[In the following essay, Hollington claims that while Little Dorrit seems to be unconcerned with time, temporal matters are of central importance in the novel.]

The purpose of this essay is to suggest the importance of temporal process in Little Dorrit, both as a theme and as an aspect of Dickens's narrative technique. The topic is neither new nor recondite, but it is, I believe, vitally important, especially so because Little Dorrit easily gives rise to the impression that it is not very much concerned with time at all. When we read John Wain's round assertion that “it is his most static novel; its impact is even less dependent on plot than is customary throughout Dickens's work; its development is by means of outward radiation, rather than linear progression,” we recognize the overt “spatial” emphases of the New Critics—the tendency to look for an “expanded metaphor” as the principal of organization. Certainly Little Dorrit, with its ubiquitous prison, yields considerable rewards to such an approach. But if some aspects of the novel can be described as static, the novel as a whole is certainly also pessimistic about stasis; it has none of the “spatial rapture” that metaphoric critics normally uncover in the works, recent and ancient, that they admire. Its authorial perspective, I want to argue, upholds the importance of change and growth, even if these are felt to be almost entirely absent in the society that the novel describes and analyzes.

To ask ourselves at the outset whether the stasis belongs to this society or to Dickens's imagination, we enter the critical debate about the nature of Dickens's creative power in Little Dorrit. If we follow the trend that started with Forster but received its most important recent charge from Trilling, and perceive in the novel an augmented power of abstraction, a diminished vitality of imaginative detail, we are more likely to be satisfied by “spatial” accounts of the novel. We can, on the other hand, respond to the arguments put forward in the chapter on Little Dorrit in Dickens the Novelist by F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, indebted though the chapter is, more substantially than it acknowledges, to the insights gained by that tradition. It invites us to see, within the novel itself, the abundant evidence of an imagination concerned with the particularities of reality, by its presence defining what the society portrayed inhibits and destroys. Thus we are also likely to seek positive signs of an alternative attitude toward time.

It seems important, then, to note straight away that the “redeemed” characters of Little Dorrit, those in whom imaginative vitality is not suppressed or is only superficially distorted, differ from other characters in their perception of time. There are two kinds of difference—one between precision and imprecision about time, the other between a sense of history and an absence of that sense. The first contrast is established very distinctly between John Baptist Cavalletto and Rigaud in the very first chapter, when Rigaud asks to be told what time it is: “‘Say what the hour is,’ grumbled the first man. ‘The mid-day bell will ring—in forty minutes.’ When he made the little pause, he looked round the prison-room, as if for certain information. ‘You are a clock. How is it you always know?’ ‘How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am’” (I, i, 4). Cavalletto has an instinctive sense of time that he can't explain. He displays a keen and resourceful attentiveness to the scanty means of telling the time at his disposal, patiently checking the state of the faint prison light as a means of verification. What is apparent is a sensitive attunement to natural process; the contrast with Rigaud is brought out when Rigaud curses the hostile autumnal wind and darkness on his road to Chalons (I, xi, 124), betraying an egoistic sense of being slighted by natural elements. At another level the contrast is between the relations of perceiving subject and surrounding reality; Rigaud, for whom anything outside himself is mere matter, can regard Cavalletto only as an object, and calls him a clock.

Cavalletto is not a clock; his capacity to tell the time accurately signifies his hold upon reality. We are made aware of it on another occasion much later in the novel, when he confers with Arthur Clennam about the chronology of Rigaud's disappearance into the mysteries of London: “In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it suggested hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later date than the night of his visit at his mother's; but Cavalletto was too exact about time and place, to leave any opening for doubt that it has preceded that occasion” (II, xxii, 677-78; my italics). Mysteries and doubts are clarified by Cavalletto's accuracy; his capacity to remember events in clear and ordered sequence establishes the reality of things.

This precision about time is reminiscent of Doyce's professional painstaking in another sphere, and it is through him that we may introduce the second aspect of the creative response to temporal process in Little Dorrit: a historical imagination, a capacity to imagine and envisage other times, past and future, besides one's own. Doyce understands that his frustrations at the Circumlocution Office belong in historical perspective; others have suffered before, and more will suffer after him: “You see, my experience of these things does not begin with myself” (I, i, 121). Doyce is able to make projections into the future, basing them on the probabilities of individual and historical outcomes. He expresses, in contrast to Clennam's hesitations, his own gloomy certainties about the marriage of Pet Meagles and Henry Gowan:

“I see him bringing present anxiety, and, I fear, future sorrow, into my old friend's house. I see him wearing deeper lines into my old friend's face, the nearer he draws to, and the oftener he looks at, the face of his daughter. In short, I see him with a net about the pretty and affectionate creature whom he will never make happy.”

