[In the following essay, Carlisle examines the relationship between Little Dorrit as a work of fiction, and the various fictions or illusions created within the novel by its characters.]

On the last page of Little Dorrit (1855-57), Dickens describes the wedding of Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam. Literally the last words accorded to a character are spoken by the most minor of them all, “the sexton, or the beadle, or the verger, or whatever he was”¹ of Saint George's Church. He explains the “special interest” that observers take in Little Dorrit's wedding:

“For, you see,” said Little Dorrit's old friend, “this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has come now to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she's now a-writing her little name as a bride, in what I call the third volume”

(p. 826).

The implications of this comment justify the place of distinction it is given. Little Dorrit is an inquiry into the moral status of fiction; and here Dickens makes a final self-conscious reference to his own literary form. It is an obvious parody of the conventional narrative pattern which opens with a birth in the first volume and ends with a marriage in the final volume. The primary function of the passage is to juxtapose the actions of individual characters against the ultimate realities of birth and death. Yet it also provides a comic perspective on Little Dorrit itself: the official unwittingly compares the biography of Amy Dorrit to the fictional form it assumes, the actual novel that the reader is holding. His displacement of the conventional order of the three elemental human experiences—birth, death, and union—traces sequentially the three main events of Little Dorrit's life: her birth, her father's death, and her marriage to Clennam. An even more complicated reference is involved: the functionary's concern for his three volumes is a witty allusion to the form of publication that was the major rival of Dickens's twenty-number serials. With a few sentences, Dickens has created an analogy between the novel he has written about Amy Dorrit's life and the pattern that Saint George's three Registers impose on her life.

This analogy might suggest a certain uneasiness on Dickens's part. Throughout Little Dorrit he repeatedly draws attention to the moral ambiguities involved in any attempt to present life in a fictional form. The nameless, functionless church appendage embodies one of these ambiguities. He is both kind and insensitive to Little Dorrit: he finds her a place to sleep when she has been locked out of the Marshalsea earlier in the novel, yet here he regards her as an object, merely “one of [his] curiosities.” As Dickens had good occasion to know, the term “fiction” is itself weighted with moral ambiguity: it shares a common root with “feign” and means literally something fashioned or invented, something artificial rather than real. In its most derogatory sense, it is a lie, a deception, an attempt to hide or disguise facts. (The OED documents the use of the word “fiction” to define both the “action of ‘feigning’ … whether for the purpose of deception or otherwise” and “fictitious composition” throughout the nineteenth century. It cites, for example, Bulwer-Lytton's Devereux [1829]: “Old people like history better than fiction.” The word “fictionist” used in place of “novelist” is recorded for 1829, 1836, and 1875.) Unlike the morally neutral term “novel,” “fiction” implies an unfavorable comparison with the concepts of reality and history. When Dickens refuted the Edinburgh Review attack on Little Dorrit, he ironically described the Circumlocution Office as an “idle fiction”:² such a use of the word presumes an awareness of its pejorative nature. This awareness would have come naturally to a novelist who listened to Thomas Carlyle as attentively as Dickens did. If Carlyle had little patience with readers of novels—he thought they should be separated along with the insane from the serious readers in the British Museum—he had even less for novelists themselves. He was not above charging the “fictionist” with outright moral irresponsibility: “Oh my friend, you will have to think how perilous and close a cousinship it has with lying.”³ The social criticism of Little Dorrit owes a great deal to Carlyle's thought, and Dickens embodied one of his teacher's concerns, the questionable moral status of fiction, its cousinship with lying, within the form of the novel. He develops a correlation between the fictions, the lies, that the characters tell each other or themselves and the novel he is writing—at its center is the unlikely figure of Little Dorrit. She is not at all the conventional heroine: the equivocal nature of her actions qualifies her for the title role in a novel replete with deceptions. The way in which this correlation defines fiction as one of the arts of How Not to Do It is the subject of the present essay.

Little Dorrit presents formidable critical problems. It is so complex that even the most convincing descriptions of it seem reductive. Yet it is also a novel built on the idea of simple and radical contrasts, as every critic writing on the novel has noticed. One of the first, John Forster, spoke of Dickens's “clear design … of contrasting, both in private and in public life, and in poverty equally as in wealth, duty done and duty not done.”⁴ Dickens himself tirelessly insists on the contrasting elements in his novel. To begin on the most familiar note: Little Dorrit is divided into two books, “Poverty” and “Riches,” and it explores two modes of existence, freedom and imprisonment. There are two Dorrits, Proud William and Humble Frederick, two manifestly contrasted sisters, and twin Flintwinches. Two radically different types of motion typify action in the novel: the linear journey along the highroad of life and the labyrinthian circularity of bureaucracy and imprisonment. This development by antithesis is so obvious as to be misleading. Critics usually deal with this aspect of the book in one of two ways. Either the polarities merge in an ironic statement—the social world does not contrast with the prison: it is a prison. Or one polarity disappears completely in the resolution reached by the novel—the state of imprisonment is conquered by Little Dorrit's liberating love. But such basically reductive approaches simply do not do justice to the complexity of Little Dorrit. This point becomes especially evident in any consideration of what has been called the major polarity of the novel, the problem of appearance and reality. In many ways, tracking down this dichotomy is an old and rather obvious critical tactic: very little ingenuity is needed to discern the theme of seeming and being in practically any work of literature. Commentators on this particular novel tend to treat Dickens's version as if it were a rather straight-forward rendition of the same old theme. By using such conspicuous examples as the broad expanse of flesh that constitutes the Bosom of Society or Mrs. General's “surface and varnish, and show without substance” (p. 504), they are able to claim that appearances are false and therefore bad and that the destruction of appearances, the emergence of reality, is the highest moral good. To be morally effective, therefore, the action of the novel must invalidate the sham of seeming and reveal the essence of being to the reader.⁵Little Dorrit is thus Dickens's most “profoundly optimistic” novel because, in the end, love stands as the only reality,⁶ or it is profoundly grim because misery is “that great reality lying behind genteel illusion.”⁷ As one critic sees it, the final chapters of the novel present “an end to surfaces for good and all,” and the “life of surface and sham” is “set aside” for a “new and valid” life of reality.⁸ But Little Dorrit is a novel that can be more justly characterized by ambiguity than by such simple resolutions. To see how Dickens uses simple contrast to develop cases of rather startling complexity, one need only look at one aspect of the contrast: the instances in which characters create “fictions” to hide the “reality” of their feelings or social positions.

