LITTLE DORRIT

CHARLES DICKENS was born at Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children. Dickens’s childhood experiences were similar to those depicted in David Copperfield. His father, who was a government clerk, was imprisoned for debt and Dickens was briefly sent to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve. He received little formal education, but taught himself shorthand and became a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle. He began to publish sketches in various periodicals, which were subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz. The Pickwick Papers were published in 1836–7 and after a slow start became a publishing phenomenon and Dickens’s characters the centre of a popular cult. Part of the secret of his success was the method of cheap serial publication which Dickens used for all his novels. He began Oliver Twist in 1837, followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). After finishing Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens set off for America; he went full of enthusiasm for the young republic but, in spite of a triumphant reception, he returned disillusioned. His experiences are recorded in American Notes (1842). Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) did not repeat its predecessors’ success but this was quickly redressed by the huge popularity of the Christmas Books, of which the first, A Christmas Carol, appeared in 1843. During 1844–6 Dickens travelled abroad and he began Dombey and Son while in Switzerland. This and David Copperfield (1849–50) were more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early novels. In later works, such as Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857), Dickens’s social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage. In 1850 Dickens started the weekly periodical Household Words, succeeded in 1859 by All the Year Round; in these he published Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61). Dickens’s health was failing during the 1860s and the physical strain of the public readings which he began in 1858 hastened his decline, although Our Mutual Friend (1865) retained some of his best comedy. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and he died on 9 June 1870. Public grief at his death was considerable and he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

STEPHEN WALL is an Emeritus Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and edits the quarterly journal Essays in Criticism. His publications include Trollope and Character (1988) and Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology (1970). He has also edited Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? for Penguin Classics.

HELEN SMALL is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. She is the author of Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (1996), co-editor of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (1996), which includes an essay by her on Charles Dickens’s public readings. She edited The Public Intellectual (2002).

CHARLES DICKENS

Little Dorrit

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
STEPHEN WALL and HELEN SMALL

Revised Edition

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in 1857

This edition published in Penguin Classics 1998

Revised edition 2003

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

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9780141900292

A Dickens Chronology

Introduction

A Dickens Chronology

1812 7 February Charles John Huffam Dickens born at Portsmouth, where his father is a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The eldest son in a family of eight, two of whom die in childhood.

1817 After previous postings to London and Sheerness and frequent changes of address, John Dickens settles his family in Chatham.

1821 Dickens attends local school kept by a Baptist minister.

1822 Family returns to London.

1824 Dickens’s father in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison for three months. During this time and afterwards Dickens employed in a blacking warehouse, labelling bottles. Resumes education at Wellington House Academy, Hampstead Road, London, 1825–7.

1827 Becomes a solicitor’s clerk.

1830 Admitted as a reader to the British Museum.

1832 Becomes a parliamentary reporter after mastering shorthand. In love with Maria Beadnell, 1830–33. Misses audition as an actor at Covent Garden because of illness.

1833 First published story, ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, in the Monthly Magazine. Further stories and sketches in this and other periodicals, 1834–5.

1834 Becomes reporter on the Morning Chronicle.

1835 Engaged to Catherine Hogarth, daughter of editor of the Evening Chronicle.

1836 Sketches by Boz, First and Second Series, published. Marries Catherine Hogarth. Meets John Forster, his literary adviser and future biographer. The Strange Gentleman, a farce, and The Village Coquettes, a pastoral operetta, professionally performed in London.

1837 The Pickwick Papers published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1836–7). Birth of a son, the first of ten children. Death of Mary Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law. Edits Bentley’s Miscellany, 1837–9.

1838 Oliver Twist published in three volumes (serialized monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany, 1837–9). Visits Yorkshire schools of the Dotheboys type.

1839 Nicholas Nickleby published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1838–9). Moves to 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regents Park, London.

1841 Declines invitation to stand for Parliament. The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge published in separate volumes after appearing in weekly numbers in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1840–41. Public dinner in his honour at Edinburgh.

1842 January–June First visit to North America, described in American Notes, two volumes. Georgina Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law, becomes permanent member of the household.

1843 Speech on the Press to Printer’s Pension Society, followed by others on behalf of various causes throughout Dickens’s career. A Christmas Carol published in December.

1844 Martin Chuzzlewit published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1843–4). Dickens and family leave for Italy, Switzerland and France. Dickens returns to London briefly to read The Chimes to friends before its publication in December.

1845 Dickens and family return from Italy. The Cricket on the Hearth published at Christmas. Writes autobiographical fragment, ?1845–6, not published until included in Forster’s Life (three volumes, 1872–4).

1846 Becomes first editor of the Daily News but resigns after seventeen issues. Pictures from Italy published. Dickens and family in Switzerland and Paris. The Battle of Life published at Christmas.