“We don't know,” said Clennam, almost in the tone of a man in pain, “that he will not make her happy.”

“We don't know,” returned his partner, “that the earth will last another hundred years, but we think it highly probable.”

[I, xxvi, 307-8]

As his last remark implies, time for Doyce is an objectively real and shared phenomenon; his projections are not inspired divinations but appeals to a logic of sequential probability. When we first meet him outside the Circumlocution Office, he is presented “looking into the distance before him, as if his grey eye were measuring it” (I, xi, 121).

Likewise Little Dorrit herself, during her visit to Italy, is imaginatively stirred by a realization that the places she visits have had an existence previous to her own: “One of my frequent thoughts is this:—Old as these cities are, their age itself is hardly so curious, to my reflections, as that they should have been in their places all through those days when I did not even know of the existence of more than two or three of them, and when I scarcely knew of anything outside our walls” (II, xi, 553). Little Dorrit is here countering the idealist perceptual notions of Rigaud and many other characters by recognizing the separate existence of other phenomena, independent in time and space of herself as a necessary perceiving object. She feels life going on before and after and outside herself.

The contrasting state, the absence of any sense of history and change, is perhaps most emphatically stated in Mrs. Clennam. In one passage we find Dickens analyzing her “subjective time”—from a perspective entirely different from that of Proust or Mann:

The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has. Pictures of demolished streets and altered houses, as they formerly were when the occupant of the chair was familiar with them; images of people as they too used to be, with little or no allowance made for the lapse of time since they were seen; of these, there must have been many in the long routine of gloomy days. To stop the clock of busy existence, at the hour when we personally were sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless, when we were brought to a standstill; to be unable to measure the changes beyond our view, by any larger standard than the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence; is the infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.

[I, xxix, 339]

The perspective is first sensed in the hint of irony in the withheld omniscience; Dickens as narrator has to “suppose” even the limited amount of contact with past reality that is outlined here. But the imagery of size is the most telling and characteristic feature; the vast extent of time and space outside here and now is reduced to the compass of the self and its preoccupations. Habitually, self-centeredness in Little Dorrit is manifested in a denial of history, a contraction of its scope to make it an instrument of selfish desire. So the Bohemians of Hampton Court await a private apocalypse for the irritating Sunday visitors, expecting “the earth to open and swallow the public up … which desirable event had not yet occurred, in consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the arrangements of the Universe” (I, xxvi, 312).

Ultimately, the alternative to this private fantasy is provided by the attempt, in the linear structure of Little Dorrit, to make the novel a real “history.” For the moment, however, we must substantiate the varieties of subjective experience of time; the extreme dissociation from reality of Mr. F's aunt, for instance, is accompanied by an equally “original” sense of time. When Clennam follows Miss Wade to the Casby house, appearing there for the first time in three months, she exclaims, “Drat him if he an't come back again!” Dickens, pointing the theme even at this grotesque—but illuminating—distance from Mrs. Clennam, offers the supposition that she is “measuring time by the acuteness of her own sensations and not by the clock” (II, ix, 534). More poignantly, perhaps, there is William Dorrit's bitter complaint to Clennam as he waits impatiently to be released from prison, “‘A few hours, sir!’ he returned in a sudden passion. ‘You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?’” (I, xxxiii, 421). The affront is that Clennam appears incapable of projecting himself into Dorrit's personal time; clock time, as something objective and shared, is vigorously and ominously repudiated.