Dickens continually emphasizes the role that the creation of fictions plays in the world of Little Dorrit. Involved “legends” surround the name of Bleeding Heart Yard or explain Frederick Dorrit's odd behavior in the theater where he plays the clarinet, and “stories” account for Edmund Sparkler's dim-wittedness. According to Tite Barnacle, Dorrit is the subject of “‘a good story, as a story’”: he is granted his freedom when “‘the fairy [comes] out of the Bank and [gives] him his fortune’” (p. 565). This penchant for fictionalizing experience or identities is apparent in the names the characters give others or assume for themselves. The villain uses names as a disguise: he is, variously, Rigaud, Lagnier, and Blandois. The Meagleses deny Harriet Beadle's essential equality to their daughter by calling her Tattycoram. Flora calls Clennam “Doyce and Clennam” in a preposterously halfhearted attempt to disguise her early attachment to “Arthur.” Dickens develops this theme most extensively and effectively when he catches characters in the act of fictionalizing their own experience in self-consciously created, sustained narratives. His use of the first person in the memorandum book which he began to keep six months before he started writing Little Dorrit suggests that he was increasingly anxious to let his characters present themselves in their own voices. In Little Dorrit, characters often use narrative frameworks to explain themselves. Flora falls back on various literary sources—including the myths of Cain and Pygmalion, Wordsworth's Prelude, and The Winter's Tale⁹—to re-create the past in the present: she even manages to persuade Little Dorrit that Clennam is still in love with her. Young John Chivery, that “pining shepherd” in his “tuneless groves” of laundry (pp. 297, 258), composes epitaphs for his own gravestone that plot the course of his love for Little Dorrit: at the end of the novel, his imagined tomb triumphantly proclaims that he “for the sake of the loved one … became magnanimous” (p. 734). Clennam can only express his feelings by creating an objectified version of himself, “Nobody.” After he “decides” not to fall in love with Pet Meagles, his references to “Nobody's State of Mind” constitute a futile attempt to deceive himself about his own state of mind. Meagles fosters this self-deception with his own fiction of the continued growth of Pet's dead twin; the idea is so powerfully conceived that Clennam imagines himself as the twin's widower. When Dickens is finally ready to reveal the events surrounding Arthur's birth, he notes in his number plans, “Tell the whole story, working it out as much as possible through Mrs Clennam herself.”¹⁰ What is remarkable about the way Dickens tells “the whole story” is his emphasis on it as narrative. Blandois confronts Mrs. Clennam and offers to tell a “‘ravishing little family history’” (p. 771). He assumes the role of entertainer: “‘I perceive I interest you. I perceive I awaken your sympathy’” (p. 772). But Mrs. Clennam will not accept the “glass” in which Blandois offers to present her: “‘I will tell it myself! … I will be known as I know myself’” (pp. 774-76). Her version of events, weighted down by vindictive Calvinistic language, is simply a modern Old Testament story: God's righteous fury works itself out through his human instruments. Miss Wade's story is the most conspicuous example of a character's use of his own experience as the source of fiction. Her autobiographical account is an interpolated narrative with its own grandiose, self-advertising title, “The History of a Self Tormentor,” its own plot, characters, moral. Dickens describes this History in his memorandum for the chapter: “From her own point of view. Dissect it” (Plans, p. 50): the narrative is to be Miss Wade's “own” peculiar paranoid reconstruction of events. She uses both Clennam, her audience, and the narrative itself as a “looking-glass” to reflect the version of reality she wants to see. That both Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade explain their activities by referring to a mirror is not accidental: their fictions are appropriately defined by the traditional symbol of art.

According to conventional critical approaches and the moral assumptions behind them, all such acts of fictionalization are clearly immoral. A fiction in this sense is a lie. Throughout Little Dorrit, Dickens insists upon this interpretation of the word. The narrator's disgust with Dorrit's pretensions to the status of a gentleman is transparent: he speaks of “the miserably ragged old fiction of the family gentility” (p. 213); as Dickens knew too well, debt is not genteel, and he is angered by any attempt to pretend it is. The “little fiction” that Mrs. Plornish creates by having her shop wall “painted to represent the exterior of a thatched cottage” is a “most wonderful deception” (p. 574); wonderful, but still a deception. Yet this version of the problem of appearance and reality goes beyond the narrow definition of fiction as a lie. One need only realize the extent to which Little Dorrit herself is intimately involved in analogous acts of fictionalization, of deception and lying, to recognize the complexity and subtlety with which Dickens formulates this problem.