1847 Returns to London. Helps Miss Burdett Coutts to set up, and later to run, a ‘Home for Homeless Women’.

1848 Dombey and Son published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1846–8). Organizes and acts in charity performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Every Man in His Humour in London and elsewhere. The Haunted Man published at Christmas.

1850 Household Words, a weekly journal ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’, begins in March and continues until 1859. Dickens makes a speech at first meeting of Metropolitan Sanitary Association. David Copperfield published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1849–50).

1851 Death of Dickens’s father and of infant daughter. Further theatrical activities in aid of the Guild of Literature and Art, including a performance before Queen Victoria. A Child’s History of England appears at intervals in Household Words, published in three volumes (1852, 1853, 1854). Moves to Tavistock House, Tavistock Square, London.

1853 Bleak House published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1852–3). Dickens gives first public readings for charity (from A Christmas Carol).

1854 Visits Preston, Lancashire, to observe industrial unrest. Hard Times appears weekly in Household Words and is published in book form.

1855 Speech in support of the Administrative Reform Association. Disappointing meeting with now married Maria Beadnell.

1856 Dickens buys Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester.

1857 Little Dorrit published in one volume (issued in monthly parts, 1855–7). Dickens acts in Wilkie Collins’s melodrama The Frozen Deep and falls in love with the young actress Ellen Ternan. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written jointly with Wilkie Collins about a holiday in Cumberland, appears in Household Words.

1858 Publishes Reprinted Pieces (articles from Household Words). Separation from his wife followed by statement in Household Words. First public readings for his own profit in London, followed by provincial tour. Dickens’s household now largely run by his sister-in-law Georgina.

1859 All the Year Round, a weekly journal again ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’, begins. A Tale of Two Cities, serialized both in All the Year Round and in monthly parts, appears in one volume.

1860 Dickens sells London house and moves family to Gad’s Hill.

1861 Great Expectations published in three volumes after appearing weekly in All the Year Round (1860–61).The Uncommercial Traveller (papers from All the Year Round) appears; expanded edition, 1868. Further public readings, 1861–3.

1863 Death of Dickens’s mother, and of his son Walter (in India). Reconciled with Thackeray, with whom he had quarrelled, shortly before the latter’s death. Publishes ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’ in Christmas number of All the Year Round.

1865 Our Mutual Friend published in two volumes (issued in monthly parts, 1864–5). Dickens severely shocked after a serious train accident at Staplehurst, Kent, when returning from France with Ellen Ternan and her mother.

1866 Begins another series of readings. Takes a house for Ellen at Slough. ‘Mugby Junction’ appears in Christmas number of All the Year Round.

1867 Moves Ellen to Peckham. Second journey to America. Gives readings in Boston, New York, Washington and elsewhere, despite increasing ill-health. ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ appears in Atlantic Monthly (then in All the Year Round, 1868).

1868 Returns to England. Readings now include the sensational ‘Sikes and Nancy’ from Oliver Twist; Dickens’s health further undermined.

1870 Farewell readings in London. The Mystery of Edwin Drood issued in six monthly parts, intended to be completed in twelve. 9 June Dies, after stroke, at Gad’s Hill, aged fifty-eight. Buried in Westminster Abbey.

Stephen Wall, 2002

Introduction

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)

Early in 1824, when Dickens was a boy of twelve, his father was put in the Marshalsea Prison for debt, where he remained for three months. During that time, and for some while afterwards, the young Charles was put to work in a warehouse, pasting labels on to pots of blacking and living in lodgings while the rest of the family joined his father in gaol. Dickens tried to come to terms with this desolating episode in an abandoned fragment of autobiography written in the late 1840s, but he never spoke about it to his own children, and the story only came out posthumously in Forster’s biography. It was, however, incorporated in David Copperfield (1849–50), where David’s bitter resentment at being subjected so thoughtlessly to ‘that slow agony of my youth’ clearly expresses Dickens’s own lasting sense of injury. At the time, the humiliations of the warehouse may have been even harder to bear than the shame of parents behind bars, but both were part of the same experience, as their yoking together in Chapter XI of David Copperfield shows. It’s the more remarkable therefore that when he began to write Little Dorrit in May 1855 Dickens’s treatment of the Marshalsea should in a few years have developed so far beyond personal trauma towards a larger vision in which the iron bars of its gate are ‘turned by the early-glowing sun into stripes of gold’ whose ‘long bright rays’, striking across the city’s jumbled roofs and church towers, become ‘bars of the prison of this lower world’ (p. 796).

