SOURCE: Metz, Nancy Aycock. “Little Dorrit's London: Babylon Revisited.” Victorian Studies 33, no. 3 (spring 1990): 465-86.

[In the following essay, Metz discusses Dickens's use of images of the city of London in Little Dorrit.]

We usually think of urbanization as a process associated with growth, expansion, construction, and burgeoning population. More vividly than any other Victorian novelist, Dickens has chronicled such changes. But as the rate of urban expansion increased toward the middle of the century, Dickens increasingly turned his attention to the unevenness of these transformations and to the psychological effect on city-dwellers as the metropolis changed shape and purpose. I see Little Dorrit (1855-57) as an important statement of these concerns, and the London it represents as central to the novel's exploration of human memory, imagination, and identity as they are distinctively shaped by the city experience.

Little Dorrit's London differs in important respects from its counterpart in Bleak House. Nominally a novel about the recent past, Bleak House repeatedly confronts its contemporary readers with landscapes they might theoretically see for themselves on any evening's slumming expedition; the novel thus freezes time for readers and characters alike on the threshold between a threatening present and an apocalyptic future. With its unambiguous opening reference to the Marseilles of “thirty years ago,” Little Dorrit seems similarly poised at a generation's remove from the experiences of the novel's original readers. But if Bleak House leaps ahead to the millennium, Little Dorrit lingers over the traces of a London that seems at times more ruin than real. The accreted past speaks to the characters of this novel through a pervasive and enigmatic architecture of decay. Thus, while the sense of place is as strongly rendered in this novel as in any of Dickens's books, the distinctive atmosphere of Little Dorrit owes more to the generalized evocation of decline than it does to the immediacy with which particular scenes are rendered. If Bleak House borrows its urgency and topographical detail from the bluebooks and journalism of sanitary investigation, Little Dorrit sometimes reads like a museum guide to “lost” London.

I

To a certain extent, of course, Dickens's novels typically appeal to antiquarian interests. John Henry Raleigh, commenting on Dickens's “long-standing prediliction for the old, the quaint, the ancient,” notes that from the beginning he was driven “to immortalize in print the old twisted by-ways of the huge City that obsessed his imagination but which he knew was, like everything else, at the mercy of time.”¹ Walter Bagehot once claimed, in what has become a much quoted phrase, that Dickens described London as might a “special correspondent for posterity.”² And Dickens himself, as early as Sketches By Boz exhibits a joking self-consciousness about precisely this role. Concluding a little essay tracking the “advance of civilization” into sleepy, out of the way Scotland Yard, he imagines his text in the hands of an “antiquary of another generation,” who despite great learning would be helpless to discover the whereabouts of any of the landmarks he has described.³ He could imagine himself on the other side of that temporal/geographical gulf as well. Dickens clearly draws on his own perpetually renewed sense of wonder when he has David Copperfield, having freshly arrived from his foreign travels, muse on the transformations time has wrought:

I have often remarked—I suppose everybody has—that one's going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change in it. As I looked out of the coach window, and observed that an old house on Fish-street Hill, which had stood untouched by painter, carpenter, or bricklayer, for a century, had been pulled down in my absence; and that a neighbouring street, of time-honoured insalubrity and inconvenience, was being drained and widened; I half expected to find St. Paul's Cathedral looking older.⁴

But if the impulse to record a London whose landmarks were even then passing away is nothing new in Dickens's fiction, what is new in Little Dorrit is the increased seriousness with which Dickens registers these changes, his heightened sensitivity to their impact on the individual's sense of order, predictability, and growth, and his fictional extension of absence, transformation, and ruin into tropes for cultural decay.

That civilizations did decay and leave behind them only the enigmatic signs of their once flourishing state was a fact brought vividly before the popular imagination in the 1850s by Victorian travellers and archaeologists, two of whom were important influences on Dickens. The legendary figure of Giovanni Battista Belzoni fascinated him. Belzoni had died when Dickens was eleven years old, but before his early death (of dysentery on the road to Timbuktu), he had made a romantic name for himself by his impressive Egyptian accomplishments: opening the second pyramid and discovering the buried temple of Abu Simbel, six royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and the lost city of Berenice. Treasures from these excavations were displayed in 1821 on a grand scale at the Egyptian Hall, Picadilly—their arrival well-publicized by the release of Belzoni's Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids. Richard Altick compares the public stir accompanying these events to the sensation created in London and the United States in the 1970s by the splendid travelling display of treasures from Tutankhamen's tomb.⁵ That interest was still very much alive in 1851 when Household Words told “The Story of Giovanni Belzoni.” As the journal interpreted it, it was a very Dickensian story indeed, stressing Belzoni's early struggles as “the son of a humble barber,” his “devouring” of Robinson Crusoe, his “truant spirit” and inventive, energetic disposition, and his early career as a “Hercules in tinsel,” delighting audiences at Astley's circus with his gymnastic feats. The centerpiece of the essay was an excerpt from Belzoni's book, describing in compelling detail his discovery of an Egyptian burial vault in the Valley of the Kings:

Of some of these tombs many persons could not withstand the suffocating air, which often causes fainting. A vast quantity of dust rises, so fine that it enters the throat and nostrils, and chokes the nose and mouth to such a degree, that it requires great power of lungs to resist it. … The blackness of the walls, the faint light given by the candles or torches for want of air, the different objects that surrounded me, seeming to converse with each other, and the Arabs with the candles or torches in their hands, naked and covered with dust, themselves resembling living mummies, absolutely formed a scene that cannot be described.⁶