Little Dorrit is a good woman. She is a dutiful daughter, a loving sister, and presumably she will be a dutiful and loving wife. No one can fail to notice Amy's goodness: she is, as one critic puts it, the image of “composed spiritual health.”¹¹ F. R. Leavis exults in Little Dorrit's goodness:

Her genius is to be always beyond question genuine—real. She is indefectibly real, and the test of reality for the others. … The characteristic manifests itself in her power to be, for her father and brother and sister, the never-failing providence, the vital core of sincerity, the conscience, the courage of moral percipience, the saving realism, that preserves for them the necessary bare minimum of the real beneath the fantastic play of snobberies, pretences and self-deceptions that constitutes the genteel life in the Marshalsea.¹²

This description of Little Dorrit's role is eloquent, indeed moving; and it does conform to one's sense of her status in the moral hierarchy of the novel. There is only one problem: it is patently inaccurate. Leavis's comment refers to Amy specifically when she and her family inhabit the Marshalsea. Is she the “saving realism” or does she cooperate to create and sustain “the fantastic play of snobberies, pretences and self-deceptions that constitutes the genteel life in the Marshalsea”? Of course, Dorrit himself creates the fiction that he is a gentleman, a public figure with a public duty among the Collegians. But Little Dorrit—not her father or brother or sister—is the character who “preserves” the “genteel fiction that they [are] all idle beggars together” (p. 74). She is the one who tells her father stories to conceal the shaming fact that Fanny dances for a living. She never questions the “family fiction” that she knows nothing of the world beyond the prison (p. 234). She is the one who maintains the “pious fraud” that her brother Tip is a visitor, not an inmate, in the debtors' prison. Tip himself demonstrates some healthy skepticism about the need for all this prevaricating: he tells Clennam that he is a prisoner; “‘only my sister has a theory that our governor must never know it. I don't see why, myself’” (p. 87). Little Dorrit is not particularly pleased with her role—she does not like “becom[ing] secret with” Mrs. Clennam (p. 86)—but she insists that her role is necessary. She explains to Clennam that, in order to see Fanny in the theater, she must “pretend” that she is going to a party: “‘I hope there is no harm in it. I could never have been of any use, if I had not pretended a little’” (p. 169). At the end of the chapter, the narrator presents his own bitter evaluation of such pretenses: “This was Little Dorrit's party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure, of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds, of the dismal night. This was the party from which Little Dorrit went home” (p. 177). The disjunction between the “white lies” Little Dorrit tells and the reality she experiences could hardly be more complete.

As long as Little Dorrit can sustain the fiction of her father's love and concern, she and the rest of the family can survive. She is utterly defeated by any event which reveals the true nature of his feelings. In two scenes in the Marshalsea, Dorrit confronts her with the reality of his position. When Little Dorrit fails to humor John Chivery, Dorrit rebukes her and describes himself as a “‘poor prisoner, fed on alms and broken victuals; a squalid, disgraced wretch’” (p. 227). This line literally brings Amy to her knees. Later, he is “cut to the soul” because she has been seen in public with the pauper Old Nandy, and he sobs while Fanny tells her exactly what she is, “‘you Common-minded little Amy. You complete prison-child!’” (p. 368). Again, she kneels before her father and begs his forgiveness. The fictions that little Dorrit sustains are among the most morally debilitating in the novel: like Tip, the reader may wonder whether she actually helps her father by fostering his self-deceptions. Throughout the second book, Little Dorrit deserves Leavis's praise: when confronted with the unreality of social conventions, she asserts her human reality, her inability to deal in fictions. She becomes “the test of reality for the others.” Yet, in Book the First, while she still inhabits the Marshalsea, she is what Fanny labels her, a “‘prevaricating little piece of goods’” (p. 369).

If, in the second half of the novel, Little Dorrit's presence invalidates the fictions on which her family depends, she maintains, in persistent and baffling ways, some extraordinary fictions about herself. This point explains her repeated insistence that her name is Little Dorrit, not Amy. As Flora perceptively comments earlier in the novel, it is “‘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’” (p. 270). One expects a “little dorrit” to come up speckled: it is hardly a human name. And Little Dorrit uses it to conceal the human potentiality of her relationship with Arthur Clennam. Throughout the two chapters which recount her early history, Dickens refers to her either as Amy or as the Child of the Marshalsea, but he prepares for her later deception of Clennam by reserving the name Little Dorrit until Clennam sees her enter the Marshalsea at the end of chapter 7. Clennam has a tendency to think of her as “his adopted daughter” (p. 188), and Little Dorrit uses her diminutive name to sustain that fiction. She writes him about her friendship with Pet: “she speaks to me by my name—I mean, not my Christian name, but the name you gave me. When she began to call me Amy, I told her my short story, and that you had always called me Little Dorrit. I told her that the name was much dearer to me than any other, and so she calls me Little Dorrit too” (p. 552). Though Clennam has accepted the practice of calling her Little Dorrit, he is not responsible for giving her that name—Affery first mentions it when he asks who she is. Amy herself prefers the name of a “poor child” because it conceals the fact that she is old enough to love Clennam. This deception persists through the last chapter of the novel. Arthur refers to her as Amy, and she responds by correcting him: “‘Little Dorrit. Never any other name’” (p. 822). Even their mutual protestations of love do not dissolve the fiction of her daughterliness. As the church functionary says on the last page, Little Dorrit signs her “‘little name’” into the Marriage Register.

Just as Miss Wade tells her “History of a Self Tormentor,” Little Dorrit tells her own story in the guise of the fairy tale with which she entertains Maggy.¹³ This interpolated narrative is the counterpart of Clennam's conception of himself as Nobody. A “‘poor little tiny woman’” (p. 293) spins in her cottage while she mourns the loss of “‘Some one who had gone by long before’” (p. 294). Eventually the little woman dies and the shadow of “Some one” descends into her grave. The little woman is obviously Little Dorrit; Clennam is “Some one”—in a curious way both of their tales reduce him to an indefinite pronoun.¹⁴ Just as Clennam turns himself into a ghost wed to Pet's dead sister, Little Dorrit's storytelling makes a grotesque comment on her sense of identity: she becomes a corpse united to a shadow. The fairy-tale quality of his narrative reinforces the fiction that Little Dorrit is somehow unsubstantial, unreal. It is consistent with Fanny's calling her “‘Amiable and dear little Twoshoes!’” (p. 698) and with Flora's addressing her as an “‘industrious little fairy’” (p. 284). When Clennam later proclaims that he is beyond the age of marriage and Little Dorrit conceals her feelings, Maggy refers to the story of the little woman. Little Dorrit has said, “‘I have no secret,’” but Maggy senses the truth: “‘It was the little woman as had the secret’” (pp. 382-83). She begs Little Dorrit to tell the story, but Amy refuses by dismissing it as “only a Fairy Tale.” The irony is apparent: if she did tell the story, her story, she and Clennam might have a chance to comprehend the reality of their feelings for each other.