Prisons engaged Dickens’s attention throughout his career. His first collection of papers, Sketches by Boz (1836), includes a careful account of a visit to Newgate, stormed during the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge (1841). Mr Pickwick’s normal buoyancy is severely checked when he has to spend some time in the Fleet, another debtors’ prison. The sensational chapter describing Fagin’s last night alive in Dickens’s second novel, Oliver Twist (1838), was to have been paralleled by another scene in the condemned cell in his last, Edwin Drood (1870). In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dr Manette is buried alive in the Bastille for so long that he can no more escape its conditioning when freed than Mr Dorrit can when released from the Marshalsea. Dickens was also a great visitor of prisons in real life, both at home and abroad, and wrote with intense feeling about the ‘torture and agony’ of solitary confinement in American Notes (1842). Nowhere else in his work, however, is the state of imprisonment, whether as experience, idea, metaphor or theme, studied so searchingly as in Little Dorrit.

The inmates of the Marshalsea are there because they owe money they can’t pay, not because they are guilty of murder, theft or grievous bodily harm. It’s quite unlike the barbaric prison camp in The House of the Dead (1860) by Dickens’s admirer Dostoevsky, where political exiles are thrown together with violent criminals and are sadistically beaten. The financial problems faced by Mr Dorrit and his fellows may vary in degree, but they also provide a common interest which fosters mutual sympathy and promotes a kind of society – or, as the prisoners call it, a ‘college’ – that isn’t without its congenial and even convivial aspects. Their physical confinement – cut off by high walls from wide skies and open prospects – is certainly hard to bear, as Arthur Clennam realizes when accidentally shut in for the night after his first visit, but some sort of domestic life can still be carried on. It is possible to maintain, or invent, one’s character, as Mr Dorrit so conspicuously does. Being inside can even seem preferable to life outside, once you get used to it. As the drunken doctor who brings Little Dorrit into the world observes,

‘We are quiet here … Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at home, and to say he’ll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money, to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s freedom! … Elsewhere, people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir … we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom, we can’t fall, and what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for it. Peace. (pp. 78–9)

Whatever peace may be had in the Marshalsea is Little Dorrit’s birthright. She is its Child not only because Mr Dorrit has assumed the role of its Father but also because she is born to it. In play, the prison children make the iron bars of the inner gateway ‘home’. According to Forster, Dickens was able to breakfast ‘at home’ when he moved to a lodging nearby, so that he could go in as soon as the gate opened. For Little Dorrit the prison really is home, and her loyalty to it is absolute. When she is old enough to pass out to the free city she always returns – like a bird, Clennam thinks, fluttering back to its cage – never sleeping outside until the night of her ‘party’ with Maggy, spent wandering the London streets. When Mr Dorrit comes into his fortune and the family travels abroad (the cosmopolitanism of the novel draws on the long periods Dickens himself had spent on the Continent since 1844), everything Little Dorrit sees is ‘new and wonderful’ but not real: ‘it seemed to her as if those visions of mountains and picturesque countries might melt away at any moment, and the carriage … bring up with a jolt at the old Marshalsea gate’ (p. 488). The expatriate society among which the Dorrits now live resembles ‘a superior sort of Marshalsea’. In Venice, she leans on her balcony over the canal and watches the water ‘as if, in the general vision, it might run dry, and show her the prison again, and herself, and the old room, and the old inmates, and the old visitors: all lasting realities that had never changed’ (p. 492). As she confesses in the second of her affecting letters to Clennam, she suffers from homesickness so intensely because ‘the scene of my poverty and your kindness’ is so dear to her. That she should finally confess her love for Clennam in the same prison room in which she cared for her father for so long is entirely logical.

The rest of her family have come to depend on Amy (they always use Little Dorrit’s proper name) more than they like to admit. Mr Dorrit concedes that Amy is a ‘very good girl’ and that they would have been lost without her, but Clennam senses that they have become ‘lazily habituated’ to her selflessness. They disapprovingly view her ‘not as having risen away from the prison atmosphere, but as appertaining to it’ (pp. 108–9). Like everyone else, except Little Dorrit herself, they see prison as something to be escaped from, not returned to – but if the ‘lasting reality’ of ‘this lower world’ is indeed a prison, she has the greater wisdom in accepting it as such.

Mr Dorrit can only sustain his life as a prisoner by fictions and pretence. He inherits the title of Father of the Marshalsea from a dying turnkey because he has become its longest inhabitant, and keeps it up by a show of gentility quite at variance with his actual status. He has to be shielded from such disagreeable truths as the fact that Amy goes out to work for their bread. The pride he takes in the way new arrivals present themselves to him, so that on busy days it is ‘quite a Levee’, compensates for the indignity of having to accept money from them when they leave. It is an essential part of Mr Dorrit’s euphemistic vocabulary to call these gifts ‘testimonials’, as if the proceeds of others’ pity were really tributes to his distinction. He is intensely sensitive to any suggestion of disrespect: when a plasterer presents him with ‘a little pile of halfpence’, admitting that it isn’t much ‘but it’s well meant’, Mr Dorrit bursts into humiliated tears at being offered plebeian copper rather than some more genteel coin (p. 82). Particularly revealing is his pleasure in receiving Old Nandy as if he was a vassal ‘under some feudal tenure’, bringing his ‘homage from some outlying district where the tenantry were in a primitive state’. He speaks of Nandy as ‘his old pensioner’, and is wonderfully gratified by his decayed state in the workhouse where he has ‘no privacy, no visitors, no station, no respect, no speciality. Most deplorable!’ (p. 388). Dickens understands Dorrit’s need to preserve his self-esteem by patronizing others too well to become factitiously indignant about it.