The year this account was published, Austen Henry Layard returned triumphantly to London, two months after the opening of the Great Exhibition. Layard had made extensive excavations in Asiatic Turkey, culminating in the (mistaken, as it turned out) discovery of the site of biblical Nineveh. With his arrival, Assyrian subjects and artifacts, previously the domain of the biblical scholar or archaeologist, became household words. Schools awarded prizes for essays on Nineveh, and books on the subject were displayed prominently at the Great Exhibition. Layard himself—whose undertakings had gone long unsupported—was accorded celebrity status. The Duke of Wellington lionized him. He was made a Citizen of London and given the keys to the city. At the Gothic Hall, a panorama of Nimrud enjoyed a long run, and in Lower Grosvenor Street, Layard's travelling artist lectured nightly to diorama audiences. The arrival and installation of the famous “winged bulls” at the British Museum fueled the sensation. Meanwhile, Layard's published account of his quest, Nineveh and Its Remains (1848-49), sold well and was widely reviewed. The Times went so far as to declare it “the most extraordinary work of the present age.” A shortened version, sold primarily at railway bookstalls, was even more successful. According to Kenneth Hudson, it is “entitled to the honour of being the first genuinely popular book on archaeology ever written.”⁷

Dickens had good reason to second the general chorus of praise for these accomplishments. Layard was his personal friend and a man whose energy, love of adventure, and curiosity suited his own restless temperament well. “Among the best and greatest of … travellers,” Dickens once called him, and though the remark was made in a professional context to a group of commercial travellers, Dickens had experienced at first hand the qualities of which he spoke so highly. With Layard, Dickens wrote to Forster in 1853, he had “ascended Vesuvius in the sunlight and [come] down again in the moonlight, very merrily.” Dickens had a genuine literary appreciation for Layard's published narratives, ranking them with the work of Macaulay, Herschel, Faraday, and Tennyson as the best texts for working men to read “in these bad times.” It is easy to see why he felt this way. Layard's readable, exciting account of his dealings with quarrelsome Arab tribes is the stuff of which classic adventure fiction has been fashioned, but the theme of the book, the patient surmounting of daunting obstacles—physical, financial, logistical—makes his a Victorian success story at once exotic and eminently instructive.⁸

If the Smilesian themes of Layard's narrative especially recommended it to the newly literate, it was probably to other elements that Dickens himself responded most strongly. As Belzoni had done earlier, Layard called up in striking chiaroscuro the spectacle of ancient relics suddenly disentombed before the eyes of awed witnesses. Here is his account of the discovery of Sennacherib's palace:

The excavations consisted … of a perfect labyrinth of subterranean passages, lighted by wells sunk from the surface of the mound. It would be difficult to convey any idea of the peculiarly solemn appearance of these underground galleries. The colossal human-headed monsters scarcely emerging into the dim light; the long lines of bas-reliefs recording the ancient glories of Assyria; the Arabs wandering to and fro through the gloomy passages, formed a picture which the imagination could scarcely realise, and which once seen could never be forgotten.⁹

More conscious than Belzoni of the symbolic value of his discoveries and of his own role as an interpreter of culture, Layard frequently called attention to the textual status of his relics, as in the case of the pair of human-headed figures found “in perfect preservation,” guarding the steps of the palace:

I used to contemplate for hours these mysterious emblems, and muse over their intent and history. What more noble forms could have ushered the people into the temple of their gods? What more sublime images could have been borrowed from nature, by men who sought, unaided by the light of revealed religion, to embody their conception of the wisdom, power, and ubiquity of a Supreme Being? They could find no better type of intellect and knowledge than the wings of a bird. These winged human-headed lions were not idle creatures, the offspring of mere fancy; their meaning was written upon them.

The sudden resurrection of these artifacts after long obscurity prompts an exclamation on the strange paradoxes of time and history: “For twenty-five centuries they had been hidden from the eye of men, and they now stood forth once more in their ancient majesty. But how changed was the scene around them!”¹⁰ In the “recovery of the metropolis of a powerful nation from the long night of oblivion” might not also the future history of the modern Babylon be read? The analogy was implicit in much contemporary archaeological discussion; it is explicitly worked out in Rossetti's “The Burden of Nineveh” (1856), where the shadow of the massive figures on the streets outside the British Museum darkly forecasts England's coming fall. And in Household Words, “The Nineveh Bull,” speaking in dramatic monologue, is made to warn: “They say I am far from my violated home, in a city prouder, greater, more glorious than my native realm; but boast not, ye vain glorious creatures of an hour. I have outlived many mighty kingdoms, perchance I may be destined to survive one more.”¹¹

For Dickens, predictions of national ruin were set firmly within a political context, one that was being shaped in great measure by Layard's campaign for administrative reform. Punch's “Mr. Bull,” the “Bedouin of Parliament,” occupied center stage in a series of complex political agitations Dickens followed with acute interest between 1854 and '55. As M.P. for Aylesbury and a staunch critic of inefficiency during the Crimean War and of corruption in the civil service, Layard articulated a political position which Dickens fully supported in public speeches and in the pages of Household Words. The effect of Dickens's political activism on the composition of Little Dorrit has been well documented.¹² To it we owe the striking conception of the Circumlocution Office and the broad caricatures of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings. But the influence on his thinking of the “Ninevite question,” in both senses of Dickens's playful phrase, does not end with topical satire. The very atmosphere of the city and the sombre, meditative tone of the novel owe something to Belzoni, Layard, and the renewed cultural consciousness of “ruin” their discoveries prompted.

