[In the following essay, Rainsford studies characters in Little Dorrit who were adversely affected by childhood trauma well into middle age.]

Dickens's early novels typically end with the principal characters finding a home, a physical refuge from their problems. In later Dickens, characters tend to have to fall back, more movingly, on the resources of a toughened mind, and they have to be prepared to forgo tangible rewards. Louisa Gradgrind, in Hard Times (1854), represents a bleak version of this renunciation. In Little Dorrit (1855-57), on the other hand, something of the cheerful perseverance of a Mark Tapley—which, in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), had seemed to condemn that individual to being comic and secondary—can be detected in the readiness of Arthur Clennam to give up his present life and “begin the world”:

The shadow of a supposed act of injustice, which had hung over him since his father's death, was so vague and formless that it might be the result of a reality widely remote from his idea of it. But, if his apprehensions should prove to be well founded, he was ready at any moment to lay down all he had, and begin the world anew.

(311)

This romantic notion can be traced back to the dying Richard Carstone's promise to “begin the world” in the antepenultimate chapter of Bleak House (1852-53; 763), but some comparable form of redemption, rescue, or reformation of the character had always been required of the Dickens hero. A constant desire is manifest in the novels to make up for a bad past—for which the protagonist may be to blame, or for which he or she, like Esther Summerson, may simply be persuaded they are to blame. Even Oliver Twist may be seen as going through a punishing, educating process as a function of his inauspicious birth (Oliver Twist, 1837-38), and the first Dickens character who undertakes consciously to begin the world is probably Nicholas Nickleby, who must apply himself deliberately to make up for his unsatisfactory parents (Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39). But the problems of Oliver and Nicholas are eventually met by neat solutions, whereas the impulse towards redemption or self-exculpation in later Dickens is far less easy to resolve.

The redemptive drive in Dickens's fiction connects, as has often been remarked, with his sense of his own early history, but it is also linked to the rhythm of his artistic practice. New beginnings were an occupational hazard of Dickens's work, and the extent to which he lived each work, and lived, above all, with its characters, must have made him feel as though he were passing through a series of incarnations. A few days before finishing Hard Times, having just disposed of Stephen Blackpool, Dickens wrote as follows to John Forster:

I am three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at Hard Times. … I have been looking forward through so many weeks and sides of paper to this Stephen business, that now—as usual—it being over, I feel as if nothing in the world, in the way of intense and violent rushing hither and thither, could quite restore my balance.

(14 July 1854, Letters 2: 567)

This was not just a pleasantry. A few months later, writing to Mrs. Richard Watson, he said this:

Why I found myself so “used up” after Hard Times I scarcely know, perhaps because I intended to do nothing in that way for a year, when the idea laid hold of me by the throat in a very violent manner, and because the compression and close condensation necessary for that disjointed form of publication gave me perpetual trouble. But I really was tired, which is a result so very incomprehensible that I can't forget it.

(11 November 1854, 2: 602)

Here we have a picture of the novelist which is intimately related to the epistemology, social views, and emotional tone of the novels. In the writing process, it seems, one can get waylaid and lost—caught up, like Oliver by the Fagin gang, or like a bystander at the riots in Barnaby Rudge (1841). And the process does not, for Dickens, seem to have become any less troubling with the passage to time. Starting Little Dorrit seems to have been just as deranging an experience as starting Hard Times:

                                                                                YOU
                                                            I suppose are fat and rosy
                                                                                          I
          am in the variable state consequent on the beginning of a new story.
                              (Dickens to W. H. Wills, 18 September 1855, 2: 691)

In earlier letters and prefaces Dickens had seemed very much in control of his career. In the 1841 advertisement for Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, the burden of novel-writing is accepted with pride and flamboyance (see Butt and Tillotson 89). But, later, Dickens comes more and more to confess that his career gets on top of him, that he is almost lost within it. Perhaps this is partly the consequence of age, but it is also a significant outgrowth both of Dickens's imagination and of his social insight: a realization in the man himself of the implications of his fictional worlds.

