[In the following essay, Peters proposes that orphans and criminals are represented in Victorian fictional discourse in the same way; she examines two orphans in Little Dorrit to illustrate her point.]

To make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognised as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.¹

The prison, both literal and metaphorical, in Little Dorrit has received a considerable amount of critical attention in the pioneering work of Philip Collins's Dickens and Crime, Lionel Trilling's metaphorical probing in The Opposing Self,² and more recently in Natalie McKnight's book Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens. However, apart from McKnight's book³ there has been little critical endeavour to theorise the representation of the prison in Little Dorrit as part of a larger nineteenth-century disciplinary discourse centred around Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon. Michel Foucault, in his early work Discipline and Punish,⁴ argues that this disciplinary discourse is one of the products of an epistemological break which results in the construction of an individual subject who is a product of intersecting power relations and discourses. The ‘ideal’ power relations embedded within the design of the Panopticon interest Foucault very much; he refers to it as ‘a figure of political technology’⁵. Foucault finds these power relations as informing both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century design of hospitals, insane asylums, schools and working-class housing estates. For my purposes, the key element of this design that forms the basis of the larger disciplinary discourse is the issue of continuous visibility, either by surveillance or by solitary confinement, and how this constructs the psyche of the subject. Continuous visibility brings with it continuous self-consciousness which marks the beginning of a process of internal reform. As the knowledge of visibility is internalised, the surveillance is gradually undertaken by the subject him/herself in a process of self-scrutiny. The process is complete when the subject not only polices him/herself but reproduces the surveillance (and the power that is embedded in it) on another.

The primary concern of such political technology, Foucault argues, is to subject to visibility those that threaten the normative collective values of the society at large, especially criminals and deviants who seem to pose a subversive threat. Other such figures who were the focus of a great deal of cultural anxiety in mid-Victorian Britain were the burgeoning population of street children⁶ and particularly, orphans. In this essay, I will argue that ultimately in Little Dorrit the orphan and the criminal occupy the same margins; as such, they are the targets of a disciplinary discourse and the products of continuous visibility. The criminal and the orphan are both alienated figures: the criminal, as a punishment, is removed from society (marginalised), while the orphan, having no family, is born in a state that is outside society. This lack of family results in a lack of social place—a marginalised existence—and as a result it is possible to trace strong similarities in the discursive representation of the orphan and the criminal. This disciplinary discourse leads to the orphan's being subjected to what I term as a ‘penal narrative’—a mode of narrating that attempts to recoup the orphan into the normative standards of the family. The familial configuration has relevance not only for the individual family unit but as a trope for mid-Victorian society and ultimately for the colonies and empire.

To illustrate my argument I will focus on two orphan figures in Little Dorrit, Miss Wade and Tattycoram, to determine the extent of the influence of these disciplinary endeavours. Ultimately, then, I am tracing a process of double marginalisation, where the orphan is not only dominated but becomes the gaoler of another orphan figure. In other words, the orphan under surveillance takes responsibility for the continuation of reform in her own psyche and becomes the agent of the dominating power.

The orphan, Miss Wade, has a fragment entitled ‘The History of a Self-Tormentor’. When Miss Wade gives Arthur Clennam ‘something I have written and put by for your perusal’⁷, she establishes Arthur as an authority figure, disregarding Arthur's claim that he has ‘no authority or influence’ (LD, 660). One result of Foucault's theorising is that the fictional autobiographical narrative may now be read as a product of self-surveillance; a form of psychological confession. The crucial significance of this reading of the fictional autobiography as confession is its relationship to the reader and how it ultimately empowers the reader. This will become especially relevant in the relationships between Miss Wade and Arthur, and between Little Dorrit and Arthur. Both women give Arthur their narratives. The reader, in this case Arthur Clennam and ourselves, becomes the authority who requires and judges the confession. Despite Miss Wade's disclaimer that she ‘set[s] no value on [her narrative]’, she not only feels ‘inclined to tell’ her narrative to Arthur but, crucially, she asks permission to give it to Arthur, ‘Shall I give you something […] or shall I hold my hand?’ (LD, 660). Miss Wade feels a need to explain herself (or her hatred) to Arthur, whom she also recognises as a figure of kind; there exists a kinship of marginalisation between Arthur and Miss Wade, arising from their orphanhood. Thus, they share the same temper—Arthur's is an ‘unreasonable temper’ (LD, 546), while Miss Wade's is a ‘violent’ temper (LD, 328) full of ‘anger and ill-blood’—terms which create a possible shared intertextual genealogy between Miss Wade, Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield) and Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre).