Increasingly in the novel we feel that “subjective time” is the equivalent of the experience of time in dreams, and perhaps the fundamental contrast is that between living in a dream and living in reality. No doubt Dickens's own sense of time in dreams provided the basis of this theme. Not many years before writing Little Dorrit, he had noted in a letter to his doctor how his dreams followed their own peculiar temporal laws: “My own dreams are usually of twenty years ago. I often blend my present condition with them, but very confusedly. …” Likewise, the dreamers of Little Dorrit both habitually revert to the past and mingle different phases of development in their reveries. Clennam, “dozing and dreaming” in his Marshalsea imprisonment, just before he is awakened by Little Dorrit's nosegay of flowers, is “without the power of reckoning time, so that a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute” (II, xxix, 755). The condition is elaborated upon by Mrs. Tickit, in the marvelous eccentric monologue explaining how Tattycoram appeared at the Meagles house when she was “what a person would strictly call watching with my eyes closed”: “As I was saying, I was thinking of one thing, and thinking of another, and thinking very much of the family. Not of the family in the present times only, but in the past times too. For when a person does begin thinking of one thing and thinking of another, in that manner as it's getting dark, what I say is, that all times seem to be present, and a person must get out of that state and consider before they can say which is which” (II, ix, 529; my italics). Mrs. Tickit's dream associations are not about herself but about “the family”; her evident unselfish devotion to them cancels any temptation to consider this disquisition as merely ludicrous. She is talking, significantly, to Arthur Clennam, the central dreamer of Little Dorrit, afflicted by a traumatized fixation on the past and impeded in his dream from action and progression: “It was like the oppression of a dream, to believe that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father's memory, and to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the possibility of coming to her aid” (II, xxvii, 720). Thus Mrs. Tickit, a minor character in the novel, points to a major theme—the development of Clennam. Her wisdom is trustworthy; in order to wake up, Clennam has eventually to “get out of that state and consider.” He does so in the Marshalsea at the end of the novel. Experiencing a “marked stop from the whirling wheel of life,” he at last finds a vantage point from which he can separate present and past: “he could think of some passages in his life, almost as if he were removed from them into another state of existence” (II, xxvii, 720).

Another dreamer in the novel, Affery, illuminates a very similar progress. In her dream state she is a “Heap of confusion,” uncertain of her own identity, and very vague about time; “she looked at the candle she had left burning, and, measuring the time like King Alfred the Great, was confirmed by its wasted state in her belief that she had been asleep for some considerable period” (I, iv, 41). Once she eventually wakes up in the novel, she is capable of progressive action and development: “I have broken out now, and I can't go back. I am determined to do it” (II, xxx, 766).

Thus dreaming in the novel implies inertia, a blurred sense of time, an inability to find any sequence in events; Dickens's critical analysis of the society of Little Dorrit establishes this as the state induced by the practitioners of fraud and injustice. The labyrinthine images in the novel, noted by J. Hillis Miller, have as their temporal equivalent the absence of intelligible temporal relationships. Plornish, turning “the tangled skein of his estate about and about, like a blind man who was trying to find some beginning or end to it” (I, xii, 143), reflects in a direct way the confusions fostered by Casby's thumb-twirling, “so typical to Clennam of the way in which he would make the subject revolve if it were pursued, never showing any new part of it nor allowing it to make the slightest advance” (II, ix, 539). The circular imagery is pervasive; for the natural linearity of events in time, the confidence tricksters of the novel have substituted a confusing cyclical perpetuum mobile.

Timelessness, then, is analyzed and placed in the novel; again a clear alternative attitude is discernible. History for Dickens followed a linear pattern, its natural tendency being toward progression; he never tired of repeating that the “good old days” were really the “bad old days.” The approved image of history is conveyed, revealingly, in a comparison where its rightful onward flow is related to the cheer from the Bleeding-Heart Yarders that accompanies Doyce's departure to the country that “knows how to do it”: “In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's time downwards” (II, xxii, 675). There is undoubtedly something disagreeable in the naive “heartiness” of this image, and yet the stress on a collective historical momentum does effectively function as a contrast to “subjective time.”

The private and fictional versions of history that hold sway in Little Dorrit perpetuate superseded stages of its progression, mingle them in confusing juxtaposition with their advanced sharp practices, and impede forward movement. Thus it is that “the ugly South Sea Gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again” in the enlightened taboos of the Victorian Sunday (I, iii, 28). The expatriate society in Rome may still be described as “Island Savages” (II, xv, 609), as at the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. Indeed, the fiercely sarcastic treatment of Mrs. Merdle's lament that she and her fellow members of society cannot, alas, behave as primitive savages stresses that they in fact do. Footmen lounge around like “an extinct race of monstrous birds” (I, xxvii, 327), and the “Spartan boy with the fox biting him” still presides as a model, in this society, for the repressive upbringing of children (I, xxiv, 284). In imitation, the feudal society within the Marshalsea is out of phase with the times, its father patronizing it “like a baron of the olden time” (I, xxvi, 425) and dispensing platitudes on Christian fortitude “like Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church” (I, xxvvi, 428). The pitiable passivity of the Plornishes is expressed in their adherence to a vision of the past, of a renewed innocence, “the Golden Age revived” (II, xiii, 574).