In keeping with this sense of being overwhelmed, of being at the mercy of destiny despite his appearance of power and success, is Dickens's increasingly considered and solemn treatment, in the later novels, of the ways in which the course of an individual's life can be adversely determined by past events. This is a psychologically sophisticated development of the more murky, superstitious link between the origins of Oliver, Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840-41), even Esther Summerson, and their subsequent trials. Stephen Blackpool, for example, is haunted by the inescapable past in the shape of his spouse, “the evil spirit of his life” (Hard Times 117). This is eerie, but it is also realistic, and it can be taken as part of a serious critique of the laws of divorce. Deliberately unrealistic spirits, on the other hand, are to be found, at an earlier stage of Dickens's career, in A Christmas Carol (1843), where the reader is cheered by a fantasy of the short-circuiting of the past—something which, when we compare it with the all too unfantastical bondage of someone like Stephen, becomes extremely poignant. The earlier Dickens was prone, at times, to confuse psychological verisimilitude with fairy-tale wish-fulfillment, as in Mr. Dombey's easy second chance at being a good father (Dombey and Son, 1847-48), but these were platitudes which belied Dickens's frequently clear perception of the unsolved social problems which individuals like Dombey represent.

In Little Dorrit, almost ten years after Dombey, the fatalistic view of life is firmly grounded in social observation. Thus Clennam's religiously oppressed childhood suggests William Blake's Experience—in its social detail as well as in its vigorously bitter tone. Consider, as a parallel to Blake's “Holy Thursday” or “The School Boy,” this reflection on Sundays:

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition? … There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; … There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage. …

(30)

Here Dickens prosecutes further his continuing struggle, in which he is aligned with Blake, against didactic/destructive children's literature and its unwitting distribution of mind-forged manacles (“morally handcuffed to another boy”).¹ What is most striking about this novel is that these bad childhood influences are seen to be controlling the life of a middle-aged man.

In some respects Arthur Clennam could be said to be Walter Gay (from Dombey and Son) matured and Alan Woodcourt (Bleak House) brought to life, his financial failure being comparable—in a blighted, jaded way—to their ennobling shipwrecks. For he is essentially a well-intentioned, just, and helpful man. But he is also a morbid, tongueless sort of poet: as here, where Clennam, after losing Miss Meagles to the glamorous waster Gowan, has just cast his flowers on the river:

The lights were bright within doors when he entered, and the faces on which they shone, his own face not excepted, were soon quietly cheerful. They talked of many subjects (his partner never had had such a ready store to draw upon for the beguiling of the time), and so to bed, and to sleep. While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.

(330)

Just so, “Pet”—Miss Meagles herself—“glided away” from Clennam a few paragraphs before. The echo is a little too exquisite, the moral is a trifle glib, and the sadness is somewhat picturesque. Is there not a touch of Skimpole's posing here—on Clennam's part and, possibly, the narrator's?

Clennam's failure seems to be related to his kindness, in a way that links him with characters like Jarndyce, Trooper George, David Copperfield, and Pip. All these individuals seem too hurt and chastened to be able to function in any powerful position, let alone aggressively. Self-confidence is reserved for Boodles and Buffys, Pecksniffs and Pumblechooks, Barnacles and Veneerings. Clennam's river is the same one into which the self-confident Gowan is discovered to be tossing stones, thereby disclosing his cruel nature, when we first meet him. Clennam here, and the implicit Dickens (who appeals for his readers' reassurance) seem to be nervous persons, quick to spot signs of danger in those around them: “Most of us,” the narrator claims, “have more or less frequently derived a similar impression, from a man's manner of doing some very little thing: plucking a flower, clearing away an obstacle, or even destroying an insentient object” (197). Elsewhere in the novel, the same need to identify dangerous people appears in more vulgar forms, in the physiognomic diagnosis of Miss Wade, for example, who broadcasts her embitterment in “a smile that is only seen on cruel faces: a very faint smile, lifting the nostril, scarcely touching the lips, and not breaking away gradually, but instantly dismissed when done with” (324). It is a hard world, apparently, containing irredeemably wrong-headed individuals—an idea that can be traced back to The Pickwick Papers (1836-37). But the hopelessness of trying to do anything about other people is all the more impressive, in Little Dorrit, because it is bound up with the protagonist's inability to do much about himself. And here I will come back to what may have seemed a reckless reference to Skimpole.