Freedom comes too late to change Mr Dorrit’s nature; for him the Marshalsea wall is never down. His initial reception of the good news Clennam brings him doesn’t support Amy’s hope that in prosperity she will at last see him as he should have been. When Clennam explains that because of the formalities to be completed his release will be delayed for a few more hours Dorrit’s response is typically, if forgivably, querulous: ‘You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?’ (p. 443). His reactions to life abroad continually reveal that he is as unsuccessful in distancing himself from the Marshalsea as his younger daughter is. When crossing the Alps, for instance, it troubles him that the space to which the Fathers of the Great St Bernard Convent are confined is so ‘very limited … so very contracted’ (p. 466). His impatience with Amy for not heeding their companion Mrs General’s advice on the formation of a proper demeanour develops into an escalating rebuke in which accusation is overtaken by self-justification: ‘I was there all those years … I gave my family a position there. I deserve a return. I claim a return. I say, sweep it off the face of the earth and begin afresh. Is that much? I ask, is that much?’ (p. 502). In such characteristic bluster, and in the predictable way it subsides into whimper, Little Dorrit recognizes only too well the old routines of the Marshalsea’s Father, and has unwillingly to acknowledge ‘that no space in the life of man could overcome that quarter of a century behind the prison bars’ (p. 501).

Mr Dorrit’s final collapse comes at a banquet given in Rome by Mrs Merdle, wife of the great financier. It makes a strong effect of the kind Dickens was sometimes too ready to force, but its power is genuine because its cause is so consistent with what has gone before. Dorrit’s sudden call to Amy across the table to see if Bob – the best of all the turnkeys – is on the lock, his reprise in such inappropriate surroundings of his customary address of welcome in the Marshalsea Snuggery and his proud assertion of personal dignity coupled with elaborate allusions to the acceptability of testimonials – all dramatically express the profound pathos of a man still trying to reconcile himself to the prison from which he has been liberated and which he can never leave.

The contradictory elements in Mr Dorrit’s character could not have been shown with such psychological subtlety had we not seen him wealthy and at large, as well as poor and locked up. As the contrasted titles of its two books, ‘Poverty’ and ‘Riches’, indicate, Little Dorrit is organized on binary principles. The presentation of opposed or comparable states allows for many internal echoes, both structural and local. When Dickens began the novel in May 1855 he had been thinking about it since the beginning of the year. His first idea was that the story’s leading character should put the blame for every fresh calamity on Providence, the provisional title being Nobody’s Fault, but this conception developed markedly as he wrote the opening chapters. In the plan for the second number the words ‘Parallel Imprisonments’ (i.e. Mr Dorrit’s and Mrs Clennam’s) are significantly underlined (p. 865). On 15 September he wrote to Forster that he intended to ‘overwhelm’ the Dorrit family with wealth, and on 29 October he told his publishers about dividing the novel into two books. Dickens didn’t finish Little Dorrit until May 1857 but its essential design must have been clear to him well before the appearance of its first part on 1 December 1855, and by this stage of his career he had become adept at reconciling the immediate pressures of serial publication with long-range thematic patterns and the demands of an elaborate plot. It can’t therefore be accidental that the second chapter of the first book and the first chapter of the second book have the same title, ‘Fellow Travellers’; both reflect the idea, described in a letter to Forster (19 August 1855) of showing ‘people coming together, in a chance way … being in the same place, ignorant of one another, as happens in life’ and of connecting them afterwards, making ‘the waiting for that connection part of the interest’. Similarly, Book the First ends with Clennam carrying the insensible Little Dorrit out of the Marshalsea, forgotten by her family in their eagerness to disown it, while Book the Second echoes but improves on this when she and Clennam quietly leave the prison to be married in the neighbouring church where she was baptized.

