SOURCE: Manning, Sylvia. “Social Criticism and Textual Subversion in Little Dorrit.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 127-47.

[In the following essay, Manning examines the way Dickens undermines the narrator in Little Dorrit and the ideological contradictions that this causes.]

Little Dorrit proffers a deal of ideological discourse, some of it ironic explication in the service of the novel's satirical stance, such as the analysis of How Not To Do It, and some of it wholly solemn expostulation to the same moral purpose, such as the narrator's commentary on Little Dorrit's suggestion that, because her father has paid with his life, he should not also have to repay his debts in money. Apparently congruent with this discourse are the Christian ideology implicit in the tale and the ideology of the novel form itself, which is the epistemological ground for the moral implications.

The ideology implicit in the story is constituted of a collection of comforting, radical eventualities: that the good shall be rewarded, that the mighty shall be cast down, that the lame shall walk (Mrs. Clennam) and the blind see (Arthur Clennam), that the prodigal daughter shall return (Tattycoram). The more fundamental ideology of novelistic plot assumes or asserts that events mean and tend towards larger outcomes; that individual action and chance combine into narratable history; that there are beginnings and endings; that there come points at which it is possible to say, “This happened and it was good [or bad].”¹

What I hope to show, however, is that the narrator's discourse is repeatedly undermined; the resulting contradictions constitute the ideology of the book, distinct from and less radical than the narrative stance. The ideology inherent in the conventions of narrative form, on the other hand, is also steadily undermined, but here the effect is to radicalize. These are the conventions that allow us to create meaning, believing that we are finding it, extracting it, not falsifying to reach it. As these are disrupted, the text presents the possibility of a world in which all we are really doing is circumlocuting. That prospect is truly frightening, and we can see its terror in the outrage of contemporary reviewers. The reviewers expressed two kinds of outrage: at the narrator's satire—one side of the book's constitutive ideological contradictions—and at the contraventions of form.

The narrator's comment on Little Dorrit's proposition occurs just at the end of Book 1, prior to the departure from the Marshalsea. Little Dorrit has asked Clennam if the debts must be paid from the newly inherited estate, he has said that they must, and she has responded that it seems unfair. The narrator comments:

The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit's mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

(Book 1, chapter 35)

The narrative voice of that paragraph and the voice of Mrs. Merdle's parrot, which doesn't parrot but counterpoints its keeper, seem hardly a continuous sensibility, yet they are presented as on the same side of the novel's social critique. To overstate it somewhat, the problem is that the narrator, like the parrot, is supposed to be right. He is the moral center that calibrates the satiric universe represented: he exposes, excoriates, mocks, derides folly when it is pernicious, and laughs more kindly at it when it is harmless. Moreover, by this point in the novel he has established certain specific values and valuations. These include: that the system of imprisonment for debt is foolish; that wealth is hollow, self-serving, and greedy; and that the building of human relations on a cash nexus is abhorrent. Little Dorrit's notion that perhaps an extent of suffering might annual a cash bond may strike us as consistent with these values. If they do, the narrator's comment—the paragraph I just cited—comes like a slap. It tells us that cash relations are not to be confused or re-shaped by human suffering.

Worse yet, the notion of the prison's taint on Little Dorrit that the narrator introduces here will be picked up, and carried as something of a motif, by three not very admirable characters, most notably Fanny, but Mr. Dorrit and Tip as well. It is the taint of the prison that accounts in their minds for such failures as Amy's attempt to assist the fainting Pet Gowan directly rather than sending her maid. And Amy herself accepts the idea that it is her prison-taint that prevents her from enjoying the sights of Venice and Rome and the daily social round.

This association of the narrator with the targets of his own satire may suggest that the ideological position of the novel is not where the satirist-narrator would have us believe. For a more extended instance of the same problem, we may consider Arthur's bankrupting of Doyce by his investment in Merdle's enterprises. The moral tone that surrounds this episode is established by the elaborated (one might argue, belabored) metaphor of illness and contagion leading to this crux and conveys a narrative valuation that finds it right for Arthur to suffer imprisonment in consequence. By the time Arthur arrives as a prisoner at the Marshalsea, in fact, the essential stupidity of the system seems to have been forgotten. Within hours, Arthur begins to sink into moral lassitude:

In the unnatural peace of having gone through the dreaded arrest, and got there,—the first change of feeling which the prison most commonly induced, and from which dangerous resting-place so many men had slipped to the depths of degradation and disgrace by so many ways—…

(Book 2, chapter 27)

“So many men” fall to degradation because they are weak and weary. The brief views we have of the inmates remind us that at the beginning of the story too, except for Amy and Plornish they were no better than they should be; they may not have deserved the prison, but they suit it. Arthur, we are told in Chapter 28 (Book 2), remains throughout his stay aloof from his fellow-prisoners; to be saved for a better end, he must be different. The note of stupidity is struck only further on, at the end of Chapter 32, when Mr. Casby pronounces, “Let him pay his debts and come out, come out; pay his debts, and come out.”