Clennam is a kind and sentimental man; Skimpole is a horror—lethally selfish, possessed with a spirit of frivolity which is terrifyingly impervious to the acutest needs and sufferings of those around him. But we apprehend something important about Dickens's later work if we see that Dickens was aware that these two can be assimilated into a single, complex but coherent account of human nature. Skimpole's self-confidence is obviously neurotic, trembling on the brink of self-parody. That does not make him any less repellent, but actually more so. He is not a purely fictional grotesque, but rather an image of what we (or people we know) might be like, should we (or they), in a certain way, go mad. If Esther Summerson really ends up thinking that Skimpole is wholly cynical, a calculating actor, then she is grossly simple-minded—but she is not, and Dickens, through the ambiguity of Esther's narrative, sensitively leaves Skimpole with his morally erosive power, his resistance to full categorization, intact. Clennam presents a reversal of these conditions. In place of Skimpole's irresponsibility, Clennam is over-responsible, agonizing about himself (like David Copperfield or Pip) in a way that limits him severely. His focusing on pathetic images—the flowers, the stones—is a form of paralysis, and is sickly dandified in its own way. Clennam's fear of Gowan's cruelty, or more generally Dickens's fear of the untender and unhinged (Skimpole, Sir John Chester, Miss Wade, Miss Havisham, and others), binds him as they are bound.

So how, in Little Dorrit, is this state of affairs to be endured? By the cultivation of sympathy, through the relation of others' failings to one's own. Thus Clennam's exploded dream of his sometime beloved, Flora:

With the sensation of becoming more and more lightheaded every minute, Clennam saw the relict of the late Mr. F enjoying herself in the most wonderful manner, by putting herself and him in their old places, and going through all the old performances—now, when the stage was dusty, when the scenery was faded, when the youthful actors were dead, when the orchestra was empty, when the lights were out. And still, through all this grotesque revival of what he remembered as having once been prettily natural to her, he could not but feel that it revived at sight of him, and that there was a tender memory in it.

(147)

There are Shakespearian echoes here: the poor player, dusty death, the insubstantial pageant faded. It is very serious stuff. But it is not clear whose “tender memory” is being referred to in the last sentence. Is it Flora's of Clennam, or Clennam's of Flora? This ambiguity is of the essence. Clennam sees his own limitations and absurdities reflected in Flora, and the gravity of the change that he witnesses, and the way in which it echoes a great number of instances of deterioration and folly throughout the novel, make specific mockeries and recriminations quite inappropriate. Flora, whose spirit could be felt to preside over the flowers that Clennam later throws on the water, for all her absurdity, has a symbolic presence equal to, though pathetically opposite to, her mythological namesake.²

The effect on Clennam of this encounter with Flora is not so much depressing as clarifying and simplifying. Clennam is confronted with a completely irremediable loss which gives him a newly sharp picture of what he himself is, and of what he cannot any longer have (an experience that is merely repeated in the loss of Miss Meagles). This expresses itself in Dickens's writing through an ascetic-seeming calmness and orderliness of diction:

When he got to his lodging, he sat down before the dying fire, as he had stood at the window of his old room looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys, and turned his gaze back upon the gloomy vista by which he had come to that stage in his existence. So long, so bare, so blank. No childhood; no youth, except for one remembrance; the one remembrance proved, only that day, to be a piece of folly.

(157)

Like Louisa Gradgrind, Clennam has been the victim of a dreadfully misguided education, but has emerged with a sort of grave uprightness, of a personal and undogmatic type—mirrored in Dickens's sober cadences—which, while it is not much fun, is nonetheless worthy of respect. Hence the grim figure of Clennam's mother is not just reviled—she made Clennam what he is, principled as well as miserable—but held in awe. Her religiousness is not completely alien to Dickens's sensibility, any more than Blake was completely out of sympathy with the didactic fierceness of Barbauld, but it has become tragically reified. She is another icon of failure, like Flora; less ridiculous, but, in her own way, just as pitiful:

The shadow still darkening as he drew near the house, the melancholy room which his father had once occupied, haunted by the appealing face he had himself seen fade away with him when there was no other watcher by the bed, arose before his mind. Its close air was secret. The gloom, and must, and dust of the whole tenement, were secret. 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.