Miss Wade's penal narrative, ‘The History of a Self-Tormentor’, reveals the effect of the internalisation of this temper and orphanhood. Miss Wade's narrative is her case history—the language of which is the discourse of discipline. From an early age Miss Wade has ‘detected’ (LD, 663) things about herself and the people around her—in fact, she first subjected herself to the same microscopic examination to which she later subjects Tattycoram. Miss Wade's revelation of the care with which she has ‘studied’ (LD, 659) herself and people about her implies the compilation of her case history. This observation then is a method of gaining both knowledge and power over an individual by learning their inner nature (perhaps a perverse extension of De Cerjat's Knowledge is Power that Dickens read in 1854). Miss Wade's self-scrutiny finds an immediate cause for her sense of marginalisation: the patronage she detects is a direct result of her orphanhood. ‘There was no other orphan among us; and I perceived […] that they conciliated me in an insolent pity, and in a sense of superiority’ (LD, 663). Miss Wade repeatedly ‘tries’ (LD, 663) her hypothesis and interprets the results as supporting her conclusion. The additional discovery that she does not, in fact, have any living relations—that she is a true orphan—is knowledge that reinforces both her feeling of alienation and her determination to alienate herself: ‘I carried the light of that information both into my past and into my future’ (LD, 665).

Miss Wade is actively alienated by her orphan identity as outsider and as ‘other’: ‘I saw, in the children's shrinking away, a vague impression that I was not like other people’ (LD, 667). Later Mr Meagles reinforces this otherness: ‘you were a mystery to all of us, and had nothing in common with any of us […] I don't know what, but you don't hide, can't hide, what a dark spirit you have’ (LD, 329-30). But Miss Wade also actively emphasises this otherness by reinforcing her alienation. Our initial introduction to Miss Wade establishes her as ‘a handsome young Englishwoman, travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest—nobody, herself excepted perhaps, could have decided which’ (LD, 22). Miss Wade does ‘decide which’ in asserting her ‘independence’ by refusing all endeavours that she feels are patronising in nature: ‘These disappointments of her patronage were a sharp retort, and made me feel independent’ (LD, 665). Miss Wade's entire narrative is a continuous assertion of her independence through the rejection of perceived patronage which always ultimately results in her departure and consequently her alienation.

Miss Wade's account of her experience as ‘correcting [… her] belief in many respects’ (LD, 23) parallels a Foucauldian process of internal reformation. In a novel dominated by the metaphor of a prison, it is not coincidental that Dickens takes the opportunity to depict Miss Wade in the shadow—which is her internal prison. ‘The solitary young lady […] silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room, where she sat […] seeming to watch the reflection of the water, as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the lattice’ (LD, 23). By showing that Miss Wade is a self-imprisoned figure Dickens reveals the extent to which Miss Wade has internalised her sense of oppression—her orphanhood has become her prison. So Miss Wade's declaration that ‘If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground’ (LD, 23) actually signifies to the reader what she is doing to herself. Miss Wade is ‘shut up’—in a form of self-imprisonment and self-torment—and all her destructive efforts are ultimately directed towards herself, in an effort to ‘burn’ herself down. In this, Miss Wade can be read as an extreme form of Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield who has ground herself on the grindstone. Likewise Miss Wade is ‘devouring her own heart’ (LD, 656) in a way similar to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre who devours her own heart and mind and then ultimately burns down her prison (Thornfield).

This self-destructive endeavour has special relevance for Miss Wade's treatment of Tattycoram, in whom Miss Wade discovers ‘a singular likeness’ (LD, 671). Mr Meagles, for once, displays true perception in his warning, ‘I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself’ (LD, 330). Miss Wade sees herself as Tattycoram's liberator but in reality she is another of Tattycoram's gaolers. In Tattycoram, Miss Wade simultaneously sees both herself and a figure to be reformed and dominated. The reader is left in no doubt about the power relationship when Miss Wade likens Tattycoram to ‘a spaniel’ (LD, 661). The relationship between Miss Wade and Tattycoram, then, is one in which Miss Wade seeks to reproduce the external and internal oppression and alienation that she has experienced. In other words, having internalised the oppression, Miss Wade now seeks actively to reproduce it through the domination of another orphan figure.