The ambiguity of Little Dorrit's role in the creation of fictions within the novel is definitely and finally established in the last scene between Clennam and herself. Dickens's memorandum—“Scene (reserve carefully till now) between Little Dorrit and Arthur” (Plans, p. 60)—suggests the particular importance of this scene within the narrative pattern of the novel. On the morning they are to be married, Amy joins Arthur in his room at the Marshalsea. She has told him that she is poor again, and Doyce has returned from the Barbaric Power with the money needed to free him. Amy has sent Meagles to the Continent to retrieve the original copy of the codicil which proves that Mrs. Clennam had cheated her of a legacy of one thousand guineas. Tattycoram has saved the papers, and Little Dorrit can maintain the fiction that Arthur's suspicions about his mother were unfounded: “The secret was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should never know of her loss” (p. 812). In this last scene, Little Dorrit asks Clennam to burn a piece of paper, the codicil he is never to know about:

“My dear love,” said Arthur. “Why does Maggy light the fire? We shall be gone directly.”

“I asked her to do it. I have taken such an odd fancy. I want you to burn something for me.”

“What?”

“Only this folded paper. If you will put it in the fire with your own hand, just as it is, my fancy will be gratified.”

“Superstitious, darling Little Dorrit? Is it a charm?”

“It is anything you like best, my own,” she answered, laughing with glistening eyes and standing on tiptoe to kiss him, “if you will only humour me when the fire burns up.” …

“Does the charm want any words to be said?” asked Arthur, as he held the paper over the flame. “You can say (if you don't mind) ‘I love you!’” answered Little Dorrit. So he said it, and the paper burned away

(pp. 824-25).

The surface sweetness of this dialogue belies its essential meaning. John Holloway has said that the last chapters of the novel constitute “an end to surfaces for good and all.”¹⁵ In this scene, however, Little Dorrit merely continues to maintain surfaces and sustain fictions. Clennam asks, “Is it a charm?” and she responds with a patent deception, “It is anything you like best”—her answer is certainly an interesting case of the transforming powers of the imagination. Their life together is begun with the inception of a new fiction, a new instance of secrecy. Only by withholding the “reality” of their legal relation—Clennam, through his “mother,” stands in debt to Little Dorrit—can their emotional relation survive. Little Dorrit assumes that by burning the paper she can destroy the past. From the very opening of the novel, Clennam has suspected that his mother is guilty of some wrong. Here he is deprived not only of the opportunity to make reparations, but also of the very knowledge that reparations are at all appropriate. Little Dorrit assumes that in destroying the evidence of the “curse” of the past she can transform that curse into a “charm” to bless the opening of their life together. This scene is the enactment of a lie, a crucial deception: here Little Dorrit creates her ultimate fiction, her last “odd fancy.”

But Little Dorrit and Arthur are blessed; they are, as Dickens tells us, “inseparable and blessed.” And we know that Little Dorrit, that “prevaricating little piece of goods,” is good.¹⁶ On the one hand, questioning the wisdom or the moral implications of her fictions lies at the center of perceiving the meaning of the novel; on the other hand, such questioning is rendered pointless by her irrevocable status as the embodiment of the novel's moral values. It is true of the novel as a whole, as it is true of what Clennam calls his “poor story,” that Little Dorrit is “its vanishing-point. Everything in its perspective led to her innocent figure. … it was the centre of the interest of his life; it was the termination of everything that was good and pleasant in it; beyond there was nothing but mere waste and darkened sky” (p. 733). Little Dorrit's role can be both ambiguous and unquestionably moral because of the context, the novel, in which she appears. Her lies are peculiarly like the “lies” that the novelist tells:¹⁷ she deals with Clennam in much the same way in which Dickens deals with the reader. Like Little Dorrit, Dickens fails to confront certain facts, he ignores certain problems and suggests that others cannot be solved. But such acts of deception do not undercut the moral status of the novel. They are not open to questioning on moral grounds: they are acceptable simply because they are necessary. Telling the “truth” necessarily involves such deceptions, such failures to tell the whole story.

The kinship between Little Dorrit and her creator becomes evident after an examination of Dickens's handling of the plot. From the earliest reviewers such as Fitzjames Stephen to the most recent critics of the novel, readers have complained of the complexity of its plot.¹⁸ John Holloway, in his recent edition, has even felt it necessary to include a two-page explanation of the events behind the dénouement. In his article on the political implications of the novel, William Myers dissents from this conventional judgment: he insists that “proper recognition must be given to the plot, which is still too frequently dismissed or undervalued.” According to Myers, the plot “unfolds freely and yet with the inevitability of a well-told story … in a way which … must, if the novel has any value at all, relate centrally to its meaning.” To accord the plot this much praise, however, Myers isolates and dismisses its “deliberate mystery element.” The “secrets of Arthur Clennam's birth, of Mrs. Clennam's connection with the Dorrits, and of Blandois's association with Flintwich's [sic] brother and Miss Wade” are conventional and insignificant aspects of the plot: they are “not … the ‘story.’”¹⁹ Yet Dickens's careful handling of this “mystery element” suggests that it does “relate centrally” to the meaning of the novel.