Not only is there no protest against Arthur's incarceration, but something hallowing has begun to hover around this particular prison. When Rugg urges Arthur to take his opportunity to go to the King's Bench instead, Arthur declines (Book 2, Chapter 26). From the moment he reaches the Marshalsea, the aura of Little Dorrit supervenes. When she herself returns, the place becomes virtually sanctified. The scene is worth looking at. Arthur has fallen into a feverish state of dozing and dreaming, has become aware of a bouquet of flowers without being able to focus on how it got there, has attempted some movements but given up:

When the first faintness consequent on having moved about had left him, he subsided into his former state. One of the night-tunes was playing in the wind, when the door of the room seemed to open to a light touch, and, after a moment's pause, a quiet figure seemed to stand there, with a black mantle on it. It seemed to draw the mantle off and drop it on the ground, and then it seemed to be his Little Dorrit in her old, worn dress. It seemed to tremble, and to clasp its hands, and to smile, and to burst into tears.

(Book 2, chapter 29)

The string of seemed's marks the ghostly benign, the mistiness of vague religious feeling, something so much too good to be true that we and Arthur alike must be brought to it through the mediating possibility that it is only a dream. The passage continues in this vein. Within a paragraph Little Dorrit is in Arthur's arms and he is exclaiming upon her and the beloved old dress. The dress is important because it marks the restoration of a prior, somehow more desirable, state. Lest we miss the point, Dickens provides a second marker as Little Dorrit continues:

“I hoped you would like me better in this dress than any other. I have always kept it by me, to remind me: though I wanted no reminding. I am not alone, you see. I have brought an old friend with me.”

Looking round, he saw Maggy in her big cap which had been long abandoned, with a basket on her arm as in the bygone days, chuckling rapturously.

(Probability is utterly abandoned. If Amy kept the dress, we have to assume a secret closet and a secret trunk, or what did her maid make of it? And she kept it to remind herself, though she needed no reminding.) Like Amy, Maggy has gotten herself up for the occasion—has as improbably retrieved the old cap as Amy retrieved the old dress. Maggy has no role in this scene, unless one can imagine Little Dorrit in need of a chaperone. Her function is to emphasize the note of restoration.

Restoration of what? Of the days of innocence, in which a love like Amy's and Arthur's could grow. Of the days before the Dorrits' fall to wealth and Arthur's sins of speculation. For Little Dorrit and Arthur, the Marshalsea has become a purgatory, a vale of suffering that will purify them for each other. That is why Arthur holds to the notion, grotesque if viewed rationally, of staying in the prison right up to the moment of his marriage. They must go directly from the prison to the church, from purgatory to heaven. That Amy was better off without her wealth fits the novel's satiric program, but that by imprisonment Arthur is purged of his economic error and his soul brought to recognize its mate, does not. It sits awkwardly with how the prison appears to stand in the first part of the novel, as well as with the rest of the prison metaphor as it is generally understood.

Yet the scene gets more complex. After Little Dorrit has hung the old bonnet in the old place, after her modest head has bowed to sew a curtain for his room, after they have sat hand in hand and one bright star has risen in the sky, Little Dorrit offers Arthur her money to obtain his release. He responds with one of the most convoluted lover's speeches on record:

“If, in the bygone days when this was your home and when this was your dress, I had understood myself (I speak only of myself) better, and had read the secrets of my own breast more distinctly; if, through my reserve and self-mistrust, I had discerned a light that I see brightly now when it has passed far away, and my weak footsteps can never overtake it; if I had then known, and told you that I loved and honoured you, not as the poor child I used to call you, but as a woman whose true hand would raise me high above myself and make me a far happier and better man; if I had so used the opportunity there is no recalling—as I wish I had. O I wish I had!—and if something had kept us apart then, when I was moderately thriving, and when you were poor; I might have met your noble offer of your fortune, dearest girl, with other words than these, and still have blushed to touch it. But, as it is, I must never touch it, never!”

