a British politician and leader of the Protestant Association. In 1780 he presented a petition against limited relief granted to Catholics, and the mass demonstration that followed developed into the destructive Gordon Riots across London. Gordon was tried for treason but acquitted because the prosecution could not prove that he intended the violence. He later converted to Judaism and died in Newgate Prison after refusing conditions attached to bail in a separate case.

Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge is the defining historical novel about the Gordon Riots and portrays Gordon amid crowds, agitators and political manipulation. Although Dickens was writing decades later, the novel strongly shaped popular memory of the events. Gordon’s eccentric later conversion and imprisonment make his life stranger and more complex than the single image of an anti-Catholic demagogue.