In this novel structured on the notion of the Panopticon—with its emphasis on surveillance, confession and reform—Miss Wade uses these same techniques of domination to gain power over Tattycoram. By observing Tattycoram, or in other words by keeping Tattycoram under surveillance, Miss Wade gains the knowledge of Tattycoram's true nature. Indeed, the scene in the chapter entitled ‘Fellow Travellers’ makes Miss Wade's visual and aural surveillance of Tattycoram explicit: ‘She [Miss Wade] heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid with the curious name. She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen passionate girl!’ (LD, 25). Tattycoram's surroundings—first in quarantine and later abandoned in her hotel room—can be read as forms of solitary confinement. The knowledge of Tattycoram's case history, which Miss Wade inherently knows as her own by simultaneously observing and living it, allows Miss Wade to gain influence over her which she subsequently uses to ‘liberate’ Tattycoram: but in reality this liberation takes the form of a more intense isolation through which she can exercise her domination.

Miss Wade's first action is to unname Tattycoram by reverting back to her foundling name Harriet. She views this unnaming process as a method of nullifying the Meagleses' power. But, significantly, Miss Wade chooses to revert to the name that re-emphasises Tattycoram's foundling identity even more so than the ‘coram’ in Tattycoram. In the interview with Miss Wade after Tattycoram's departure from the Meagleses, the reader can see that Miss Wade's gestures towards Tattycoram are those of domination: leading Tattycoram by the hand; holding Tattycoram's neck ‘protectingly’ (LD, 329); and putting her arm about Tattycoram's waist ‘as if she [Miss Wade] took possession of her [Tattycoram] for evermore’ (LD, 330).

Similarly, Miss Wade's language is the discourse of domination which serves to reinforce Tattycoram's marginalisation: she continually reinforces Tattycoram's otherness by reminding her not to forget her ‘birth’ (LD, 328). She emphasises that Mr Meagles's renaming Tattycoram was a method of isolation to ‘set [Tattycoram] apart’ (LD, 328), for the change in name from Harriet, with its fairly genteel class associations to Tattycoram also implies a social decline. In describing Tattycoram's status with the Meagleses as a ‘foil’, a ‘slave’ and a ‘toy’ (LD, 328), Miss Wade endeavours to convince Tattycoram of her new-found freedom. In short, Miss Wade is trying to reform Tattycoram by instilling in Tattycoram a truth of Miss Wade's construction—a truth which is a tool in the power relations of Miss Wade's domination.

The reader is able to witness the success of Miss Wade's oppressive endeavours when she offers Tattycoram the choice between her truth or the Meagleses'. Tattycoram's rejection of the Meagleses and her choice—‘Miss Wade, take me away please’ (LD, 329)—is an embrace of Miss Wade's truth. So Miss Wade's identification with Tattycoram, (‘The foundation of my influence here, […] is founded in a common cause […] She has no name, I have no name. Her wrong is my wrong’ (LD, 330)), reveals the degree to which her treatment of Tattycoram is on one level an external manifestation of her own self-tormenting. However, on another level, Miss Wade's motivating desire is really to project her wrong onto Tattycoram's wrong, and thus to draw Tattycoram into her own oppressive shadowy margin. At that point Miss Wade will finally possess the superiority she so desires, and by achieving this, will have reproduced the same dominant power relations.

This pattern of power relations involving a self-tormenting female evidently fascinated Dickens. A more strongly foregrounded example is Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Both Miss Wade and Miss Havisham suffer inordinately by their sense of rejection from men and both women seek to construct an orphan prodigy as an agent of revenge. In a very significant conflation of the orphan and criminal narratives, Miss Havisham chooses the ‘orphan’ Estella who is the offspring of two criminals—a criminalised father and a murderous mother—to be her avenger and subjects her to an intensive disciplinary regime. While in what could be read as solitary confinement in Satis House, Estella's observation of Miss Havisham's warped persona is ultimately internalised and reproduced. In one of her rare narrative fragments, Estella succinctly describes her childhood and its effects:

You had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not, that is soft and soothing—I had. You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up in the night—I did

(GE, Ch. 33).