As Dickens repeatedly affirmed and as Forster emphasized in his account of Little Dorrit in the Life, Dickens hoped to do something new with the plot and its effect on his readers. His memorandum for the first number explains his intentions: “People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in life. Try this uncertainty and this not-putting of them together, as a new means of interest. Indicate and carry through this intention” (Plans, p. 23). Dickens repeated this intention to Forster in a somewhat more conventional manner: he would “‘connect [the characters] afterwards, and … make the waiting for that connection a part of the interest.’”²⁰ The common assumption—made first by Forster and echoed by K. J. Fielding and Paul Herring²¹—is that Dickens failed to follow this plan. In one sense, that is true: by presenting one group of travellers in quarantine in chapter 2 of the first book and another group in the monastery of the Great Saint Bernard in the first chapter of Book the Second, Dickens has already made “connections” between them. Yet, in another sense, his plan, originally developed merely to excite the reader's curiosity about specific events, became his ultimate narrative strategy. In the second chapter, Miss Wade delivers an oracular comment that seems to promise that the patterns of the novel will work themselves out in a neat imitation of fate: “‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads … and what is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done’” (p. 25). In his remarks at the end of the chapter, the narrator adopts Miss Wade's metaphor of life as a journey: “And thus … journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life” (p. 27). The narrator here promises that the characters will meet and act and react on one another. According to this definition, the “connections” Dickens speaks of in the number plans are the primary, vital connections of human responsiveness. The reader ultimately learns that both the narrator and Miss Wade have issued empty promises. Sixteen numbers later we discover that Miss Wade's manipulations, not the workings of blind chance, have brought her into proximity with the Meagleses. At the end of the novel, the reader realizes too well that the narrator's intentions have been equally deceptive. The entire action of the novel might be described as an attempt to get answers, allay suspicions, and establish connections. Dickens develops supposedly solvable mysteries and he suggests potential relationships; but, in the end, he refuses to fulfill the expectations he arouses. He does not provide the conclusive statements characteristic of a conventional narrative pattern.

The mystery element in Little Dorrit is nothing if not “deliberate.” It carries more emphasis than considerations of plot line or the need to elicit the reader's interest would justify. Because of its baffling complexity, the plot cannot serve simply as a way of “reassuring the reader, of promising that some, at least, of the novel's problems can be solved like a puzzle—simply by persistence and ingenuity.”²² Clennam is the focus of the suspicions and secrets which pervade the novel. He is always asking questions. He is always assuming that the concerns of other characters relate to his own. His persistence borders on the neurotic: “‘I want some light thrown on the secrets of this house’” (p. 689); “‘I want that suspicion to be cleared away’” (p. 744). His first confrontation with his mother emphasizes his role: “‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to suspect—’” (p. 48). Although his father's deathbed behavior serves as a partial pretext for his uneasiness, Clennam suffers from an exacerbated sensitivity to suspicion: even his father's portrait, “earnestly speechless on the wall,” seems “to urge him awfully to the task” (p. 54). There is no logical reason why he should connect his mother's silence with Little Dorrit's presence; but “involuntary starts of fancy” take “possession” of him, and the connection becomes so vivid that he can hear his mother's voice justifying the actions he attributes to her. First for Dorrit and then for Doyce, he attempts to fathom the secrets of the Circumlocution Office. His first visit there is an allegorical journey through the levels of bureaucracy: Christian had been replaced by the persistent inquirer. He repeats his request, “‘I want to know,’” twice to Barnacle Junior, once to Barnacle Senior, then to Wobbler, to the four storytelling clerks, and finally to his fellow pilgrims, Meagles and Doyce. But he gets nowhere: by trying to search out a mystery, he only manages to become, in Clarence Barnacle's eyes, the “mysterious Clennam” (p. 208). When he is not actually pursuing other characters' mysteries, he is busy suspecting that they might relate to him. Little Dorrit is peopled with characters, from Merdle and Miss Wade to Tattycoram and Maggy, who constantly entertain paranoid suspicions. Even the extremely minor character who makes up Clennam's bed in the Snuggery suspects that the governor of the prison is defrauding him of three and ninepence a week. Clennam stands at the head of this group of characters. His insistence on following clues and revealing secrets is neither entirely normal nor very effective. What happens to his efforts epitomizes what happens to many of the secrets in the novel. His attempts are rendered useless: instead of removing secrets, he becomes involved in creating them. When he reveals to his mother that Blandois is a murderer, she retorts, “‘It is you who make this a secret. … you, Arthur, who bring here doubts and suspicions and entreaties for explanations, and it is you, Arthur, who bring secrets here.’” As Arthur realizes only too well, Mrs. Clennam succeeds in the “turning of his intelligence, and of his whole attempt and design against himself” (p. 685). Later in the novel, his ineffectuality is even more apparent: his imprisonment for debt renders him literally motionless as the time for the final confrontation between Blandois and his mother approaches—he cannot “stir hand or foot” (p. 746).