After the ceremony the couple are said, in the novel’s magisterial last sentence, to pass along the London streets ‘in sunshine and in shade’. The ‘Sun and Shadow’ of Little Dorrit’s opening chapter title are those of the staring white streets of Marseilles and of its prison, which has ‘no knowledge of the brightness outside’. In Phiz’s dark illustration The Birds in the Cage (p. 17), such indirect light as there is picks out Rigaud, his moustache already going up under his nose and his nose coming down over his moustache in the mechanically villainous manner which is to become only too familiar as the story proceeds. Nevertheless, when the gaoler’s little daughter peeps ‘shrinkingly through the grate’ at her father’s ‘birds’ her face is ‘like an angel’s in the prison’ (p. 20). Her compassion clearly anticipates that of the no less angelic Child of the Marshalsea, sitting in summer weather in the Lodge of her godfather the turnkey, ‘looking up at the sky through the barred window, until bars of light would arise, when she turned her eyes away, between her and her friend, and she would see him through a grating, too’ (p. 84). A later plate, The Story of the Princess, shows the setting sun shining directly on to Little Dorrit as she looks out of her prison garret; the story she tells Maggy is about a tiny woman whose secret treasure is the shadow of someone who would never come back – a shadow that ‘was bright to look at’ (p. 314). On the novel’s title-page, however, the vignette shows Little Dorrit followed by shafts of light from within the prison, as she passes through its outer gate. Miss Wade, meeting Mr Meagles at Marseilles, doesn’t share his easy-going assumption that ‘a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let out’ (p. 36); she would rather burn it down, and obviously can’t envisage Little Dorrit’s capacity to lighten its darkness by being ‘something which was not what the rest were’ (p. 86). It’s significant too that when Arthur first sees Little Dorrit in what his mother calls her prison, the room she hasn’t left for twelve years ‘because it is appointed that I shall so make reparation for my sins’ (p. 64), even Mrs Clennam’s hardness is softened by the younger woman’s presence.

Such symmetries and variations allow Dickens to interconnect the widely dispersed areas of a complicated – perhaps in its denouement an over-complicated – plot involving many social levels and changes of location, and also to provide through such counterpoint a telling commentary on the world thus assembled. Mrs Merdle’s reception in Italy, which ends in Mr Dorrit’s breakdown, recalls earlier feasts in London where her Midas-like husband is courted by such representatives of Society as Treasury, Bar and Bishop, for whom Mr Merdle holds ‘little levees’ (as Mr Dorrit did in the Marshalsea). These occasions show Dickens’s mature satire at full Jonsonian stretch, Merdle’s sycophants being rescued from merely polemical allegory by a mockery of upper-class obsequiousness that is at once painstaking and brilliant. The guests’ ingratiating pleas in favour of an alliance between wealth and Society –between, in other words, Merdle’s fabled cash and their aristocratic self-interest – are exposed by a sustained mimicry of establishment idiom as virtuoso as it is lethal. They are as ready to flatter each other as their host: when Lord Decimus hopes that Bar wasn’t bored by his little sally (‘the only joke of his life’) about the difference between Eton pears and Parliamentary pairs, Bar respectfully repeats its ineffably feeble punch-line, thus not only showing that he has mastered the joke but also ‘delicately insinuating that he could never forget it while life remained’ (p. 596).

Mr Merdle, however, oozing ‘sluggishly and muddily about his drawing-room’, is not at ease in such company. As his wife complains, ‘you carry your business cares and projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else they belong to … it is not the tone of Society, and … you ought to correct it’ (pp. 419–20). Merdle finds it hard to be accused in this way after all his hospitality, but he admits that if he were not a benefactor to Society and she an ornament to it they would never have come together. Mrs Merdle’s criticism of her husband’s manner anticipates Little Dorrit’s inability to follow Mrs General’s advice on forming a socially acceptable surface. Mrs Merdle has a good deal of surface herself, especially in regard to her extensive bosom – ‘not a bosom to repose on, but … a capital bosom to hang jewels upon. Mr Merdle … bought it for the purpose’ (p. 265). Making Mrs Merdle and her bosom interchangeable, Dickens gleefully exploits the comic possibilities of this dazzling synecdoche, as when he explains that her ‘first husband had been a colonel, under whose auspices the bosom had entered into competition with the snows of North America, and had come off at little disadvantage in point of whiteness, and at none in point of coldness’ (p. 266). It is as an ornament to Society that Mrs Merdle tries to stop her son pursuing Amy’s sister, Fanny. We know, she concedes, that Society is shockingly hollow and conventional, but unless we are to be children of nature (which she would have preferred, being herself pastoral to a degree) it has to be obeyed – a line of reasoning punctuated by shrieks of laughter from her pet parrot, another captive bird who despite his golden cage continues the street urchin tradition of jeering at pretension that runs from the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist to Pip’s persecutor Trabb’s boy in Great Expectations. Again, Mrs Merdle’s request that her husband should seem to care about nothing as everybody else does is followed up by Mrs General’s injunction that nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at, and Mr Dorrit’s thoughts of marrying her because she embodies the proprieties so ostentatiously implies a social contract comparable with the Merdles’. Mr Dorrit’s unfulfilled intentions, however, could hardly have survived any confession of his past: the words Mrs General recommends to Amy as giving ‘a pretty form to the lips’ (p. 500) begin with ‘Papa’ and end with ‘prism’ – close enough to ‘prison’ to seem to avert its gaze from it as resolutely as she would have done.