Estella becomes the agent of Miss Havisham's revenge in her role as male-tormentor. In fact, Estella repeatedly acknowledges that her identity is a total construct of Miss Havisham's disciplinary endeavour, ‘I must be taken as I have been made’. Even when Miss Havisham, aghast like Frankenstein at what she has created, begs for an emotional response from Estella, Estella can only reproduce the discourse she has internalised. ‘All that you have given me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I have nothing. And if you ask me to give you what you never gave me my gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities’ (GE, Ch. 38).

If what Arthur and Miss Wade have in common, besides their marginalisation, is their temper (even if Arthur's is now deeply repressed), then Tattycoram is defined, not only by her names but by her temper. Tattycoram's possession of a temper full of ‘passion and protest’ (LD, 197), ‘chafing and fire’ (LD, 321) empowers her to such an extent that Mr Meagles declares ‘The bolts and bars of the old Bastille couldn't keep her’ (LD, 320). Meagles's reference to the Bastille (and the old social order that it represents) in a novel exploring the effect of imprisonment on the individual is significant in its illumination of the situation in the Meagles family. In Little Dorrit, then, the temper shared by the three marginalised orphans becomes a metaphor for individual will. Tattycoram's declarations throughout the novel of ‘I will’ (LD, 26) and ‘I won't’ (LD, 329, 330, 661) emphasise this individual will.

Simultaneously, Tattycoram's unknown origins and her temper also serve to identify her as a potential target for reformation—one who needs to be controlled. The Meagleses are willing to overlook her temper as a flaw resulting from the lack of a family who would have provided the disciplinary force:

If we should find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account. We shall know what an immense deduction must be made from all the influences and experiences that have formed us—no parents, no child-brother or sister, no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper, or Fairy Godmother

(LD, 18).

Through knowledge of Tattycoram's case history the Meagleses feel they know the ‘truth’ about Tattycoram (even though they do not even know her name). This truth enables them to endeavour to reform Tattycoram—a process which is actually a set of power relations in which the Meagleses are the dominant power. These relations are manifested on a social level by Tattycoram's position in the household as Pet's maid: Mr Meagles's introduction of Tattycoram into the novel, as a servile appendage to Pet, belongs to the discourse of domination: ‘Tattycoram, stick close to your young mistress’ (LD, 17). This mode of introduction is further developed when Tattycoram is figured as an appendage to the Meagles family, rather like Miss Wade in her ‘family’: ‘There was even the later addition of a conservatory sheltering itself against it [the main family house], uncertain of hue in its deep-stained glass, and in its more transparent portions flashing to the sun's rays, now like fire and now like harmless water drops; which might have stood for Tattycoram’ (LD, 191).

Mr Meagles's formulaic ‘Five-and-twenty, Tattycoram, five-and-twenty’ (LD, 321) is a microcosm of his larger efforts to reform her temper through indoctrination. Even the process of renaming her, from a jumble of old names as if she were the spaniel that Miss Wade refers to, illustrates their domination (this naming process is not too far removed from the naming of slaves). By choosing to adopt the surname Coram, which is the surname of the man who established the Foundling Hospital, the Meagleses reinforce her orphan genealogy. After Tattycoram's outburst, the prelude to her departure, Mr Meagles admits that perhaps they have inadvertently marginalised Tattycoram, but as one who ‘looks on’ as a ‘mere outsider’, Tattycoram should have ‘borne’ it (LD, 321). Mr Meagles's response to Tattycoram's outburst is that of domination: he ‘gave her [his …] hand and took her to her room, and locked the house doors’ (LD, 323). He gives her another chance to reform in the isolation (the solitary confinement) of her room. Through these images, it becomes apparent that the Meagleses act both as Tattycoram's gaolers and as agents of reform who are furthering the endeavours first initiated by the Foundling Hospital.

When Tattycoram explodes, asserts her will, and demands that her narrative be told, the reader thinks that perhaps the Meagleses have been unsuccessful in their efforts to subdue Tattycoram. Even five-and-twenty fails to suppress Tattycoram:

Such a picture of passion as you never saw, she stopped short, looked me full in the face, and counted (as I made out) to eight. But she couldn't control herself to go any further. There she broke down, poor thing, and gave the other seventeen to the four winds. Then it all burst out

(LD, 322).