He does not stop here, but it gets no more lucid. Though others might not, as I do, have difficulty sorting out the respectable arrangement between declaring love and accepting money, the precise nature of that arrangement is less important than the fact that there is one. The implication is that the banker's scales and scoop take human relationships and coin together, and that that is as it should be. The marriage of Arthur's and Little Dorrit's true minds is as subject to the impediments (and impulses) of cash as are the marriages of Gowan and Pet or Fanny and Edmund Sparkler. And just as with Gowan's and Pet's marriage, the enabling banker is Mr. Meagles, retired but still able to straighten out such affairs.

Compare Arthur's speech to another on the subject of love that can no longer be:

“Ask me not … if I love him still or if he still loves me or what the end is to be or when, we are surrounded by watchful eyes and it may be that we are destined to pine asunder it may be never more to be reunited not a word not a breath not a look to betray us all must be secret as the tomb wonder not therefore that even if I should seem comparatively cold to Arthur or Arthur should seem comparatively cold to me we have fatal reasons it is enough if we understand them hush!”

(Book 1, chapter 24)

Flora may fail a test of syntax, but there is a level at which her values are closer to those the novel touts than what the narrative gives, with tacit admiration, to Arthur. The novel claims the moral ground that holds love and charity superior to the ledgers of cash transactions, but the truest exemplar of these values is Flora, fat and prolix in a world where the best are thin and laconic, her sentences running over as her flesh runs over, an object of laughter more harsh than affectionate. There is no contradiction here: Flora is a pariah because the narrative subscribes to love and charity but bows to proper relations and proper-ty. (Flora is incapable of taking proper tea: she eats too much and prefers the nip of the wrong beverage.)

Another derided female worth considering in this regard is Fanny. The following dialogue takes place on a tired afternoon in Venice. Fanny is speaking first:

“… Come! Has it never struck you, Amy, that Pa is monstrously polite to Mrs. General.”

Amy, murmuring “No,” looked quite confounded.

“No; I dare say not. But he is,” said Fanny. “He is, Amy. And remember my words. Mrs. General has designs on Pa!”

“Dear Fanny, do you think it possible that Mrs. General has designs on any one?”

“Do I think it possible?” retorted Fanny. “My love, I know it. I tell you she has designs on Pa. And more than that, I tell you Pa considers her such a wonder, such a paragon of accomplishment, and such an acquisition to our family, that he is ready to get himself into a state of perfect infatuation with her at any moment. And that opens a pretty picture of things, I hope? Think of me with Mrs. General for a Mama!”

Little Dorrit did not reply, “Think of me with Mrs. General for a Mama;” but she looked anxious, and seriously inquired what had led Fanny to these conclusions.

“Lord, my darling,” said Fanny, tartly. “You might as well ask me how I know when a man is struck with myself! But of course I do know. It happens pretty often: but I always know it. I know this in much the same way, I suppose. At all events, I know it.”

(Book 2, chapter 7)

Amy continues with a series of doubting questions: “You never heard Papa say anything?” “And you never heard Mrs. General say anything?” “At least, you may be mistaken, Fanny. Now, may you not?” Fanny treats these questions with increasing contempt, but we may note that the contempt is not merely characteristic but, in this instance, perhaps called for. Though the text directs our sympathy as usual away from Fanny and toward Amy, as with the notation of the retort Amy did not make (“Think of me with Mrs. General for a Mama”), the fact is that Fanny is right and Amy is obtuse.

The narrative takes Fanny's part in so far as it accepts the notion that it is wrong for Mrs. General to marry Mr. Dorrit. One might ask why. Does he deserve better? No. Would he be unhappy with her? No. What is wrong is that she aspires. She is absurd as Young John Chivery is absurd in his aspiration for Little Dorrit's hand. In both instances the laughter or disapproval is based upon notions of appropriate matches that are essentially the same as those that chafe the dowager Mrs. Gowan and reconcile Mr. Meagles in their children's marriage. The disjunction between the tone that continues to disparage Fanny as she discusses Mrs. General's aspirations and the narrative's sharing of her perspective upon them signals a moment of tension in the ideological strands of the novel. Although every moment at which we feel dissonance may not indicate such a point of tension, the points of tension all seem to carry some such surface sign.