(526)

Mrs. Clennam's is another fixed state, about which nothing can be done. The great misfortune is that she has usurped a position of centrality in Clennam's life. She is at the heart of the house and seems to have infiltrated her son's heart too, whose romances are thereby condemned to go wrong. Her influence on him cannot be undone; she has discredited the spiritual and material highroads of life (for she is poisonous in commerce as well as in religion), and so he can only make his own way modestly, at the social periphery. Which is where Little Dorrit comes in.

Amy Dorrit is really rather odd. Odd and flat. “Of all the trying sisters a girl could have,” thought Fanny Dorrit, “the most trying sister was a flat sister” (570-71).³ Fanny seems to mean that Amy is unfashionable, lacking in glamour, devoid of frivolity, and that her very inoffensiveness is provoking: “and the consequence resulted that she was absolutely tempted and goaded into making herself disagreeable. Besides (she angrily told her looking-glass), she didn't want to be forgiven. It was not a right example, that she should be constantly stooping to be forgiven by a younger sister” (571). Dickens presents these sentiments as though he means to be wholly on Amy's side. Fanny is a self-contradictory feather-brain, whose petty self-concern implicitly makes Amy's pragmatic, nurse-like and housekeeperly attentions all the more commendable. But Fanny's remarks suggest misgivings which are applicable to the whole sequence of Dickensian good little women to which Amy is merely the latest addition. Agnes, in David Copperfield (1849-50), for example, could be said to have a flatness (sobriety, reliability) that reproaches and ultimately supplants the eye-catching Dora, while drab Esther fares much better than lustrous Ada Clare.

So, paradoxically, the neglected and put-upon Amy has a kind of power. While flat in certain respects, she is also a rather angular and provocative sister. She is the sort of girl who, in Dickens, turns out to be so successful that her vaunted virtues begin to jar. This is an aspect of Dickens's work that puts many readers off, but it has an admirable side to it. For just as Esther's oscillations between vanity and self-belittlement can be taken as invigorating—her weakness as an individual (if we are looking for a paragon) being her strength as a ludic narrator—so Amy's combination of dowdiness and efficiency can be disconcerting in a healthy way. I am thinking, in particular, of what must have seemed, in the 1850s, her startlingly forward handling of Clennam, to whom she in effect proposes marriage twice: once disguisedly, when she thinks that she will be wealthy (738), and then again, quite blatantly, when that pecuniary obstacle to Clennam's self-respect has proved to be illusory (792). This, by the standards of the time, is a subversion of the popular notion of a love story, just as Clennam is a deviation from commonplace ideals of the hero. Amy's businesslike proceeding would not do if she were to be paired off with a Nicholas Nickleby; it presupposes a complex but essentially stricken male lead.⁴

But it is important to recognize that Dickens means Amy to be odd. The name, “Little Dorrit,” is ugly enough in itself: Amy drags it through the incarcerating novel like a ball and chain. As Flora says, “and of all the strangest names I ever heard the strangest, like a place down in the country with a turnpike, or a favourite pony or a puppy or a bird or something from a seed-shop to be put in a garden or a flower-pot and come up speckled” (265). Dickens could be reproaching himself here, through Flora, for “Little Nell,” “Sissy Jupe,” and Esther's ugly names (“Cobweb,” “Dame Durden,” and the others). The “place down in the country with a turnpike” could be Pod's End. In fact, this style of naming comes to a crisis in Little Dorrit, where we also find “Pet” Meagles and the Meagleses' servant, “Tattycoram,” who, after an abortive rebellion, eventually begs for the restoration of her nickname (787). It would be easy to be indignant and dismissive about this, and to write Dickens off as incorrigibly patronizing towards young women. But there is more to it than that.

In particular, Little Dorrit's name is just one among a range of weird accessories which Dickens has chosen to attach to her. The most conspicuous of these, and the most disturbing, is her friend, dependent, and “child,” Maggy, the twenty-eight-year-old who thinks that she is ten, and whose “face was not exceedingly ugly, though it was only redeemed from being so by a smile; a good-humoured smile, and pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable by being constantly there” (96). Like Miss Mowcher, the dwarf in Copperfield, Maggy is a moral challenge to whomever she meets. And we might well be disturbed by Dickens's intermingling of pity, in his treatment of her, with surreal comedy; not least in her first appearance: “Little Dorrit stopping and looking back, an excited figure of a strange kind bounced against them …, fell down, and scattered the contents of a large basket, filled with potatoes, in the mud” (95). Maggy pops up here like an absurd, unlooked-for, thoroughly bathetic supernumerary who simply will insert herself into Amy and Clennam's embryo romance.