II

Lost London, never far beneath the surface of the city to which Clennam returns, presents to the most casual observer odd and troubling dislocations. Vestiges of the past are everywhere present—in the remaining tall chimneys and large rooms of Bleeding Heart Yard, in the deserted warehouses Clennam passes on his way home, in the “ruin” his own home has become. But the apparent stability of these structures is disconcerting, for while they have remained, the context around them has been gradually redefined. Clennam finds his mother's house exactly as he had left it—“nothing's changed”—but undeniable change in the outer world has rendered it now “a mere anomaly and incongruity … out of date and out of purpose” (p. 45). Few structures can make a grander claim to antiquity than Bleeding Heart Yard; its remote origins are the subject of legend and vigorous scholarly dispute. But not only in its cramped and subdivided apartments is it “much changed in feature and fortune,” it stands in an altogether transformed relationship to surrounding London:

As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on which it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard that you got into it down a flight of steps that formed no part of the original approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a maze of shabby streets, which went about and about, tortuously ascending to the level again.

(p. 129)

The metaphor and persona employed here recall Dickens's memorable description of the approach to Todgers's—“you groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards, and passages”¹³—but the hypothetical wanderer in this maze finds himself trapped in a labyrinth that is as much temporal as spatial. He is lost in history, or at least in the peculiar and incomprehensible metropolitan expression of it, with its uneven stratifications and surprising architectural holdovers. The physical experience of these impressions is more than just disorienting. For while individuals track their lives in more or less linear stages, time moves with apparent lawlessness among the urban landmarks that signpost growth. Without any effort of will, often without any consciousness of the process, individuals write their autobiographies in city dust and mud, in brick and mortar. Only in retrospect do they learn how unstable such texts prove. For Mrs. Clennam, emerging after long seclusion to confront the contrast between her mental images “of demolished streets and altered houses, as they formerly were” and the “overwhelming rush of reality,” the discovery is quite literally maddening (pp. 333, 766).

Against this background of change within permanence, familiarity within strangeness, Little Dorrit's characters maintain an uneasy poise. Lacking any organic connection to the past, they are nonetheless strongly influenced by it, experiencing it as inconvenience, as vague sentiment or vague guilt, or simply as enigma. Nor do they fully possess the present. Consider the ludicrous situation of the “Hampton Court Bohemians,” who live across the grain of a rich past they refuse to acknowledge or even see. Against the massive scale of Henry VIII's palace, they interpose flimsy screens and partitions, failing spectacularly to domesticate their apartments to the most basic requirements of comfortable housekeeping. While the stage is obviously set for high historical drama, the scenarios they enact before puzzled visitors are nothing if not broadly farcical: “Callers, looking steadily into the eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off; people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see bottles; visitors, with their heads against a partition of thin canvas and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made believe to be sitting in primeval silence” (p. 304). To occupy space is necessarily to occupy time, and in throwing the whole weight of their trivial, arrogant lives against the implications of this unalterable fact, the Bohemians open the way for innumerable contradictions. But only in the absurd lengths to which all this is carried are their living conditions unique. Elsewhere too, the architecture of the past overshadows those who must live from day to day within its familiar precincts, so that the simple business of inhabiting inherited structures is presented as no easy or natural thing. Clennam comes upon Miss Wade, in a neighborhood of “horrors that came into existence in some wrong-headed time, still demanding the blind admiration of all ensuing generations … until they tumbled down,” surrounded by stray furniture and trunks, “as she might have established herself in an Eastern caravanserai” (pp. 316, 318). And in Bleeding Heart Yard, the poor linger on, year after year, in a permanent arrangement of temporary accommodation, “as Arabs of the desert pitch their tents among the fallen stones of the Pyramid” (p. 129). Gypsies all, these characters simply camp out on the ruins of the past, their pitiful makeshifts dwarfed by the evidence everywhere of a history with which they share no thread of meaningful connection.

For Little Dorrit's serial readers, making connections through the text with a London at the margins of living memory, topographical descriptions provisionally recreate a world that can never be reclaimed. But the tone and distance of the narrative voice repeatedly underscore just how provisional this recreation is intended to be. Readers of the novel are never allowed to forget that this city has been verbally reconstructed for them. They do not enter it through some invited suspension of disbelief; rather, they typically stand outside, on the perimeter of their own time, and with its more vivid reality as a constant frame of reference. At a further remove from the characters, they too must find their way among structures which have changed beyond recognition, or have been emptied of their original life, or have vanished altogether. Thus, any pretension to permanence can only evoke satire. Tip's office in the Palace Court is but one “of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more” (p. 73). Dickens's readers might look in vain for Mr. Casby's street in the Gray's Inn Road; though it had “set off from that thoroughfare with the intention of running at one heat down into the valley … it had run itself out of breath in twenty years” and “there is no such place in that part now” (p. 138). The most precise guidebook directions trace the route to the novel's central symbolic setting, the Marshalsea prison, “a few doors short of the church of Saint George, in the Borough of Southwark, on the left hand side of the way going southward.” Any reader might pace it out. But all this expense of careful detail finally leads nowhere. The Marshalsea “is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it” (p. 58). The effect of this narrative stance is to hold at a distance even those scenes which are most vividly and precisely described. The gaps themselves, rather than the verbal bridges which span them, come into focus, sketching in the dimensions of an urban backdrop within which neither characters nor readers are fully integrated. In the description introducing the rendezvous between Tattycoram and Rigaud at the Adelphi, Dickens develops at length this aspect of Little Dorrit's symbolic landscape. Clennam is walking along the Strand at dusk, when a sudden stoppage of coal-wagons causes him “to look freshly about him.” The narrator frames his reactions this way:

There is always, to this day, a sudden pause in that place to the roar of the great thoroughfare. The many sounds become so deadened that the change is like putting cotton in the ears, or having the head thickly muffled. At that time the contrast was far greater; there being no small steamboats on the river, no landing-places but slippery narrow stairs and foot-causeways, no railroad on the opposite bank, no hanging bridge or fish-market near at hand, no traffic on the nearest bridge of stone, nothing moving on the stream but watermen's wherries and coal-lighters. … At any hour later than sunset, and not least at that hour when most of the people who have anything to eat at home are going home to eat it, and when most of those who have nothing have hardly yet slunk out to beg or steal, it was a deserted place and looked on a deserted scene.

(p. 514)

The whole description is built on distances—Clennam's physical distance from Tattycoram and Rigaud, the sudden interruption of his train of thought, the elliptical nature of the conversation between the two interlocutors. The syncopated throb of deafness the pedestrian feels in crossing under the arches comes to stand for a broader register of disrupted expectations and failed connections. The Adelphi physically punctuates the surrounding scene, causing those who pass under it to feel momentarily lightheaded. But as a remembered artifact, it gives “pause” as well. At first anchored to the reader's present reality by the phrase “to this day,” the landscape slips by stages into the inaccessible past as the narrative lens filters out, one by one, its recognizable features. Readers look as through a stereoscope at a postcard view of a familiar London landmark, but as the series of negatives accumulates the effect is subtly changed.¹⁴ Each transparent overlay is in turn removed, the composite picture dissolves, and the viewer is left stranded across a gulf of time only imagination can close.

It is entirely appropriate to the atmosphere of this novel that the abandoned City district should be the point of entry to the London experience, and its moral and symbolic touchstone. There, to the wanderer of a thoughtful cast of mind at mid-century or later, time's “gulf” would have been most impressively felt. By then, the rapid increase in the population of London had begun to follow dramatically inconsistent patterns. While the slums filled up and outlying areas encroached on neighboring countryside, the population of central London, the ancient City district, decreased markedly. According to Alexander Welsh, in The City of Dickens, “the process known today as ‘depopulation of the urban core’ was underway in London by the first decades of the nineteenth century.”¹⁵ By 1837, the area was largely inhabited by shopkeepers, clerks, and laborers; wealthy homeowners had taken flight in significant numbers. To contemporary observers, the abandonment of the city churches signalled most dramatically a decay that had been underway in less obvious ways for some time. The continuity of ritual these churches represented and their visibility as monuments to English architectural tradition imbued their decline with symbolic significance. According to Walter Besant:

The City churches are all ancient as regards their site; most of them are Wren's churches, there is, about every one, a mass of associations, a long history of Rectors, Vicars, Preachers, Monuments, Chantries, charitable emoluments, and the remembrance of past worthies who were baptized and confirmed, and received the Communion, who were married, and were buried in them.

Once venerable, wealthy institutions, these churches testified forcefully to the mutability of all things; at mid-century, in some of them, “literally two or three [worshippers] met together to make their common supplication.”¹⁶

To follow Arthur Clennam down vacant and inert streets, past empty churches, on a Sabbath deserted even by worshippers, is to follow a different route from Dickens's most memorable urban pilgrimages. Clennam's discoveries are negative and disillusioning; in the general deadness of all things, the mechanical proliferation of places (“streets, streets, streets”) and people (“a million or so of human beings”) keeps all individual impressions at a numbed distance. But compare his dulled sensations to those of the innocent Oliver, stupefied by the highly particularized sights, sounds, and smells of Smithfield; or of Snagsby, shaken to the core by the inferno of suffering fellow-mortals through which he is led unwillingly; or of Florence, lost among London's “wild confusion.” While previously in Dickens's fiction, the crowd has been the defining focus of the urban encounter (the crowd is the city's new “institution” according to F. S. Schwarzbach), in this novel, the thoughtful pedestrian as often confronts scenes whose vacancy and stillness enforce a different perspective.¹⁷

To be sure, the crowds are always there in the background, and from time to time they emerge to take on a demonic life. We see them mobbing Cavalletto's litter, erupting around the apparition of the horribly resurrected Mrs. Clennam, and most notably contributing their “usual uproar” to the wedding prospects of Amy and Arthur. But against these conventional readings of the city as densely and threateningly energetic, as a vortex, are counterpointed the structurally important Iron Bridge scenes and the extended surrealist rendering of Amy's wanderings in eerie, nocturnal London. Browne's illustration for this episode captures well this new tone and perspective. The plate carries the same symbolic weight as does his “Tom-All-Alone's” in Bleak House, to which it is thematically parallel. But while the first etching depicts a cluttered, rubbish-filled background from which human beings are completely absent, “Little Dorrit's Party” shows two small human figures dwarfed by the enormous and imposing structures of prison and church. Clearly, the subject of the illustration is the relationship between these overshadowed figures and the awesome scale of the vast city under the indifferent stars.¹⁸ In the background, patterns of light faintly but cleanly illuminate—as far as the eye can see—the “empty and silent” streets emphasized in the text.