An examination of Dickens's number plans for Little Dorrit suggests that his conscious narrative strategy was to retard the events or withhold the connections that might ease Clennam's perplexity. The effect he wanted to create was a sense of “Strengthening mystery” (Plans, p. 49). By beginning with such a large number of characters and so many complicated events, Dickens could reserve a major portion of the action for long sections of the narrative. Thus, as Paul Herring notes, there are three numbers early in the novel that do not contain any references to the Clennam secret (Plans, p. 32). The notes for chapter 30, Book the First read: “Pursue Rigaud, and the beginning of his influence over Mr Flintwinch and Mrs Clennam Suspend it all. Hanging Sword” (Plans, p. 38). By withholding developments in certain segments of the plot, Dickens could make the narrative approximate a hanging sword, a sword that might or might not fall. Similarly, he delays telling Miss Wade's story throughout most of the novel. In the memoranda for number 3, Dickens asks himself, “Miss Wade in the prison?” and answers, “Not yet.” While planning Number IV, he suggests that he could tell her history—“Miss Wade. Her surroundings and antecedents?”—and the answer is an emphatic “No.” This pattern is repeated in the memoranda for Numbers V, VI, and VII. Finally, in the plans for Number VIII, the answer is “Yes,” and Miss Wade again appears. But it is not until Number XVI that Miss Wade tells her story: twelve numbers have intervened since Dickens first saw the possibility of revealing her “antecedents.” He withholds the crucial revelation of her motivation until the action of the novel is almost completed.

The fate of this story once it is told demonstrates the way in which Dickens refuses to make significant moral connections between his characters. He has promised that his figures will “meet and act and react” on one another. Yet the reader is rarely granted the satisfaction of witnessing the fulfillment of this promise. Clennam has gone to Calais to ask Miss Wade if she knows where Blandois might be, but she refuses to give him any information.²³ Instead she offers him her “History of a Self Tormentor.” Clennam leaves Calais with this history in hand; and, in the following chapter, the narrative itself appears. It is a powerful, almost explosive document; but, after its actual appearance, it is never mentioned again. One presumes that Clennam has read it. His ideals of conduct, we are told, are “Duty on earth, restitution on earth” (p. 319); it would be interesting to discover what he thinks of a woman whose entire existence is motivated by passion and vindictiveness. But the reader never does find out what Clennam thinks. In the following chapter, he is back in London, and he has resumed his search for Blandois. Miss Wade has acted, but the reader never sees Clennam react. It is as if the history had disappeared into thin air. Of course, one might suggest that Dickens is to blame for his failure to present Clennam's response: he has complicated the plot to such an extent that he simply has more material than he can handle. But such an explanation clearly is not satisfactory: a line or two might have supplied Clennam's opinion of Miss Wade.

Dickens's treatment of this history is completely consistent with other instances in which he refuses, throughout the second half of the novel, to show one character reacting to another. In the plans of Number XVII, he asks himself if he should “close with a Letter from Little Dorrit?” His answer is emphatic, “No—Not to weaken her next appearance” (Plans, pp. 52-53); the reader therefore never knows how Little Dorrit reacts to the most radical change in her life, the deaths of both her father and uncle. She does not appear again until the end of the next number; there her role is not that of the grieving child but that of the comforting nurse: her loss is never mentioned. The fate of Clennam's mother is a similar case: we are told that she lives for three years after the collapse of her house; yet, in the scenes that take place between Clennam and Little Dorrit, she is never mentioned. How does Little Dorrit explain what has happened? The house collapses, and the reader is never given the chance to see the dust settle. This strategy extends to various minor elements in the story. We know what the Nation thinks of Merdle's death, but how does Fanny respond to the use her father-in-law has made of her pen-knife? Or in the case of the Gowans: we know that Blandois suspects Little Dorrit of delivering a love letter from Clennam to Pet. Does he share this information with Gowan? If so, how does Gowan react? And, of course, we never see Clennam respond to the truth about his birth. Little Dorrit promises to tell him—“in time to come, he should know all that was of import to himself” (p. 812)—but, for all the reader knows, that time might never come. Clennam may never be given the opportunity to understand the reality of his relationship to Mrs. Clennam—indeed, the writer of one recent essay on the novel simply assumes that “Arthur never learns the secret of his origins.”²⁴ Forster thought that a major fault in Little Dorrit was “the want of ease and coherence among the figures of the story.”²⁵ Dickens's handling of the events in the second half of the novel suggests that this “want of ease and coherence” is not an oversight, but a consistent plan of narrative presentation. Dickens does not forget to inform the reader of certain events: he purposely excludes them so that he can demonstrate the lack of “connections” between his characters.

The care with which Dickens planned the ending of Little Dorrit is obvious. Before determining what to include in the final double number, he reconsidered all the previous action: he reread parts of the novel and made notes in two separate sets of “Mems: for working the Story round” (Plans, p. 56). The nature of the resolution reached by the end of the novel suggests the limitations involved in what fiction can ultimately reveal to the reader. Because there is so much “story” in Little Dorrit, it is possible to forget just how much of it Dickens chooses not to tell.²⁶ Merdle's business dealings are never explained. Arthur's question—“How connected with the Dorrits?” (Plans, p. 58)—is answered, but not for him. Most of the Dorrit story remains a mystery. Tite Barnacle cannot remember the nature of Dorrit's original business: it could have been “‘spirits, or buttons, or wine, or blacking, or oatmeal, or wollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron, or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops, or seamen, or somebody’” (p. 565). This question is never resolved. The reader never even finds out how Dorrit gets into debt or, for that matter, how he gets out: where that fortune had been resting for all those years remains a mystery concealed in Pancks's “hand.” Nor do we ever understand the nature of Doyce's invention—though he explains it to Clennam with the utmost clarity, that courtesy is never extended to the reader. Nor do we learn the nature of his business with the Barbaric Power: as Meagles points out, Doyce must “‘hide’” his works and labors “‘under lock and key’” (p. 822) when he returns to England. And, as J. Hillis Miller has noted, Clennam's attempt to get Doyce some recognition at the Circumlocution Office reaches no conclusion: it “remains at the end of Little Dorrit like a loose thread of the plot dangling unresolved.”²⁷ Just before the collapse of the Clennam house, Flintwinch promises that he will explain his theft of the codicil in twenty-four hours. This elucidation, however, is withheld: “his taking himself off within that period with all he could get, was the final satisfactory sum and substance of his promised explanation” (p. 795). By the end of the novel, the narrator, who has pledged earlier that he will be explicit, leaves such points open to speculation. This effect is playfully underlined in the last appearance of Mr. F's aunt. Throughout the novel, she has been the source of “mysterious communication” (p. 158). In the last chapter, she sits in the kidney-pie shop, “addressing the following Sibyllic apostrophe. … ‘Bring him for'ard, and I'll chuck him out o' winder!’” (p. 820). The narrator refuses even to guess the meaning of this invective: “it has been supposed that this admirably consistent female intended by ‘him,’ Arthur Clennam. This, however, is mere speculation; who the person was, who, for the satisfaction of Mr. F's Aunt's mind, ought to have been brought forward and never was brought forward, will never be positively known” (p. 821). “Mere speculation,” in even this most minor of matters, is all that remains.

