Summer of content before a Dickensian storm

In Barnaby Rudge, his novel of the Gordon Riots, Charles Dickens gives us a vision of sunlit bliss before the murderous climax

Barnaby and his mother have almost nothing, and Barnaby wants nothing, because he has his pet raven, Grip.

"A crust of bread and scrap of meat, with water from the brook or spring, sufficed for their repast. Barnaby's enjoyments were, to walk, and run, and leap, till he was tired; then to lie down in the long grass or by the growing corn, or in the shade of some tall tree, looking upwards at the light clouds as they floated over the blue surface of the sky, and listening to the lark as she poured out her brilliant song," wrote Charles Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, his 1841 novel of the Gordon Riots and the burning of Newgate in 1780.