Such anomalous hangovers are bolstered by entrenched rationalizations. Historical reality is blurred over with mystifying abstractions; evading any recognition of cause and effect, and blocking progress, the Circumlocutory powers erect false historical inevitabilities. By inventing abstract “nobodies” who are hypocritically presented as determinisms—Society, Precedent, Fate—responsibilities are evaded and initiative effort stifled. “If we could only come to a Millennium, or something of that sort,” sighs Mrs. Merdle (I, xx, 242); but Society prevents it, and she, like Mrs. Gowan, resigns herself “to inevitable fate” (I, xxxiii, 388). “Treasury” is similarly wistful in contemplating future possibilities—more mundane though their object is (the entry of Merdle into Parliament)—and trusting to “accident”: “If we should ever be happily enabled, by accidentally possessing the control over circumstances, to propose to one so eminent to—to come amongst us …” (I, xxi, 250). Against these supernatural agencies determining the course of history, “mere actions are nothing”—the phrase and the theology are Mrs. Clennam's (I, xxx, 357), but rationalization of stasis is the habit of the whole society.

Throughout Little Dorrit the conception of historical movement forms an impressive unity with the conception of individual growth, and this applies equally to their perversion. Fictions about historical determinism have their counterparts in fictions about the necessity of one's nature; in Fanny Dorrit, for instance, they are to be found side by side. Little Dorrit urges her to consider love as a relinquishing of self; “if you loved anyone, you would no longer be yourself, but you would quite lose and forget yourself in him.” But for Fanny these are “degenerate impossibilities” (II, xiv, 591)—she echoes the lament of the Hampton Court Bohemians over the “degeneracy of the times” (I, xxvi, 313)—that the conditions of history will not permit. To lose herself would be to fly in the face of her “fated” personality: “Other girls, differently reared and differently circumstanced altogether, might wonder at what I say or may do. Let them. They are driven by their lives and characters; I am driven by mine.” These justifications are in some sense compensatory; they register the habitual Dorrit insecurity about the Marshalsea disgrace, which also governs her father's pathetic boasts about his adaptation to “Necessity”: “Consider my case, Frederick. I am a kind of example. Necessity and time have taught me what to do” (I, xix, 223). And so they do engage our sympathy. But a cruder instance, the running commentary of Rigaud on the “fatalities” of his character, makes the point obvious; these fictions insulate their perpetrators from any form of self-scrutiny that might lead to a change in their behavior. Personal development, like historical development, is negated; these characters remain statically imprisoned within themselves.

At this point it is necessary to shift focus somewhat and develop some other aspects of the contrast between characters bound within themselves and characters receptive to experience outside themselves. As I noted earlier in discussing Mrs. Clennam's imprisonment, the imagery of size is characteristic. For the ego-bound characters of Little Dorrit, other experience is felt to be an unfortunate encumbrance, to be crushed or reduced in size. The most extraordinary instance of this is Fanny's outburst at Sparkler, in their London house: “You look so aggravatingly large by this light. Do sit down. … Oh, you do look so big!” (II, xxiv, 694). But it is apparent not only in the way of treating other people but in a careless insensitivity toward things, especially little things. Gowan kicks stones in a way “that Clennam thought had an air of cruelty in it. Most of us have more or less frequently derived a similar impression, from a man's way of doing some very little thing; plucking a flower, clearing away an obstacle, or even destroying an insentient object” (I, xvii, 201). Likewise Rigaud, staying at the coffee-house near Mrs. Clennam, displays his nature in the way he violates the furniture: “His utter disregard of people, as shown in his way of tossing the little womanly toys of furniture about, flinging favourite cushions under his boots for a softer rest, and crushing delicate coverings with his big body and his great black head, had the same brute selfishness at bottom” (I, xxx, 352).

The importance of size in this novel is announced by the stress of its title, Little Dorrit. All its redeemed characters are small in stature: Cavalletto is a “sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man” (I, i, 4); Doyce is short, “not much to look at, either in point of size or in point of view” (I, x, 118); Pancks is a “short dark man” with “a scrubby little black chin” (I, xiii, 148). Their size has metaphoric significance; they are in consequence more responsive to the vastness of everything outside themselves. By contrast, many of the fraudulent impostors and hypocrites in the novel are very large: Merdle has “large unfeeling handsome eyes” and a “broad unfeeling handsome bosom” (I, xx, 238); Casby has “a shining bald head which looked so large because it shone so much” (I, xiii, 145) and moves around like a “heavy selfish drifting booby” with a history of “unwieldy jostlings against other men” (I, xiii, 149). The imagery of clumsiness in Casby suggests a trampling disregard of anything not related to his selfish concerns.