In scenes like these, London is not meant to represent any large Victorian city. Though slums like Tom-All-Alone's might be discovered by unwary pedestrians anywhere—that is the point of Snagsby's shock and horror—the full irony of Amy's lonely vigil becomes apparent only when its specific location is made melodramatically clear: “This was Little Dorrit's party. The shame, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital” (p. 171). This is London viewed from a somber, prophetic distance, its thronging life for the moment suspended by a narrator who views and judges it as the crowning achievement of a failed culture. The same kind of distancing effect is achieved by presenting the city through the eyes of an exile like Clennam and by having him track his course down depopulated streets and among fallen monuments. To the returned traveller, mesmerized by the dull enchantment of a London Sabbath, the city appears drained of life or haunted, a relic or a vast necropolis. Clennam, listening to the maddening cacophony of bells calling an absent population to a deserted church or “passing … the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful Company … the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church,” typifies a narrative approach to the city, not as an exotic dark continent, but as, literally and figuratively, a ruin. Everywhere, vestiges in brick, paint, and mortar—the “silent warehouses and wharves,” the gloomy arches of the Adelphi, the “piece of antiquity” Clennam's own house has become—seem to be waiting “for some adventurous Belzoni to dig [them] out and discover [their] history” (p. 31).

In the decades preceding the writing of Little Dorrit, London was, of course, being dug and re-dug. Between 1837 and 1854, improvements were made in Eastcheap, Little Tower Street, and Gracechurch Street; Upper Thames Street was widened from Eastcheap and Fish Street Hill, the Thames Tunnel was opened, the Fleet prison was demolished; Moorgate Street was constructed, 428 miles of sewers were laid, Canon Street was widened, Basin Lane was removed, New Oxford Street was built and the surrounding slums pulled down (Besant, pp. 137-139). Though these excavations were carried out by engineers and city planners rather than “adventurous Belzoni's,” even such modern improvements as the building of railroads, the laying of sewers, and the demolition of slums brought before residents of the capital an increased awareness of London as an archaeological artifact. If the depopulation of central London showed to the romantic imagination a city in picturesque and gradual decline, metropolitan improvements wrought, visibly, instant “ruin” on whole neighborhoods. Such sudden upheavals in the known and ordered features of the streets inevitably evoked comparisons to the “lost” cities of the ancient world. Dickens, who took an enlightened interest in the suffering caused by this shortsighted removal of entire slum populations, found himself fascinated by such scenes of devastation. They figure vividly in his letters, receive memorable and explicit treatment in Dombey and Son, and color the whole later view of the city as junkyard Sahara.¹⁹

Yet however vulnerable to annihilation may be the remembered neighborhood or the structure made luminous through personal association, the city's collective past survives beyond the capacity of individual memory to contain or fathom it. In ordinary middle-class houses as well as in businesses and institutions, innumerable domestic dramas—ghosts of the city's long human history—vaguely overshadow the struggles of present occupants. As Clennam sits brooding in the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, the generalized sense of their manifold nameless presence hangs suspended in the heavy atmosphere. “Looking at the dull houses opposite,” he muses, “if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment” (p. 31). The company of these invisible fellow prisoners makes Clennam feel somehow diminished and unreal, a “ghost” himself as he revisits the scenes of his own dead past. Visiting one of those deserted City churches Dickens makes focal points of Clennam's London, the Uncommercial Traveller would later remark:

Not only in the damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into the bellows of the organ. … We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds. Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverized on the sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air comes, tumbles down upon him.²⁰

The translation of this kind of choking physical reality—playfully conceived here—into the oppressive atmosphere of Little Dorrit is one of the novel's defining characteristics.

“Dead citizens” threatened the health of the living; the dangers posed by this silent population in the ordinary press of daily life had been sensationally documented by George Walker in 1839 and in annual statistics and periodical essays ever since.²¹ But though the sanitary threat had made the dead newsworthy in the forties and fifties, it was not to the recent and specific horrors of overcrowded cemeteries and acquisitive burial practices that Dickens now turned his attention. An 1860 “Uncommerical Traveller” essay reminiscent of G. A. Sala's “The Key of the Street” reflects his new orientation. Here Dickens creates the character of “Houselessness,” whose object, like Amy's earlier trial outside the Marshalsea gate, is simply to “get through the night.” The “immensity of London” is powerfully evoked in this essay; fearful characters—the whining, snapping savage “Houselessness” nearly steps upon on the dark street, the man who stabs his pudding “like a mortal enemy”—stand out in sharp relief against a background chiefly compelling for its emptiness. But as impressive as the scale of this nocturnal desert, or as the solitary grotesques who sparsely populate it, is the awareness that comes upon the narrator of its buried life:

in these houseless night walks … it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin's point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into.

Equally “residents” of London, Dickens's dead swell a census that defies enumeration. Their imagined resurrection would flood the streets and “overflow the hills and valleys … God knows how far” and would make of every house a prison.²²

To secure one's own identity among the citizenry of the dead, then, becomes one of the challenges that courageous and inquiring minds accept; its attendant risks are paralysis and suffocation. In Little Dorrit Dickens represents the undertaking paradigmatically as a process of archaeological exploration. Clennam, re-entering the long-abandoned rooms of his mother's house, might as well be leading an expedition into an Egyptian tomb:

Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was no color in all the house; such color as had ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams—got itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, and what not. There was not one straight floor, from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by dust and smoke, that old women might have told their fortunes in them, better than in grouts of tea; the dead cold hearths showed no trace of having ever been warmed, but in heaps of soot that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been a drawing-room there were a pair of meager mirrors, with dismal processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking around the frames, but even these were short of hands and legs, and one undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its axis and got upside down, and another had fallen off altogether.