Long before writing Little Dorrit, Dickens had established a characteristic formula for his endings. By dating the action of his novels before the period of their publication, he could use the last chapter to trace the course of his characters' lives after the close of the action proper. The past-tense narrative yields to the present tense: the characters exist in a future already realized, and their fates coexist with the reader's experience of the novel. Dickens ends both Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and Oliver Twist (1838-39) with a final paragraph in the present tense, but Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) is the first novel in which he uses the form that Humphry House treats as characteristically Dickensian.²⁸Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50), and Bleak House (1852-53) all conclude with a chapter in the present tense. Dombey “makes” merry with Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle; Mr. Dick “plays” with David Copperfield's children; and Esther Summerson tells the reader how happy she “is” after seven years of marriage. The main purpose of these endings is simply to convey information. As House noted, “Dickens was enough of a pure story-teller to want to answer the child's insistent question, ‘What happened next?’”²⁹ The reader therefore learns “what happens” to most of the major and to many of the minor characters. In the novel that immediately preceded Little Dorrit, Hard Times (1854), Dickens varies this practice, but only slightly: he conveys this information by allowing his characters to see into the “futurity” he has planned for them.

One measure of the “newness” of Little Dorrit is Dickens's handling of the form of its closing chapter. The events of the novel sufficiently antedate its appearance to allow him to follow the procedure he had established. Dickens, however, chooses to do otherwise. He concludes his narration when the action proper is completed: the novel ends with the marriage of Little Dorrit and Clennam, not with the history of how many children they had or how many of the other characters they could include in their happy family. What would have been a present-tense narration in an earlier novel is a continuation of the conventional past tense. The actual information Dickens offers is scant. We learn that Fanny will neglect her children. We learn that Amy will nurse the dying Tip. The narrator notes, in parentheses, that Pancks will become chief clerk, then partner, of Doyce and Clennam. But all this information is subordinated to the main action of the wedding. Dickens seems less interested in narrating the fates of Amy and Clennam than he is in including the dog Diogenes in the final tableau of Dombey and Son. An entire chapter of sustained promise in Dombey and Son shrinks to two paragraphs of vaguely projected events in the later novel. The figures of Woodcourt, Esther, and Ada in Bleak House are comparable to Clennam, Amy, and Pet: we know a great deal about “what happens” to the former and practically nothing about what will happen to the latter. This sense of relative incompletion extends to details of presentation. The last paragraph begins with an incomplete sentence: Dickens has relinquished even the desire to sustain the normal patterns of grammar. Although these paragraphs are a masterpiece of balanced tone, they constitute something less than a neat conclusion: indeed the resonance of this ending depends on Dickens's ability to balance the inconclusiveness of the information he offers against his use of the conventionally “tidy” marriage ending.

“And they lived happily ever after”—Dickens has no such comforting assurance to offer the reader. His handling of the last chapter is more tentative than it had been previously because his conception of what fiction can accomplish is more limited. The conclusion of Little Dorrit is the novelist's exercise in How Not to Do It. Dickens refuses to tidy up the plot. He is not Mrs. General: he does not believe in varnishing the narrative's surface, and he will not “cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence” (p. 450). Despite Miss Wade's prophecy characters remain “unconnected.” If their fates seek them out, the reader is allowed only a vague and general understanding of what those fates involve. The relative uncertainty embodied in this ending is appropriate. The characters in Little Dorrit are confronted with a world that is incomprehensible. When Plornish tries to understand his poverty, he becomes like a blind man with a “tangled skein” of yarn: he is futilely “trying to find some beginning or end to it” (p. 143). Clennam complains that the world is a labyrinth. If Dickens had chosen to simplify the plot, he would have sacrificed the verisimilitude that its very labyrinthian quality creates in the experience of reading the novel. Both character and reader must live with the “contradictions, vacillations, inconsistencies, the little peevish perplexities of this ignorant life, mists which the morning without a night only can clear away” (p. 639). Final answers are not to be found on earth, and the conclusion of the novel enacts in concrete terms the conditions of this “ignorant life.”

Little Dorrit, then, is a thorough exploration of the concept of fiction from its original root meaning to its modern use as a label for a literary form. If it is a novel “about the moral imagination,”³⁰ it is more specifically a novel about the moral limits of the imagination. Fiction is principally defined by what it cannot do: it cannot divulge secrets; it cannot provide an all-encompassing pattern of meaning; it cannot create connections between people in a world which precludes such connections. Like Little Dorrit herself, it cannot tell the whole truth. Dickens portrays a world in which not only the most immoral, but also the most innocent are forced to lie for their survival. In such a world—indeed by creating such a world—the novel cannot maintain a straightforward and conventionally “moral” posture. Dickens might well join Amy Dorrit in saying, “I could never have been of any use, if I had not pretended a little.” Morality necessarily involves taking one's stand, a realistic stand, among the “perplexities of this ignorant life.” Yet the conclusion that Dickens reaches carries with it no sense of defeat: he embodies within a particular novel an understanding of fiction in general that is comprehensive enough to include its moral ambiguities without allowing them to undercut its moral utility. The tone of the church official's comment at the end of the novel is proof of this point: it is, after all, a joke, a literary game. And it is immediately followed by the extraordinarily restrained and balanced tone of the closing lines: “They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar” (p. 826). If Dickens refuses to give his readers the kind of ending they expect from him, if he refuses to offer final assurances or a sense of ultimate clarity, he brings Little Dorrit in its last page to a conclusion worthy of the complexity and profundity that precede it.