Mrs Merdle’s authority as a judge of what Society will tolerate leads to the charade of her being consulted by Mrs Gowan over her son’s unfortunate infatuation with Pet, the cherished daughter of Mr and Mrs Meagles, to whom she patronizingly refers as the Miggles people (as a connection of the great Barnacle family she can hardly be expected to get such names right). Is her weakness in letting Henry marry beneath him excusable? As a ‘Priestess of Society’ Mrs Merdle, knowing perfectly well that Pet, as the banker’s only surviving child, is a good catch for a drone like Gowan and that in any case his mother has no real choice in the matter, provides the necessary exoneration.

A similar collusiveness on Society’s part has provided Mrs Gowan with an apartment at Hampton Court and a pension – after all, her late husband, ‘a Commissioner of nothing particular’, had ‘died at his post with his drawn salary in his hand’ (p. 224). The discrepancy between pretence and reality in Hampton Court’s cramped quarters is maintained as rigorously as Mr Dorrit himself could wish, so that callers pretend ‘not to smell cooking three feet off’ and visitors overhearing servants squabbling behind a partition make believe ‘to be sitting in a primeval silence’ (p. 331). Like the collegians of the Marshalsea, the ‘gipsies of gentility’ would prefer you to think that they are only lodging where they do until they can get something better. Invited to dine at Mrs Gowan’s, Clennam meets Lord Lancaster Stiltstalking, a retired diplomat in a white cravat ‘like a stiff snow-drift’ and immediately dubbed by Dickens ‘the noble Refrigerator’, who ‘shaded the dinner, cooled the wines, chilled the gravy, and blighted the vegetables’ (p. 333). The Stilt-stalkings, like the Barnacles, owe their useless careers and unearned eminence to the Circumlocution Office, and the linguistic exuberance with which they and that Office are treated is a measure of a hostility to the governing class and its culture more sustained and more indignant than anywhere else in Dickens.

Early exposure to Parliament as a young reporter had left Dickens with a lasting sense of the irrelevance of its debates and the absurdity of its diction; he refused the first of several invitations to stand for the House of Commons as early as 1841. The use of parliamentary language to obstruct serious discussion is epitomized in Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle’s discovery of what Dickens calls the Behoving Machine – ‘I am yet to be told that it behoves a Minister of this free country … to fetter the public spirit, to contract the enterprise, to damp the independent self-reliance, of its people …’ etc. (p. 427) – a classic example of rhetorical evasion to justify governmental inaction. There were, however, particular reasons why Dickens’s contempt for the existing regime was intensified at the time of Little Dorrit. The incompetence and corruption of the Civil Service had been fully exposed by the disasters of the Crimean War. Dickens normally involved himself in public controversy only on his own terms (often through articles in his weekly Household Words), but in 1855 he joined the Administrative Reform Association and made a strong speech in its support, dwelling on the ‘gulf’ between governors and governed, and attacking the arrogance of Palmerston as Prime Minister: ‘We have seen the Comedy of Errors played so dismally like a tragedy that we cannot bear it.’ Private letters of the time make the same points even more despairingly: in one to Forster (3 February 1855) Dickens says, ‘I am hourly strengthened in my old belief that our political aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England’; in another (30 September 1855) he concludes ‘that representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for it, and that the whole thing has broken down since the great seventeenth-century time’.

Dickens’s frontal attack on the conduct of public departments comes in Book I, Chapter X, ‘Containing the whole Science of Government’. This may be reduced to mastering ‘the art of perceiving – HOW NOT TO DO IT’ (p. 119). Although parliamentary proceedings are largely devoted to not doing it, it is the Circumlocution Office’s application of this ‘sublime’ principle that has ‘led to its having something to do with everything’, so that all public business passes, or fails to pass, through its hands. The momentum Dickens creates by repeating the phrase ‘How not to do it’, by the elaborate series of six sentences in the fourth paragraph all beginning with ‘It is true that …’, and by the unremitting irony of the whole exposition, overwhelms resistance by sheer verbal energy and resource. Dickens nowhere defines the ‘it’ in ‘How not to do it’; it might mean anything and so comes to stand for everything – too sweeping, surely, for the likely facts, however discreditable. Similarly, when Clennam calls at the Circumlocution Office about Mr Dorrit’s affairs he repeatedly insists that he wants ‘to know’. The alarmed reply of the junior Barnacle – ‘Look here. Upon my SOUL you mustn’t come into the place saying, you want to know, you know’ (p. 128) – effectively widens Clennam’s personal inquiry into a general claim for that freedom of information which bureaucracy instinctively resists. Properly used, the word ‘circumlocution’ would refer not to the business of any one department but to the tendency of all departments to use ‘several words instead of one, or many instead of few’ (OED). It is not surprising that some of Dickens’s first critics felt he was hardly engaging with the problem responsibly.