Tattycoram's narrative, the narrative that she will tell, constructs her identity as ‘miserable’, ‘unloved’, ‘exulted over’, ‘shamed’. She feels dehumanised (correctly so) in being named and treated like a dog. The Meagleses do treat her as if she were somehow subhuman: when first at the Foundling Hospital, Mrs Meagles refers to the orphan children with the pronoun ‘it’, and when describing Tattycoram's narrative Mr Meagles refers to its narrator as a ‘vehement panting creature’ (LD, 323). This dehumanising of the orphan figures by considering them virtually as members of a subspecies is the common fate of not only the orphan figure, but also the criminal.

Although Tattycoram's outburst gives vent to her temper and her subsequent flight appears as an act of self-liberation, the Meagleses' reforming efforts have been more successful than they realise. Tattycoram's first action in the novel—a gesture of submission (the ‘half curtsey’) in response to Mr Meagles's command to ‘stick close to your mistress’ (LD, 17)—foreshadows her final display of submission. In addition to Miss Wade, the reader is able to observe Tattycoram's initial display of temper in her first narrative fragment. But this same display is unsettling in that it reveals Tattycoram's ‘tearing’ hand busy in an effort of self-mutilation which is strongly self-punitive, ‘[plucking] her lips’ and ‘pinching her neck, [which was] freshly disfigured with great scarlet blots’ (LD, 26). Tattycoram's narrative fragments reveal her acute awareness that she does not ‘signify to any one’ (LD, 26); the knowledge of being unloved tortures her—a torture which she then reproduces in her self-punitive gestures. This fragment culminates in Tattycoram's assertion of her individual will: ‘I don't care for that. I'll run away. I'll do some mischief. I won't bear it; I can't bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!’ (LD, 26). But her actions parallel the progressive diffusion of her will in the movement of her language from the assertion of her will to the nullification of this will through death. Her assertion of her will (in the form of her temper) is gradually repressed by her punitive and self-reforming gestures. Her narrative dwindles to ‘broken murmurs’ and her physical gestures move from defiance, to punishment to submission: ‘She sank […] upon her knees […] upon the ground beside the bed, drawing the coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head […] and half […] to embrace it, rather than have nothing to take to her repentant breast’ (LD, 27). This pattern of assertion of will followed by gradual submission will be repeated by Tattycoram throughout the novel. Indeed, this scene is a miniature of the larger process of domination which exists in the penal narrative—namely, disciplinary endeavours are first internalised and then actively reproduced. In this scene, Tattycoram gradually applies disciplinary techniques for the repression of her temper which she has learned from the Meagleses. Her final, submissive, ‘broken’ posture, wanting only to ‘pray’ (LD, 27), is the successful end product of this disciplinary endeavour. The use of the word ‘broken’ recalls Arthur's self-portrait as the product of a similar familial and religious disciplinary endeavour.

When Tattycoram puts this same ‘unsparing hand’ (LD, 26) (a hand also seen by Miss Wade as ‘repressing’ in Miss Wade's and demands her to ‘take me away’ (LD, 328) the reader witnesses not only Tattycoram's submission to a woman of whom she is afraid (and to a woman who, she knows, continually keeps her under surveillance), but also the reproduction of the same structure of dominance from which she fled. Miss Wade, then, as mentioned above, acts as a vehicle for the continuance of Tattycoram's oppression and reformation. Tattycoram's time with Miss Wade is akin to solitary confinement—a time when Tattycoram can meditate simultaneously upon herself and on the figure of Miss Wade, her other self. As a result of her vulnerability during this confinement Tattycoram is receptive to Miss Wade's suggestions. Miss Wade then becomes her gaoler leading her in and out by the hand. Ironically, it is Miss Wade who, albeit unknowing, furthers the disciplinary process: ‘You can have your droll name again, playfully pointing you out and setting you apart, as it is right you should be pointed out and set apart (Your birth, you know; you must not forget your birth)’ (LD, 328). Miss Wade reinforces Tattycoram's marginalisation first by actively removing her from others and then constantly reinforcing Tattycoram's dependent position as an orphan. It is Miss Wade who reveals to Tattycoram that what she must do to return to the Meagleses is to confess her guilt, ‘[You must demonstrate] how humble and penitent you are […] by going back to them to be forgiven’ (LD, 328). Both of these endeavours initially serve to bind Tattycoram more tightly to Miss Wade, thus giving Miss Wade someone to dominate. As Tattycoram has not yet fully internalised this disciplinary process and accepted her place, she remains with Miss Wade for further instruction.