Notes

1. Little Dorrit, intro. Lionel Trilling, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 176. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text.

2. “Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review,” Household Words (1 Aug. 1857); rpt. Miscellaneous Contributions, Standard Edition XIX (London: Gresham, n. d.), p. 442. He applies the same ironic description to the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office in the preface to the 1857 edition (p. xvii).

3. Quoted by K. J. Fielding, ed., The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 374.

4. The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. A. J. Hoppé (1872-74; rpt. London: Dent, 1966), II, 185.

5. This moral measuring-stick is also used to evaluate specific characters: “Through their misuse of language they encourage appearances and suppress reality” (Jerome Meckier, “Dickens's Little Dorrit: Sundry Curious Variations on the Same Tune,” Dickens Studies, 3 [1967], 61).

6. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, The Narrative Art of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 337-38.

7. Monroe Engel, The Maturity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 131.

8. John Holloway, Introduction, Little Dorrit (rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 26-29.

9. Holloway, “Notes,” Little Dorrit, p. 906, n. 4.

10. Paul D. Herring, “Dickens' Monthly Number Plans for Little Dorrit,” Modern Philology, 64 (1966), 60. Subsequent references to Dickens's number plans are included in the text and designated by “Plans.”

11. Edwin B. Barrett, “Little Dorrit and the Disease of Modern Life,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 214.

12. “Dickens and Blake: ‘Little Dorrit,’” in Dickens: The Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 226.

13. Barbara Hardy uses the fairy tale that Little Dorrit tells Maggy as an example of the stories that Dickens's characters frequently create (“Dickens's Storytellers,” Dickensian, 69 [1973], 71-78). Mrs. Hardy suggests that the “forms of narrative [used by Dickens's storytellers] draw our attention to the nature of his story-telling, and to story-telling in general” (p. 72), but she does not discuss the moral ambiguity involved in Little Dorrit's story. Rather, she analyzes the psychological implications of the relationship between listener and teller that the fairy tale creates.

14. Throughout the period in which he was writing Little Dorrit (originally entitled Nobody's Fault), Dickens was fascinated by the expressive quality of pronouns. In a major article in Household Words, he commented that England needed “Somebody who shall be no fiction” (“Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody” [30 Aug. 1856], rpt. Miscellaneous Contributions, p. 414).

15. Joseph Gold speaks of Amy's “unshakeable integrity and wholeness” and does not find that aspect of her character inconsistent with her decision to “destroy” the information about Arthur's birth (Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1972], pp. 226-27).

16. Perhaps this paradox is what J. Hillis Miller refers to when he says, “Little Dorrit centers on the secrecy, the otherness, of Little Dorrit herself. … the mystery of incarnate goodness” (Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969], p. 244).

17. James R. Kincaid assumes that Dickens takes a negative attitude toward the “lying” implicit in any creative activity: “In this black world, the work of the creative imagination is likely to be seen simply as lying” (Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], p. 198). This point is overstated, as I hope the following discussion will show.

18. Fitzjames Stephen called the plot “singularly cumbrous and confused” (“The License of Modern Novelists,” Edinburgh Review, 215 [July 1857], 126). Meckier finds it “neither extremely clear nor overly convincing” (“Dickens's Little Dorrit,” p. 56). K. J. Fielding complains that it “contains far too many mysteries” and then attempts to ignore the fact that Dickens “fell down on the plot” (Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction [London: Longmans, 1965], pp. 176, 179). And, in a more recent study of Dickens, Angus Wilson concludes that “the culmination of the novel is to a great extent lost, swallowed up in an overcomplicated plot” (The World of Charles Dickens [New York: Viking, 1970], p. 245).

19. William Myers, “The Radicalism of ‘Little Dorrit,’” Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 77-78.

20. Life, II, 182.

21. See Fielding, Charles Dickens, p. 179; and Herring, “Number Plans,” p. 24.

22. Myers, p. 77.

23. One might say that an archetypal activity in Little Dorrit is seeking out information and coming up empty-handed; for example, Clennam goes to Casby for information about Miss Wade and to Miss Wade for information about Blandois; Dorrit asks Mrs. Clennam about Blandois; Meagles goes to the Continent to get documents from Miss Wade; and Clennam makes seemingly endless visits to his home to interrogate Affery. In each case, the attempt proves unsuccessful.

24. Gold, p. 226.

25. Life, II, 184.

26. G. K. Chesterton refers to the residing mystery he perceives in “grisly figures” such as Mrs. Clennam: “When the book closes we do not know their real secret” (Charles Dickens, intro. Steven Marcus [1906; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965], p. 168).

27. Miller, p. 234.

28. The Dickens World (1941; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 27-28.

29. Ibid., p. 27.

30. Barrett, p. 200. I agree with Barrett's emphasis on the role played by the moral imagination in Little Dorrit and his recognition of the importance of Amy Dorrit's involvement in this question. He concludes, however, that Duty provides the answer to the Condition of England and that Dickens “proposes the cure” for the condition in the act of describing it (pp. 212, 215). Such conclusions do not do justice to the complexity of the problems Dickens raises in the novel.