One of these was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (Virginia Woolf ’s uncle), in an article on ‘The License of Modern Novelists’ in the Edinburgh Review (July 1857). His complaint that Dickens had not dealt as fairly or as kindly with the upper classes as with the lower, that he had not done justice to ‘those manly, disinterested and energetic qualities which make up the character of an English gentleman’, was often to be echoed by polite readers. Shrewdly arguing that Dickens gets ‘his first notions of an abuse from the discussion which accompanies its removal’, he maintains that – not surprisingly in view of Dickens’s lack of ‘solid acquirements’ – his account of the Circumlocution Office is simply absurd to anyone who really understands, for instance, how the nation’s revenue is managed. Invoking the names of some distinguished public servants, Stephen ridicules the idea that they could be mistaken for Stiltstalkings; these were the people who gave Rowland Hill the opportunity to reform the Post Office. (In Dickens’s reply he refers to Hill’s name as a ‘curious misprint’ on the grounds that the Circumlocution Office did everything it could to block his proposals.)

This exchange raises some fundamental questions about Dickens as an artist and as a social critic. Fitzjames Stephen’s exasperation seems due not only to Dickens’s unscrupulous treatment of fact, but also to an involuntary recognition of the power of his conception. Stephen admits that ‘everybody has read Chapter X of Little Dorrit’; what infuriates him is that anyone should take such an ignorant representation seriously. David Masson, writing only two years later, thought that ‘The Administrative Reform Association might have worked for ten years without producing half of the effect which Mr Dickens has produced in the same direction, by flinging out the phrase, “The Circumlocution Office”,’ and was unconcerned that the phrase might be a ludicrous exaggeration. In his book British Novelists and Their Styles (1859), Masson argues that Dickens is not a realist like Thackeray but concerns himself rather with the Ideal: ‘Having once caught a hint from actual fact, he generalizes it, runs away with this generalization into a corner, and develops it there into a character to match; which character he then transports … into a world of semi-fantastic conditions, where the laws need not be those of ordinary probability.’

James Spedding was thinking along the same lines when, in a piece on American Notes, he remarked that ‘the author of Pickwick will study the present as our historical novelists study the past – to find not what it is, but what he can make of it’ (Edinburgh Review, January 1843). Reality proposes, but Dickens metamorphoses. Even when his subject was an abuse he felt strongly about, his irresistible instinct was to create not so much a verifiable picture of life as a living alternative – in Masson’s terms, an ideal version of it – with its own parallel truth. In Bleak House the imaginative force of Chancery is not dependent on historical accuracy but on the way it is transformed into a nightmare court of justice which never arrives at a verdict until it has consumed those who seek its help. In Little Dorrit the Circumlocution Office may be unfair to the administration of its day, but in being so it becomes a type of self-serving bureaucracy in any period. (Thus, for all its topicality but in a time-warp characteristic of his fiction, Dickens twice emphasizes, at the beginnings of Chapters I and VI, that the story begins in the Marseilles and Marshalsea prisons ‘Thirty years ago’.) The ‘generalization’ Masson refers to was a necessary part of the process whereby Dickens fed his imagination and ensured its freedom. ‘Circumlocution’ may not be the name of a real department but it distils the way in which language can be used by any department, and any government, to defend its interests. Few writers have known better than Dickens how damaging naming can be: it is as obvious that Stiltstalkings will display an absurd aristocratic hauteur as that Tite Barnacles will cling to the ship of state and impede its progress.

It is hardly surprising therefore that Stephen and Dickens cannot agree on basic terms. For Stephen, disinterested public service by those best qualified to give it is part of what the word ‘gentleman’ implies, but when Gowan claims, however cynically, that Circumlocution is ‘a school for gentlemen’, Dickens means us to agree with Clennam’s comment that ‘It’s a very dangerous, unsatisfactory, and expensive school to the people who pay to keep the pupils there’ (p. 330). (Gowan himself treats portrait-painting with a gentlemanly flippancy of the kind that Dickens, as a professional artist intensely in earnest, hated.) The true gentlemen are not to be found in the Society which fawns on the moneyed Merdles but in the honour, scruple and industry of men in the middle class such as Meagles, his innovative friend Doyce, driven abroad by Circumlocution at home, and Clennam himself. That Meagles should be so gratified by the ‘shoal of Barnacles’ who condescendingly attend his daughter’s wedding is an irony more to their discredit than his. George Bernard Shaw’s judgement that Little Dorrit was more seditious than Marx’s Das Kapital may be too extreme, but its indictment of the gentility principle on the grounds of arrogance, parasitism and inefficiency was probably too radical for Fitzjames Stephen to comprehend, let alone endorse. There is certainly no doubt of Dickens’s purpose in organizing the novel so that the social consequences of Circumlocution’s not doing it are felt in such far corners as Bleeding Heart Yard, where Plornish the plasterer and his neighbours find work so hard to obtain.