(p. 54)

In old Mr. Clennam's office, Arthur comes across the culminating artifact for which these lesser icons have been preparation, his father's portrait, insistently demanding and simultaneously thwarting interpretation, “dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall.” At the end of the novel, when all the secrets foreshadowed here have been disentombed, the rubble of the house is literally sifted “by parties of diggers … formed to relieve one another in digging among the ruins” (p. 772). And though rumors linger that Flintwich's body lies hidden “somewhere among the London geological foundation,” this ritual carting and shovelling, and the final discovery of “the dirty heap of rubbish that had been the foreigner” (p. 772), symbolically close the central strand of the plot.

III

Clennam's story, brought to closure by this last in a series of revelations, can be fully understood only in terms of the Italian episodes of Book II. Through a process of doubling and intensification, they redefine the context of the London scenes, which are now seen as predictive; with the rest of the pattern in place, it is clear that England's capital is firmly set on a path that can only lead to a fate like ruined Rome's. “How Not To Do It” proves a disastrous course, leading in this case not to apocalypse (Bleak House's metaphor) but to the steps of a ruined Capitol, to the death of the future and the reincarnation in its place of an oppressive, sterile past. Michael Cotsell has shown that between Pictures from Italy (1846) and Little Dorrit, Dickens's thinking about the meaning of the Italian landscapes he had witnessed underwent a “major alteration of emphasis.” In the 1840s, Dickens was content to make the contrast between Protestant, progressive England, and crumbling, backward, despotic, and Catholic Italy. … It is not contrast, but similarity, that Dickens suggests in Little Dorrit: Italy gives images of what England is becoming” (p. 194). In the description of the Dickens family's arrival in Rome, Pictures from Italy (1846) offers the first foreshadowings—comic but also ominously suggestive—of an analogy that Dickens will later explore with complete seriousness:

When we were fairly off again, we began, in a perfect fever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—London! There it lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome. I swear, that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it was so like London, at that distance, that if you could have shown it me, in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing else.²³

In Little Dorrit comparisons between the two capitals are enforced at every turn, underscoring by implication the novel's social and political message. For example, London's “gypsies of gentility,” and the less genteel gypsies of Bleeding Heart Yard, forecast the unbroken series of barren encampments in Venice and Rome. The unreality of the Dorrits' new existence is measured out in the bare passages and massive stone galleries of the various palaces that swallow them. And on the road to Venice, Amy perceives that the family's situation fits into a far more troubling pattern:

they would come to whole towns of palaces, whose proper inmates were all banished, and which were all changed into barracks: troops of idle soldiers, leaning out of the state-windows, where their accoutrements hung drying on the marble architecture, and showing to the mind like hosts of rats who were (happily) eating away the props of the edifices that supported them, and, must soon, with them, be smashed on the heads of the other swarms of soldiers, and the swarms of priests, and the swarms of spies, who were all the ill-looking population left to be ruined, in the streets below.

(p. 453)

Just so, the narrator had warned of Covent Garden's scavenging children, “look to the rats young and old, all ye Barnacles, for before God they are eating away our foundations, and will bring the roofs on our heads!”²⁴

If in London, churches and counting-houses have been abandoned, warehouses gape open, buildings tumble down; in the Italian scenes decay fills every horizon, never more vividly rendered than in Dickens's existential images of “ruinous enclosures, yawning window-gap, and crazy wall, deserted houses, leaking wells, broken water-tanks, spectral cypress-trees” (p. 617). “Ruin” has become the natural condition and context for change itself. Thus the travellers come upon a “church with hoarding and scaffolding about it, which had been under supposititious repair so long that the means of repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay” (p. 474). And this spectacle anticipates the family's arrival in Rome, “a city where everything seemed to be trying to stand still forever on the ruins of something else” (p. 497). In ghost-ridden Rome, with its much longer and more remote history, the past is the only reality. In this city of the dead, not only famous men and events—long passed into history—still cast their shadows, but inglorious visitors to their shrines and monuments have themselves come and gone in bewildering succession. So Amy explains the depressing effect of Minnie Gowan's little apartment, not in terms of its dirt or gloom, but with respect to the obscure, inescapable human texts which surround and diminish her: “the walls have been drawn over with chalk and charcoal by others who have lived there before—oh, I should think for years!” (p. 534). However much Dickens drew on his own Italian travels in descriptions like these, it is clear that he drew even more on his increasingly jaded view of home. “Like the Goths reversed,” the “Island-Savages” of Book II are shown “beating at the gates of Rome” (p. 617), just as in the novel as a whole Dickens looks to the past in order to locate the future rhetorically for his readers.