Likewise, moral perceptiveness in Little Dorrit is a matter of a capacity to discriminate carefully between minutely different signals. The coarse mind, like Gowan's, sees humanity only as an indiscriminate lump and reduces distinctive features to the same scale. Rigaud serves him equally well as an artist's model for a large number of entirely different human types. Rigaud himself boasts of making “few weak distinctions” (I, xi, 132); this is so, for instance, when he fails to perceive any difference between the way the jailor's daughter reacts to him and to Cavalletto (I, i, 5). Finer and more practiced observers of behavior, like Pet Meagles and Little Dorrit herself, notice something slightly special in Rigaud's manner of behaving toward them: “The difference was too minute in its expression to be perceived by others, but they knew it to be there. A mere trick of his evil eyes, a mere turn of his smooth white hand, a mere hair's-breadth of addition to the fall of his nose and the rise of his mouth in the most frequent movement of his face, conveyed to them equally a swagger personal to themselves” (II, vii, 509). The narrative voice, too, is always attentive to subtle nuances of change in behavior, even in such an apparently impenetrable person as Mrs. Clennam: “As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal, and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs. Clennam's demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine gradation” (I, v, 52).

With these images in mind, I think we can now press home the importance of the precise calculation of time in Little Dorrit. To do things “inch by inch,” to take painstaking care over detail in the specification of time and change, is the corollary of finely tuned moral sensitivity, and of meticulous concern with real, other life. When Pancks announces his discovery of the inheritance that is owed to the Dorrits, he dwells upon the gradual stages of his investigations: “How he had felt his way inch by inch, and ‘Moled it out, sir’ (that was Mr. Pancks' expression), grain by grain” (I, xxxv, 410). When Tattycoram has emancipated herself from the perverse gratifications that Miss Wade can offer, she signals her release by resolving on patient effort in small stages of time: “I shall get better by very slow degrees” (II, xxxiii, 811). When Fred Dorrit makes a real (and not illusory, as in the case of his brother) transformation from his old self, the change expresses itself in “a certain patient animal enjoyment” of the world about him (II, iii, 457); he passes “hours and hours” in front of historic Venetians and venerates them “with great exactness” (II, v, 481).

Patient exactness is the key virtue in Little Dorrit, the essential condition of lasting change and real development. When Cavalletto goes searching for Rigaud in London, he follows the “moling-out” tactics of Pancks and expresses the moral attitudes that lie behind them:

“But!—After a long time when I have not been able to find that he is here in Londra, some one tells me of a soldier with white hair—hey?—not hair like this that he carries—white—who lives retired secrettementally, in a certain place. But!—” with another rest upon the word, “who sometimes in the after-dinner, walks, and smokes. It is necessary, as they say in Italy (and as they know, poor people), to have patience. I have patience. I ask where is this certain place. One believes it is here, one believes it is there. Eh well! It is not here, it is not there. I wait patientissamentally. At last I find it. Then I watch; then I hide, until he walks and smokes. He is a soldier with grey hair—But!—” a very decided rest indeed, and a very vigorous play from side to side of the backhanded forefinger—“he is also that man you see.”

[II, xxviii, 743]

Cavalletto's method of narration harmonizes with the patient watchfulness and minute attention to slender detail (Rigaud is betrayed only by “walking and smoking”) that the discovery displays. It is a careful unfolding of the stages of the process of discovery, with significant pauses at the points of change. His suffixes (“patientissamentally”) convey finer shades of meaning than a more standard English provides; his gestures add enriched nuances of suggestion.

I want to say more about patience as a theme in Little Dorrit a bit further on, but the time has come to examine Dickens's own method (which is very much like Cavalletto's) of conducting the temporal flow of his narrative. Not only is Little Dorrit about patience; it also, by means of its narrative technique, attempts to make its readers aware of the necessity of patience, and of its moral significance, by very gradual unfoldings and very frequent withholdings. Future outcomes are very often anticipated in oblique or ironic ways, but they are held back in a regard for proper sequence, and the reader is returning to a still-developing plot. Like Cavalletto's investigations, the plot will eventually clear up the “mysteries” proliferated by Circumlocution, and gives continual promise of its intention to do so. But the mysteries are of so convoluted and deep-seated a nature that no sudden revelation will suffice to show their full extent or effect.