The links between Amy, Maggy, and the process of naming, which are intimate and crucial, come out particularly clearly when Amy tentatively and complicatedly approaches the task of thanking Clennam—in this book which is riddled with false thanks, flagrant ingratitude, and all manner of emotional bad debts—for his payment of her unworthy brother's bail:

“Before I say anything else,” Little Dorrit began, … ; “may I tell you something, sir?”

“Yes, my child.”

A slight shade of distress fell upon her, at his so often calling her child. She was surprised that he should see it, or think of such a slight thing; but he said directly:

“I wanted a tender word, and could think of no other. As you just now gave yourself the name they give you at my mother's, and as that is the name which I always think of you, let me call you Little Dorrit.”

“Thank you, sir, I should like it better than any name.”

“Little Dorrit.”

“Little mother,” Maggy (who had been falling asleep) put in, as a correction.

“It's all the same, Maggy,” returned Little Dorrit, “all the same.”

“Is it all the same, mother?”

“Just the same.”

Maggy laughed, and immediately snored.

(160-61)

Amy resembles David Copperfield here, insofar as the multiplicity of alternative names foregrounds her multiple existence as the projection of other people's disparate needs.⁵ Maggy's absurdly exaggerated acceptance of the naming problem as solved simply points out what a live issue it really is.

In The Old Curiosity Shop, it will be recalled, Little Nell is the object of a great deal of oppressive scrutiny—from her grandfather, from Quilp, from Master Humphrey and his friends, and, not least, from an excessively doting author. In Bleak House, Esther often seems to be playfully (or perhaps worryingly?) interfered with by her fellow narrator and by Dickens—given a certain amount of eccentric freedom, but with her mind laid open in its foibles and its fears. Similarly, in Little Dorrit, the heroine is obsessively watched by the author and by the male protagonist. For just as Dickens marks or morally handcuffs Amy with an odd name and an odd companion, so Clennam manages to detect the sole “spot” of “prison atmosphere” on his future wife—when she repines, momentarily, at her father's still having to pay his debts after so many years in prison (409). Such is Clennam's propensity for finding gloomy symbols, forms of memento mori, like the flowers on the river or like Flora gone-to-seed, that for him to be able to look at Amy in this way seems a natural prerequisite for their alliance: her freakishness, or small spiritual disability, is precisely what he needs. This makes Clennam worryingly similar to Amy's father, whose dependence upon her tempts Dickens into conjuring up a scenario that is unusual both in its recondite classicism and because it is (albeit gingerly) erotic:

There was a classical daughter once—perhaps—who ministered to her father in his prison as her mother had ministered to her. Little Dorrit, though of the unheroic modern stock, and mere English, did much more, in comforting her father's wasted heart upon her innocent breast, and turning to it a fountain of love and fidelity that never ran dry or waned, through all his years of famine.

(222)

Dorrit taking his daughter as his mother, Clennam calling his future wife a child, Maggy being the “child” of a mother younger than herself—all these, despite Dickens's evident awareness, from time to time, of their frightening aspects—are hopelessly intermingled with the obsessions of the narrator and of Dickens himself. Hence the motif of the small child carrying the outsize baby, which not only appears repeatedly in the main narrative (100, 130), but also turns up, apparently taken straight from the life, in Dickens's 1857 Preface (lix-lx).

More and more, in Dickens's later work, the polyvocal worlds of the novel become subdued to a single eccentric way of seeing, in which the boundaries between protagonist and narrator fade away.⁶ Frequently this process is imaged microcosmically within the text. For instance, in Clennam's blighted vision as he approaches his mother's house:

As he went along, upon a dreary night, the dim streets by which he went seemed all depositories of oppressive secrets. The deserted counting-houses, with their secrets of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the banking-houses, with their secrets of strong rooms and wells, the keys of which were in a very few secret pockets and a very few secret breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill, among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he could have fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness to the air.