This way of positioning the reader with respect to the familiar, contemporary capital was not original with Dickens, of course. Romantic landscape painters had experimented with the same premise in the twenties and thirties, depicting well-known London landmarks as they might one day appear to sightseers at the fallen city. The perspective artist, Joseph Michael Gandy, for example, chose the Rotunda at the Bank of England as the focus for a colored drawing he suggestively entitled “Architectural Ruins—A Vision.” Interestingly, the relationship between the imagined future and the present-as-past ran in both directions. The painter John Martin was best known for his apocalyptic landscape visions of the Pyramids, the ruins of Palmyra, and the Caves of Elephanta; The Fall of Nineveh (1827) is probably the best known of these large canvases. … In his secondary career as an engineer and metropolitan planner, he translated these architectural fantasies into cast-iron and masonry, so that railway stations, bridges, and viaducts were actually built to resemble his artistic conception of Egyptian ruins. According to F. D. Klingender, Martin's influence was great: “So completely did [he] express the mood of his time that he was widely regarded as the greatest English artist after Turner.”²⁵

Macaulay appealed to the same sensibilities in 1840 with his powerfully resonating image of the New Zealander “in the midst of a vast solitude” standing “on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.” Long after the context for this rhetorical vision had been forgotten (Macaulay's point was that the invincible Catholic Church might remain even under such hypothetical conditions of general ruin), the image lingered on, inspiring, most notably, Trollope's curious work of political and social analysis, The New Zealander, and the concluding panorama of Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore's London. … In numerous pieces of popular journalism, too, “fallen” London was made the subject of romantic appeal. Sala's Household Words piece is typical in its evocation of a future when

the race of this huge London world-city shall be run—when the millstone shall have been cast into its waters, and the word … gone forth that Babylon the great is fallen—when the spider shall weave his web amidst the broken columns of the Bank; the owl shriek through the deserted arcades of the Exchange; and the jackel prowl through labyrinths of ruins and rubbish, decayed oyster shells and bleached skeletons of the dogs of other days, where once was Regent Street.²⁶

Thus Dickens's “sources” for the image of ruined London were broadly diffused through the culture. But his treatment of the trope in Little Dorrit is distinctive. Never simply the panorama seen through the mist, the proper subject for picturesque sketch or romantic effusion, the ruins of Little Dorrit stand as the most compelling objectification of the human past—suffused through place—as an artifact of individual consciousness. Amy's musings on the ancient sights of Rome, like Dorothea's honeymoon despair in the “city of visible history,” have their sources in the perceived analogy between “the oppressive masquerade of ages”²⁷ and a deep consciousness of personal loss:

The ruins of the vast old Amphitheatre, of the old Temples, of the old Commemorative Arches, of the old trodden highways, of the old tombs, besides being what they were, to her were ruins of the old Marshalsea, ruins of her old inner life—ruins of the faces and forms that of old peopled it—ruins of its loves, hopes, cares, and joys. Two ruined spheres of action and suffering were before the solitary girl often sitting on some broken fragment; and in the lonely places, under the blue sky, she saw them both together.

(p. 591)

Amy is the chief shrine of memory in a novel which, as much as David Copperfield, faces compulsively backward into the generative experiences of childhood. But if Copperfield hymns the recovered past, artistically whole and health-giving, Dorrit pauses over its broken fragments and lonely places with a more ambivalent and jaded eye. No David, who can call up childhood events palpably before him, Clennam complains often of the barrenness of his early years, of retrospectives composed of blank spaces, imagination grasping empty air. But he keeps climbing down what for him is a blighted tree, because like Dickens's other autobiographers, Clennam believes that memory makes meaning, that past and present link causally, and that the way out of the labyrinth is as much behind as before him. His urge to come to terms with the past, to clear up its mysteries and make reparations, to close it off and so restrict its capacity to harm, motivates most of his actions in the plot. In pursuit of these goals, Clennam returns home, befriends Amy, and attempts to reopen the Dorrit case.

But these assumptions about the coherence and integrity of lived time are not borne out by experience. For Clennam, as for most of the novel's other characters, discontinuity rules, and old selves “vanish” without a trace, only to be, in the cruel caprice of things, suddenly, inauspiciously resurrected. William Dorrit's cry of self-pity to Amy (“I was young, I was accomplished, I was good-looking, I was independent—by God I was, child!” [p. 221]), echoes through the novel in Clennam's own grief for his dead youth, and in Flora's rhapsodic clinging to “old times forever faded never more to bloom” (p. 263). Here, characters forever collect and arrange souvenirs as a way of saving some slight remembrance out of the annihilating waste of time and change. Flora preserves the last dress Amy makes for her; Amy, her Marshalsea frock and her uncle's clarionet; the Meagleses, whole roomsful of treasure, “mute witnesses to the lives they had lived together” (p. 395).

The most powerful and potentially dangerous of these memorials are the scenes of past misfortune or suffering, over which the novel repeatedly hovers with fascinated attention. London itself is such a scene for Clennam in chapter 3, and his subsequent exploration of the old house establishes a motif that is repeated in Tattycoram's furtive return to the Meagleses' house, and in William Dorrit's conflicted near-return to the Marshalsea. Thus when Dickens came to write the preface to the novel in 1857, it was particularly fitting that he chose to highlight a personal pilgrimage to the ruins of the old prison so closely associated with his own early and intense pain. His anecdote sums up with wonderful subtlety and distance the novel's final attitude toward a past at once inescapable and irrecoverable. Midway through the preface, he remarks in an offhand, footnoting way: “Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or not any portions of the Marshalsea prison are yet standing.” As he answers his own hypothetical question, documentation yields to dramatization. The narrator becomes a character in curious dialogue with a peculiarly urban Sphinx:

I found the outer front courtyard … metamorphosed into a butter-shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent “Angel Court” … I came to Marshalsea Place, the houses in which I recognized not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly correct. How this young Newton … came by this information, I don't know; he was a quarter of a century too young to know anything about it himself. I pointed to the window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so long, and asked what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that apartment at present? He said “Tom Pythick.” I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, “Joe Pythick's uncle.”