The way in which this technique operates locally can best be suggested by exploring some of Dickens's narrative anticipations. The introduction of Merdle's mysterious complaint occasions one of them: “Had he that deep-seated recondite complaint, and did any doctor find it out? Patience. In the meantime, the shadow of the Marshalsea wall was a real darkening influence, and could be seen on the Dorrit family at any stage of the sun's course” (I, xxi, 254). Narrative expectation is aroused, but satisfaction is deliberately withheld. The appeal for patience is an urging of essential priorities; the circumlocutory plot mystification (“deep-seated recondite complaint” is a cunning euphemism) is ironic, and the word “real” consequently receives a powerful stress. The real offense, the existence of the Marshalsea, is available for inspection “at any stage of the sun's course.” The phrase makes overt reference to the novel's own trajectory and justifies its gradual patient unfoldings by linking them to natural process.

The deliberateness of Dickens's narrative art is once more apparent when he makes a second ironic reference to the still unrevealed outcome of Merdle's career: “At dinner that day, although the occasion was not foreseen and provided for, a brilliant company of such as are not made of the dust of the earth, but of some superior article for the present unknown, shed their lustrous benediction upon Mr. Dorrit's daughter's marriage” (II, xvi, 618-19). Merdle's end is by no means “unforeseen and unprovided for” by the art of the novel; the “superior article” of which Merdle is made will be revealed when the Star of Bethlehem following him stops “over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath” (II, xxv, 710)—dust to dust, with savage new overtones, despite the pretentious detour. The care of Dickens's art is in conscious contrast to the hypocritical laissez-faire kowtowing to the “unforeseen.” The gradual and “natural” revelation of the actuality beneath the pretense protests against the illusory shimmer of Merdle's revelation, “sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process” (II, xxv, 709-10).

The experience of reading the novel is therefore in part the experience of a succession of present moments, linked with others before and after, but not transcending time, and clearly of importance in themselves as distinct stages of a process. Despite what John Wain says, plot is indeed important in Little Dorrit, and another of Dickens's narrative foreshadowings—of the death of William Dorrit—provides what is perhaps the fundamental reason for this: “Only the wisdom that holds the clue to all hearts and all mysteries can surely know to what extent a man, especially a man brought down as this man had been, can impose upon himself. Enough, for the present place, that he lay down with wet eyelashes, serene, in a manner majestic, after bestowing his life of degradation as a sort of portion on the devoted child upon whom its miseries had fallen so heavily, and whose love alone had saved him to be even what he was” (I, xix, 231).

The metaphoric connections between this lying-down and his final lying-down are clear enough—the self-pitying legacy he offers here, “a life of degradation,” anticipates what he will actually bestow on her after his death, at a point in the plot where expectation is entirely different. But the temporal connection isn't; only God, the narrative voice asserts, can know when this mystery will be revealed, and the reader is returned to “the present place.” The plot of Little Dorrit, in its gradual unraveling of mysteries, imitates the way in which Divine Providence is revealed; individual outcome and historical destiny are withheld until the scheme is completed.

To amplify this point, a passage in one of Dickens's letters, dating from 1863, is helpful: “What these bishops and suchlike say about revelation, in assuming it to be finished and done with, I can't in the least understand. Nothing is discovered without God's intention and assistance, and I suppose each new knowledge of his works that is conceded to man to be distinctly a revelation by which men are to guide themselves” (Letters, III, 351; to Cerjat, 21/5/63). In Dickens's conception of the divine plot, then, “revelation” is not limited to the Book of Revelation; it is the gradual, piecemeal process of discovery, continuous and progressive, and not a sudden enlightening. The plot of Little Dorrit imitates the providential scheme, deliberately and purposefully leading the reader in a process of gradual enlightenment.

Once again there is essential contrast in the novel; this passage about revelation helps us to understand the critical eschewal of false and premature millennia in Little Dorrit. They are distinguished by a transcendent flight from the medium of time and history in which the plan of creation is to be fulfilled. The messianic Merdle, “the rich man who had in a manner already entered the Kingdom of Heaven” (II, xvi, 616), represents an obvious perverse short-circuiting of temporal process. So does Mrs. Clennam, who mounts “on wings of words to Heaven” (I, xxvii, 319), disdaining action and involvement in the temporal world. Dorrit's millennial “castles in the air” attempt a more pitiable flight; his attempt to effect a discontinuity—“sweep that accursed experience off the face of the earth” (II, v, 479)—displays a shakier Old Testament rhetoric than Mrs. Clennam's. With tragic irony he achieves separation from himself: up above, the fastnesses of imaginary satisfactions; down below, the threatening contingencies of a real past and a real world; in between, a paranoid schizophrenic.