(526)

Clennam can usefully be thought of as “Marking” here, in the double sense of Blake's “London”: “I … mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe” (26). That is to say, it is not clear how much evil and suffering he is discovering in the world and how much he is projecting onto it: his mind and his surroundings blend into one another. Just so, Clennam is marking weakness and woe in Amy, when he spots the “spot,” with just the active/passive ambiguity, the generality of spoiled perception, that we know from Blake's poem. More than this, Clennam seeing Amy's “spot” parallels Amy seeing Clennam's error in too often calling her “child”: this binding together in a shared weakness is what makes this Dickens's most impressive, least idealized love story until, perhaps, Pip and Estella (Great Expectations, 1860-61).

And Little Dorrit is far more than just a love story. It takes an exceptionally wide view of society, while intimately relating that view to the cast of mind of the central characters, so that Amy, for example, is exactly right for the world of her novel—whereas Sissy Jupe was not at all right for hers.⁷ Sissy was designed to embody some sort of childish pastoral ideal, but Amy, as we have seen, is quite non-standard. Accordingly, Little Dorrit betrays a thorough disillusionment with the standard or ideal in society at large, and with most of society's defining institutions. Hence, just as in Bleak House, good developments in Little Dorrit seem to require the offices of an eccentric freelance agent—Pancks, in this case, standing in for Inspector Bucket. Pancks and Bucket are the wonderful opponents of inertia, the vanquishers of circumlocution, but they are almost fairy-tale beings, the sort that cannot be relied upon to exist, suggesting a mismanaged society in which it will simply be a very lucky turn of events if one finds happiness and success.

The collapse of confidence in civic values in Little Dorrit engenders a great efflorescence of jaded wit. This passage, for example, contains what is probably the best pun in Dickens: “Clennam found that the Gowan family were a very distant ramification of the Barnacles; and that the paternal Gowan, originally attached to a legation abroad, had been pensioned off as a Commissioner of nothing in particular somewhere or other, and had died at his post with his drawn salary in his hand, nobly defending it to the last extremity” (201). The heroically self-sacrificing warrior/diplomat (drawn sword) collapses instantly into the pathetic money-grubber: it is hard to imagine a neater deflation of the Imperial British ideal. But that the ruling cadres should have been reduced to Barnacles, even though it occurs in the words of the impersonal narrator, is not quite to be taken as Dickens's considered opinion. It fits too well with the vision of the disenchanted protagonist. That vision, and not society itself in any objective sense, seems to be the focus of Dickens's late books. And, in Little Dorrit, the disenchanted vision amounts to something like an inversion of the Blakean sublime, as in this spoofed apotheosis upon the return of the civil servant Sparkler from Italy to England:

The land of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Newton, Watt, the land of a host of past and present abstract philosophers, natural philosophers, and subduers of Nature and Art in their myriad forms, called to Mr. Sparkler to come and take care of it, lest it should perish. Mr. Sparkler, unable to resist the agonised cry from the depths of his country's soul, declared that he must go.

(585)

This, just like the very different exaltation of much the same group of distinguished individuals—“Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer”—towards the end of Blake's Jerusalem (257), is not meant to be temperate or rational. What is crucial is the emotional state of the speaker, as the reader can deduce it. Dickens's social criticism is all the more effective for the quirkiness with which it is expressed—whether on Clennam's part or the narrator's. To attempt to communicate in a straightforward way would be to suggest that the social malaise was not pervasively corrupting, whereas in fact Little Dorrit reads as the authentically deranged, if elegantly crafted, product of a declining civilization.⁸

The plot of Little Dorrit is often said to be one of Dickens's weakest. But that is in keeping with the book's aesthetic of flatness and its disillusioned spirit. A solidly constructed, clear, compelling plot would have been insensitive. Dickens partakes of Clennam's careful unassertiveness. The sense of precariousness, and of the uncommonness of the right circumstances conspiring to bring happiness, is echoed in Dickens's wariness of strong literary form, as much as in his lack of interest in the ancient, the venerated, and the foreign (Rome and Venice, for example)—anything that distracts us from the here and now, or that might seem to belittle the human scale. On both these counts, Dickens could be accused of philistinism, but it is rather that he is being faithful to his own artistic voice, which, despite the great magnitude of his texts, becomes, in details, more and more fastidious and thoughtfully controlled. And this control is ultimately accountable to Dickens's ethical awareness of the responsibility that his authorial status entails. Dickens, like Clennam, accepts the sober, self-doubting, and self-limiting role that his conscience represents to him as being inescapable.