Tattycoram, then, undergoes a disciplinary process—first initiated at the Foundling Hospital, continued at the Meagleses, and finally completed by Miss Wade. In Tattycoram's final outburst before her submission—her final attempt to assert her own will—she makes explicit the fact that what Miss Wade offers is really the same domination offered by the Meagleses:

‘Because I have nobody but you to look to, you think you are to make me do, or not do, everything you please, and are to put any affront upon me. You are as bad as they were, every bit. But I will not be quite tamed, and made submissive’

(LD, 661).

However, crucially, in the same breath Tattycoram also admits that she ‘went to look at the house, because I had often thought that I should like to see it once more. I will ask again how they are, because I once liked them, and at times thought they were kind to me’ (LD, 662). Tattycoram, then, is not only, in Meagles's terms, ‘the prisoner [who] begins to relent towards [… her] prison after [… she] is let out’ (LD, 22), but she is beginning to reproduce the techniques of domination, by going back to observe the Meagleses. It is sadly ironic that the knowledge which Tattycoram has gained is in fact that of her dependence and inferior position: ‘[Miss Wade] has made me her dependant. And I know I am so; and I know she is overjoyed when she can bring it to my mind’ (LD, 662). Tattycoram's final gestures in this chapter are those of gradual submission. ‘Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an abject dependant and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made as if she were too low to notice or be noticed’ (LD, 662).

So Tattycoram's final actions, those of freeing herself from Miss Wade, are no more than a return, and indeed an embrace of her confinement with the Meagleses. Tattycoram's return to the Meagleses is accompanied by gestures of complete submission as she falls to her knees before Mr and Mrs Meagles and beats her hands on the ground. There is no further need to direct these hands towards herself because she has been disciplined. Her confession of her guilt and announcement of her repentance illustrates how completely the disciplinary process has been internalised as she now reproduces the dominant discourse; she has come to view her temper as ‘a madness’ (LD, 811). Begging for her old name back, Tattycoram's language reveals the extent of her reformation:

I am bad enough, but not so bad as I was indeed. I have had Miss Wade before me all this time, as if it was my own self grown ripe—turning everything the wrong way, and twisting all good into evil. I have had her before me all this time, finding no pleasure in anything but keeping me as miserable, suspicious, and tormenting as herself […] I only mean to say, that, after what I have gone through, I hope I shall never be quite so bad again, and that I shall get better by very slow degrees

(LD, 811).

Tattycoram not only begs for her old name back, but is now actively repressing herself by furthering Meagles's indoctrination: ‘I won't stop at five-and-twenty, sir, I'll count five-and-twenty hundred, five-and-twenty thousand!’ (LD, 811).

The only glimmer that Dickens gives the reader that this scene is not a happy reunion is his description of Tattycoram's tears at Meagles's feet, ‘half in exultation and half in despair’ (LD, 810). Indeed, there should be despair, as Dickens is somehow implicated in all this by not giving Tattycoram any option—where else could she go? Where is Tattycoram's long lost legacy? In summary, I will recall the closing scene, partially quoted earlier, in which Meagles instructs Tattycoram on her place. Tattycoram is identified as a ‘penitent’ and as a willing convert to the disciplinary ethos, eager to reform her hitherto undisciplined heart:

‘[Little Dorrit's] young life has been one of active resignation, goodness and noble service. Shall I tell you what I consider those eyes of hers that were here just now, to always have looked at, to get that expression?’

‘Yes, if you please, sir.’

‘Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early and do it well.’

(LD, 812-313).

Notes

1. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-7, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 49-50.

2. See also his ‘Introduction’, Little Dorrit, (1953; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), v-xvi.

3. Jeremy Tambling in his ‘Prison-bound: Dickens and Foucault’, Essays in Criticism (1986): 11-31, does theorise Dickens's use of the prison but primarily in the context of Great Expectations.

4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1991).

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 205.

6. cf., Hugh Cunningham, Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 104-111.

7. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 660. (All further references to this text will be from this edition and will be indicated in parentheses denoted by LD and the page number.)