Like the novel it telegraphically recapitulates, this characteristic instance of Dickensian flanerie traces a journey both lateral and temporal. The narrator finds the prison, at last, both “preserved” and “transformed.” He is ultimately surprised into a recognition of artifacts so solid in their reality that they recall the past in its very texture and detail and so frame neatly the imaginative act of bringing the past to life in fiction. But his final, absurd exchange with his urchin interlocutor firmly reinstates the present—and with it irony and paradox—into the absorbing tableau of the past. The episode stands as an appropriate frame for the novel it introduces, dramatizing in little its pull between engagement and detachment, memory and desire, fictive and experiential truth. In its good-humored, ironic acceptance of the truth that one must finally learn to live as a ghost—inhabiting a city haunted by the past, haunting a city from which the past has been swept away—Dickens comes to a qualified provisional peace with the abundant anomalies and dislocations of Little Dorrit's London.

Notes

1. John Henry Raleigh, “The Novel and the City: England and America in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 11 (1968), 323.

2. Walter Bagehot, “Charles Dickens,” National Review (October 1858), qtd. in Dickens: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 394.

3. Charles Dickens, “Scotland Yard,” in Sketches By Boz (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 66, 68.

4. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Trevor Blount (1849-50; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 892.

5. The earliest reference to Belzoni in Dickens's writing is in “Seven Dials”: “The stranger who finds himself in ‘The Dials’ for the first time, and stands Belzoni-like, at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no inconsiderable time” (Sketches By Boz, p. 69). Altick discusses Belzoni in The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 244.

6. [W. H. Wills and Mrs. Hoare,] “The Story of Giovanni Belzoni,” Household Words, 22 February 1851, p. 550. Author attributions to Household Words articles are taken from Household Words: A Weekly Journal, ed. Anne Lohrli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973).

7. Arnold C. Brachman, The Luck of Nineveh: Archaeology's Great Adventure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), p. 270; Altick, p. 182; The Times, 9 February 1849, p. 5; Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Archaeology (McMillan: London and Basingstoke, 1981), p. 73. See “Reception of Nineveh Sculptures in the British Museum,” Illustrated London News, 28 February 1852, p. 184. Drawings in the Illustrated London News article depicted the cumbersome process of setting in place what was called “the largest monolith which has reached England from the buried city of the East” (The Times, 9 February 1849, p. 5).

8. “Commercial Travellers' School,” The Speeches of Charles Dickens, ed. K. J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 220; Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), II, 787. The best recent account of Layard's impact on Little Dorrit is Michael Costell, “Politics and Peeling Frescoes: Layard of Nineveh and Little Dorrit,” Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1984), 181-200.

9. Austen Henry Layard, The Nineveh Court and the Crystal Palace (London: Bradley and Evans, 1854), p. 26.

10. Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (New York: Putnam, 1849), pp. 75-76.

11. Edward Robinson, Introduction, Nineveh and Its Remains, p. ii. D. G. Rossetti, “The Burden of Nineveh,” in Poems and Translations, 1850-1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 12-17; [W. H. Stone,] “The Nineveh Bull,” Household Words, 8 February 1851, p. 469. For further information on the analogy in contemporary archaeological discussion, see Carl Woodring, “The Burden of Nineveh,” Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1983), pp. 12-14.

12. For a summary of the evidence in letters and speeches, see Harvey Peter Sucksmith, Introduction, Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Sucksmith (1855-57; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. xviii. All quotations from Little Dorrit are from this edition.

13. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. P. N. Furbank (1843-44; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 185. Dorothy Van Ghent discusses this passage in “The View From Todgers's,” Sewanee Review (Summer 1950), rpt. in The Dickens Critics, ed. George Ford and Lauriat Lane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 228.

14. The London Stereoscope Company was founded in 1854, its motto “No home without a stereoscope.” According to Altick, the little hand-held viewer “was the cosmorama and diorama finally domesticated” (p. 233).

15. Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 20.

16. Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century (London: A. and C. Black, 1909), rpt. as The Rise of Urban Britain (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 7.

17. F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London: Athlone Press, 1979), p. 49.

18. See the analysis of these two plates in Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 150-152, 164-165.

19. See, for example, the All the Year Round account of the St. Pancras Road project in [Joseph Charles Parkinson,] “Attila in London,” 26 May 1866, p. 466. Author attribution taken from Ella Ann Oppenlander, Dickens' All the Year Round: Descriptive Index and Contributor List (Troy: Whitston, 1984).

20. [Charles Dickens,] “The Uncommercial Traveller,” All the Year Round, 5 May 1860, p. 86.

21. George A. Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards (1839; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1977).

22. [Charles Dickens,] “The Uncommercial Traveller,” All the Year Round, 21 July 1860, p. 351.

23. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1911), p. 106.

24. P. 159. For a suggestive analysis of these passages as representative of Dickens's “defensive and challenging social and political attitudes,” see William Myers, “The Radicalism of Little Dorrit,” in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 89-90.

25. Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, ed. and rev. by Arthur Elton (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), pp. 120-126.

26. Macaulay's New Zealander makes his appearance in “Ranke's History of the Popes,” Edinburgh Review 145 (October 1840), p. 228. As N. John Hall has pointed out in his introduction to Trollope's New Zealander ([Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], p. xii), Macaulay took the image of the New Zealander from Walpole. Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), p. 188. G. A. Sala, Gaslight and Daylight (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), p. 66.

27. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 205.