Notes

1. Compare Dickens's depiction of destructive educational practices in Mrs. Monflathers (The Old Curiosity Shop) and Mrs. Pipchin (Dombey and Son).

2. A reference to the goddess Flora appears in Bleak House (540).

3. Neither the flatness that Fanny is referring to here nor the flatness that I am putting forward as a general characteristic of this novel is to be confused with E. M. Forster's well-known discussion of “flat” and “round” characters (73-81). Clennam and Little Dorrit are not caricatures, but are flat in the way that a real acquaintance might strike us as flat—having lost his or her fizz. Forster maintains that “Dickens's people are nearly all flat” and that “Pip and David Copperfield attempt roundness, but so diffidently that they seem more like bubbles than solids” (76). But what Forster fails to appreciate is that the insubstantiality which he detects in Pip and David is a leading theme of their respective novels. See also Squires on “flat but split characters” (51).

4. Cf. Thomas's comparative reading of Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, where he argues “that the female protagonist more successfully imagines her selfhood as something to be achieved, whereas the male protagonist is inclined to think of it as something to be endowed” (189). This idea can be applied fruitfully to various leading males and females who are in one way or another paired within individual Dickens novels: not just Estella and Pip, Amy and Clennam, but also Esther and Richard, for example. See also Metz: “with Amy … Dickens' insights outran his more limited intentions” (233). And compare Clayton, who talks of Amy as a visionary figure and a “liminal entity” who disrupts and redeems a Blakean-sounding “iron chain of narrative” (122-39).

5. David Copperfield's names include David, Davy, Daisy, Doady, Trotwood, Trot, Murdstone, Copperfield, and Copperfull.

6. My use of “polyvocal” derives mainly from Bakhtin. For sustained applications of Bakhtinian and related theory to Dickens, see Flint 47-67; Davies, passim; and Harris 445-58. My argument at this point is, in a sense, anti-Bakhtinian: the apparent heteroglossia of the late Dickens novel is limited by the fact that narrator and central characters come to express themselves in similar, typically jaded and alienated, ways. Dickens becomes progressively more monologic. For a sophisticated argument to the effect that all novels “at the most encompassing level” are monologic, see Sturgess 45-51 (48).

7. See Field for more on the ways in which the central plot and the social commentary of this novel support one another.

8. Parallels with my Blakean approach will be seen in Horne's use of Flannery O'Connor, whose “statements point to something we find in Little Dorrit more strongly … than in any of Dickens's other novels—that is, (1) his ‘prophetic vision,’ meaning ‘a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up,’ and (2) an implied view that the reader is, at least in part, one whose ‘sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration’ and must be reminded of it through bizarre, even violent, actions in the novel” (534, quoting O'Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1969]). I would simply add that there is the strangeness of the narrator's or implied author's stance to be considered too.

Works Cited

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Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1968.

Clayton, Jay. Romantic Vision and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Davies, James A. The Textual Life of Dickens's Characters. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

———. Hard Times. Ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

———. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Walter Dexter. The Nonesuch Dickens. 3 vols. London: Nonesuch, 1938.

———. Little Dorrit. Ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith. The Clarendon Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.

Field, Darin E. “‘Two Spheres of Action and Suffering’: Empire and Decadence in Little Dorrit.” Dickens Quarterly 7 (1990): 379-83.

Flint, Kate. Dickens. New Readings. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Harris, Wendell V. “Bakhtinian Double Voicing in Dickens and Eliot.” ELH 57 (1990): 445-58.

Horne, Lewis. “Little Dorrit and the Region of Despair.” Dalhousie Review 69 (1990): 533-48.

Metz, Nancy. “Blighted Tree and the Book of Fate: Female Models of Storytelling in Little Dorrit.” Dickens Studies Annual 18 (1989): 221-42.

Squires, Michael. “The Structure of Dickens's Imagination in Little Dorrit.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 49-64.

Sturgess, Philip J. M. Narrativity: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Thomas, Ronald. Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.