In early Dickens, abuses that need reform – the Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickleby, for instance – were seen in a localized way; problems were resolved by the private charity of rich men like the Cheeryble brothers or the Christmas-convert Scrooge (although Chesterton suspected him of giving turkeys away secretly all his life). By the 1850s social malaise has become systemic: in Bleak House the victims of Chancery are to be found ‘in every shire’, ‘every madhouse’ and ‘every churchyard’; in Little Dorrit Barnacleism has become not only national but imperial – ‘wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation, under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle’ (p. 422). No philanthropists come forward to put things right now. The patriarchal benevolence of Casby, landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard, is mere appearance, as the extraordinary assault on him by his ultimately rebellious agent Pancks shows. Casby’s tenants, who would willingly pay their overdue rent if they could, are left to comfort themselves with extravagant rumours – fanned by Barnacle adulation – of the extent of Merdle’s wealth. This rich man has so revised the New Testament that he has ‘already entered into the kingdom of Heaven’ (p. 641). To Mr Dorrit, Merdle’s readiness to give him preferential advice on investments seems like a ‘rapturous dream’. Dying in Rome, before Merdle’s Roman suicide in a white marble bath veined with his red blood, the Father of the Marshalsea never learns that ‘hundreds and thousands’ of people as well as his own family are beggared because the financier’s ‘complaint’, which so baffles Physician, turns out to be forgery and theft. Despite Merdle’s real-life analogues, Dickens supplies no details about either his swindles or his speculations, as Trollope was to do in the comparable case of Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1875); his riches are essentially magical, and vanish as suddenly as bags of gold in a fairy tale. The Chief Butler is not surprised by Merdle’s fall since he ‘never was the gentleman’ (p. 740), and Dickens notes the coarseness and meanness of his features in death. We are reminded of his characteristic dullness in conversation in the cleverly understated scene just before it, where he calls at his stepson’s to borrow the lethal penknife.

When Clennam is admitted to the Marshalsea because he too has been brought down by the Merdle crash, the two halves of Little Dorrit begin to coalesce and resolve. His first thought is that, having ruined his partner Doyce, he must atone; his first emotion, left in Dorrit’s old room, is his longing for the ‘face of love and truth’ (p. 751) that had sanctified it. It is back in the prison too that Mrs Clennam makes the confession through which she tries to redeem the wrong she has done. Her wild walk through the streets to the Marshalsea after so many years in a wheelchair provides one of those Dickensian shocks where the pathology is physically unlikely but psychologically plausible: she regains her freedom of movement because she is about to reveal and repent what has been repressed. Dickens was always fascinated by the idea of long-buried secrets. Earlier, after one of the novel’s most haunting passages describing the ‘dim streets’ around his mother’s house as ‘all depositories of oppressive secrets’ which ‘in hiding, imparted a heaviness to the air’, Clennam had approached the melancholy, and for him the primal, scene of his childhood home: ‘At the heart of it his mother presided, inflexible of face, indomitable of will, firmly holding all the secrets of her own and his father’s life, and austerely opposing herself, front to front, to the great final secret of all life’ (pp. 567–8). Little Dorrit’s compassion may protect Arthur from the full truth of Mrs Clennam’s guilt, but those secrets are something that readers want to come to light, however intricate their details.

Clennam’s Marshalsea visitors include such converging representatives of other areas of the plot as Rigaud/Blandois, whose unchanged insistence on being treated as a gentleman would compare more effectively with Mr Dorrit’s agitated emphasis on his gentility if Dickens’s presentation of his villain weren’t so theatrically hollow. One of the Barnacles puts in an appearance, hoping that Clennam will leave the Circumlocution Office alone in future; it’s all they ask. It’s in the old room too that Mr and Mrs Meagles are reunited with Tattycoram, whom the interestingly neurotic self-tormentor Miss Wade had seduced into sharing her own alienation. Here also John Chivery, the young turnkey who has loved Little Dorrit since childhood, resigns his claim with the comic magnanimity which is Dickens’s consolation prize for socially unacceptable admirers. Arthur’s most constant companion is, of course, Little Dorrit herself. He begins to understand how, ‘Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point’, how ‘Everything in its perspective led to her innocent figure’ (p. 766). He has to become a Pupil of the Marshalsea himself in order to learn what only she, as its Child, can teach him.

Little Dorrit

Contents

A Dickens Chronology

Introduction