In opposition to these chimera, Dickens's novel concerns itself with minute details of real growth and change. “To combine what was original and daring in conception with what was patient and minute in execution” (I, xvi, 188)—the phrase describes Daniel Doyce's habit of working, but it also intentionally suggests what Dickens himself was trying to achieve in Little Dorrit: to reflect, in the careful and precise notation of a specific stage history, the continuing presence of a divine scheme. The novel frequently refers to itself as a history, implying thereby a particular narrative stance and a particular relation to its readership. The narrator stands firmly in the present of the mid-1850s, recording the changes and legacies of thirty years ago: the Marshalsea “is now gone, and the world is none the worse without it” (I, vi, 57); the Adelphi Terrace is a place where “there is always, to this day, a sudden pause … to the roar of the great thoroughfare” (II, xi, 531). He shares the present with his readers and, as Leavis perceives—my indebtedness to his essay will be particularly apparent here—seeks to engage “colloborative” contemplation of that present. He appeals to shared experience of historical realities—experience of frustration at the Circumlocution Office, accounts of which “we all know by heart” (I, x, 120), experience of mournful dinners at houses like the Merdles': “Everybody knows how much like the street, the two dinner-rows of people who take their stand by the street will be” (I, xxi, 246).

Of course, “everybody” doesn't know. The assumption of a readership whose members all attend Merdle dinners is ironic, but if the carte d'entrée is limited, imaginative understanding need not be. The appeal to everybody establishes a corrective to the more common appeal in the novel to “nobody.” The version of artistic vocation that Dickens portrays in Daniel Doyce involves a special respect for intelligent self-projection: “No man of sense, who has been generally improved, and has improved himself, can be called quite uneducated as to anything. I don't particularly favour mysteries” (I, viii, 515). Doyce thus sets himself up against the sacred abstract professionals like Treasury and Bar, for whom the rest of the world is a collection of jurymen: “In my calling … the greater usually includes the less” (I, xvi, 194).

The “greater” is perhaps in the first place, then, the vast audience of whom Dickens was always aware. But it is also the complexity and variety of reality, of individual lives and their changes—hence the sarcastic dismissal of a “host of past and present abstract philosophers, natural philosophers, and subduers of Nature and Art in their myriad forms” (II, xv, 605). And, finally, it is certainly God and the vast providential scheme of history—hence the hatred of such notions of relative scale as Mrs. Clennam's “process of reversing the making of man in the image of his Creator to the making of his Creator in the image of erring man” (I, xiii, 165).

If God is greater, then everything else, novelist and novel included, is less—hence the egalitarian relation of novelist and reader. The novelist can see to the end of his novel, but he can't see to the end of the creation which it attempts to render and upon which is depends. As the reader is to the novel, as the plot unfolds, so the novelist is to God; both can only see that segment of time and space that is immediately about them, and only God can perceive the whole scheme. But not to be able to see the rest, does not mean that it doesn't exist; it is the function of the imagination to make present what is in reality absent. To fall into the temptation of Mrs. Clennam, “the whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in appearance, to the basest elements” (I, xiii, 165), is to be wanting in historical and moral imagination.

And so, to return to this theme in the novel, the redeemed characters of Little Dorrit are often to be found stationed at windows, looking out at the “overwhelming rush of reality” (II, xxxi, 787). Affery goes at the House of Clennam “to the ripped-up window, in the little room by the street door, to connect her palpitating heart, through the glass, with living things beyond and outside the haunted house” (I, xv, 180). And Little Dorrit in Rome, as earlier at Venice, sits at an irregular bay window “commanding all the picturesque life and variety of the Corso, both up and down” (II, xiv, 594). As a child she perceived “that it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up in narrow yards surrounded by high walls with spikes on the top” (I, vii, 69). She exhibited already the capacity of projection and the capacity to make distinctions, of which many characters in the novel seem incapable.

These windows in the novel are treasured for being a source of light: Little Dorrit as a child sits in the lodge of the Marshalsea “looking up at the sky through the barred window, until bars of light would arise” (I, vii, 69), and Pet Meagles in Rome is discovered by Little Dorrit “looking up at the sky shining through the tops of the windows” (II, xi, 550). Though not simple and single in its meaning, the light imagery of Little Dorrit is certainly connected with revelation, and the yearning may be felt as a looking for redemptive deliverance from the present blight that the novel analyzes. But what the windows illuminate is real life; the fake messiah Merdle is a mere “shining wonder.” The true millennium is a much more distant phenomenon, to be reached only through patient effort in time: “We must be patient, and wait for day” (I, xiv, 173) is Little Dorrit's symbolic appeal to Maggie when they are out on the streets for a night.

Thus it is, at this symbolic level, that in the Alps only “unaccustomed eyes” mistake the distance between themselves and the luminous mountaintops, “cancelling the intervening country … slighting their rugged height for something fabulous … [measuring] them as within a few hours' easy reach” (II, i, 431). Their eyes are akin to those of speculators, who represent a kind of secularized false prophecy, “conditionally speculating, upon this that and the other, at uncertain intervals and distances” (II, xxxiii, 813), and they contrast with Doyce's, “looking into the distance before him as if his grey eyes were measuring it” (I, x, 121). Progression in time toward real and not illusory fulfillment can only be achieved in the novel through Doyce's method of “making everything good and everything sound, at each important stage, before taking his hearer on a line's breadth further” (II, viii, 515-16). Thus it is that the liberating morning sun in the Alps is illusory: “The bright morning sun dazzled the eyes, the snow had ceased, the mists had vanished, the mountain air was so clear and light, that the new sensation of breathing it was like the having entered on a new existence. To help the delusion, the solid ground itself seemed gone, and the mountain, a shining waste of immense white heaps and masses, to be a region of cloud floating between the blue sky above and the earth far below” (II, iii, 452). The betraying touch is the disappearance of solid ground. The progress of Little Dorrit is along the ground—“restitution on earth, action on earth: these first, as the first steep steps upward” (I, xxvii, 319)—and not through the air. If the static present of Little Dorrit appears hopelessly unalterable, it is nonetheless only through the medium of time that it will be cast away.

“But you know we always make an allowance for friction, and so I have reserved space to close in” (II, xxxiv, 824). These are Doyce's words once more, following an orderly three-point exposition of his rehabilitation of Arthur Clennam at the end of the novel. They reflect the flexibility that goes with Dickens's concern for precision and careful deliberation, and they permit me to attempt a slight correction of my approach in this essay. In this case the space must be filled with a few more words about Dickens's imaginative vitality in Little Dorrit, in order to avoid a subtler kind of utilitarian view of the imagination than that which Dickens satirizes in Gradgrind or Podsnap. In perceiving the theme of growth and change in Little Dorrit, we are liable to misleading abstraction and to neglect of an inventiveness of mind beyond explanation and appreciation in terms of its moral purpose. In the scene where John Chivery protests at what he takes to be Arthur's feigned ignorance of Little Dorrit's love, the theme stands out obviously enough: “… that can't make it gentlemanly, that doesn't make it honourable, that can't justify throwing a person back upon himself after he has struggled and strived out of himself like a butterfly” (II, xxvii, 727). But if we pin the thematic specimen without regard for the sheer playful exuberance with which Dickens creates the absurd rhetorical redundancies of his indignation, we miss the poise of the passage altogether.

Indeed, time is not really felt primarily as an abstract theme in the novel at all. We are conscious of time, first and foremost in the texture of the novel: in the extraordinary improvisatory swiftness of Dickens's imagination, in its quick and deft linking of incongruities. It is the capacity to move with lightning speed between spheres of experience and registers of language that makes the rendering of the “myriad forms” of nature in Little Dorrit something other than solemn cliché. In a sentence like this one describing Mrs. Merdle we have a characteristic example: “And if ever there were an unfeeling handsome chin that looked as, for certain, it had never been, in unfamiliar parlance, ‘chucked’ by the hand of man, it was the chin curbed up so tight and close by that laced bridle” (I, xx, 238). The sentence moves from circumlocutory style, with a hint or two of anachronism—appropriately enough, in the phrase “unfamiliar parlance”—through the familiar and vulgar present of “chucked” with its feel of genuine affection, and back out again by way of the disembodied “hand of man” to the language of horseriding in “curbed up” and “bridle.” The sentence closes with an oxymoron reminding us that restraint chokes the society of the novel not only by means of prison bars but also by means of lace. Nothing appropriate about the powerful moral charge of the sentence can be said without a realization of its fluidity of movement.

A similar swiftness is to be felt in metaphor as it establishes connection between disparate worlds. On one page, where John Chivery makes his nervous attempt to woo Little Dorrit, the items of clothing include “pantaloons so highly decorated with side-stripes, that each leg was a three-stringed lute,” and a great hat turning in John Chivery's hand “like a slowly twirling mouse-cage” (I, xviii, 215). It is not surprising, then, that there is such admiration in the novel for the rapid movements of mind and body in characters of small stature, or for “a woman's quick association of ideas” in Flora Finching (II, xxvii, 732). Only the energies of the imagination are capable of challenging static inertia in Little Dorrit, and of setting the world in motion again.