This sort of ideological crux also attends Little Dorrit's reappearance in the Marshalsea wearing the old plain dress and the old bonnet. The moment was prepared at the close of Book 1, when Amy is carried out to the departing family coach in the arms of Clennam. The perspective is not the narrator's, but Fanny's:

“I do say,” she repeated, “this is perfectly infamous! Really almost enough, even at such a time as this, to make one wish one was dead! Here is that child Amy, in her ugly old shabby dress, which she was so obstinate about, Pa, which I over and over again begged and prayed her to change, and which she over and over again objected to, and promised to change today, saying she wished to wear it as long as ever she remained in there with you—which was absolutely romantic nonsense of the lowest kind—here is that child Amy disgracing us to the last moment and at the last moment, by being carried out in that dress after all.”

Amy's steadfastness to the dress, of course, is intended to display her rejection of the material values of the rest of her family and her steadfastness to—to what? To her love for her father, perhaps, to a life in which duty is harsh but clear, but could it be also to her own centrality, to stasis, to the familiar? Again the text directs our sympathy wholly to Little Dorrit, and again there remains some unacknowledged validity to Fanny's critique of “romantic nonsense of the lowest kind.”

If we set aside that sense of Amy deserving criticism as too perverse a claim, we remain with the dress as a revered icon. The true and the good cling to the shabby dress, the superficial and vain glory in bright new clothes. Consistent with this iconography, Young John is presented setting out upon his ill-fated courtship:

He was neatly attired in a plum-coloured coat, with as large a collar of black velvet as his figure could carry; a silken waistcoat, bedecked with golden sprigs; a chaste neckerchief much in vogue at that day, representing a preserve of lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons so highly decorated with side-stripes that each leg was a three-stringed lute; and a hat of state very high and hard. When the prudent Mrs. Chivery perceived that in addition to these adornments her John carried a pair of white kid gloves, and a cane like a little finger-post, surmounted by an ivory hand marshalling him the way he should go; and when she saw him, in this heavy marching order, turn the corner to the right; she remarked to Mr. Chivery, who was at home at the time, that she thought she knew which way the wind blew.

(Book 1, chapter 18)

So far, so consistent. It turns out, however, that pretension is not the only unacceptable mode. Here are the people who offer services to the inhabitants of the Marshalsea:

The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency, was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking-sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women, were made up of patches and pieces of other people's individuality, and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart.

(Book 1, chapter 9)

There is a curious problem in the clause “were made up of patches and pieces of other people's individuality.” The syntax of the sentence suggests that the three clauses are re-statements of one another: “[1] All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women, [2] were made up of patches and pieces of other people's individuality, and [3] had no sartorial existence of their own proper.” The middle clause thus confirms brutally the synecdoche of the clothes for the person: if you wear other people's clothes you are made up of other people's individuality. Does the narrator—Dickens—anyone—really mean to imply that one's individuality resides in one's clothing? By the logic of this description, Fanny's plunge into a sea of fine clothing, first at the family's liberation, but again, more assertively still, upon her marriage, is the expression of her individuality, her sartorial existence to reflect her selfhood. Now we can patch at this fault. For one thing, we know from our sojourns in the Dickens world that what is probably wrong with the attendants' clothes is not that they are old and threadbare and second-hand, but that they are not neat. Where they neat, these would be a better class of people. (Amy's “shabby dress … being so neat” virtually enhances her “delicately bent head, … tiny form, [and] … quick little pair of busy hands” [Book I, Chapter 5]). But I think that for all our patching the fault will remain, and the telltale failure of tone is in the passage describing the shabby attendants. Beneath the fault is the tension between a simple moral philosophy of clothes and something that shares the dandyism of Young John. Perhaps after all what is wrong about his finery is not that it is finery but that he does not know how to do it right: the difference between a fop and a pretentious fop, not foppery itself.

The narrative commentary is marked by ideological bits that seem regularly to cross purpose with other explicit or implicit ideological stances in the text. Similar contradictions appear around ideological bits carried implicitly by the action. For example: as a moment of high drama, as a reprieve from punishment achieved through a sudden impulse of regard for her stepson or perhaps through the release of long-pent guilt, Mrs. Clennam rises from her chair and walks through the streets of London. The action carries, implicitly, a Christian note of renovation in the motif of the lame walking. In the upsweep of events rapidly moving to a close that must be triumphant for Arthur and Amy, we are likely to succumb to the sentimental gratification afforded by this miracle. Rigaud must be defeated and, since Mrs. Clennam has repented (albeit rather suddenly), and since Arthur so much wants her to love him, perhaps, too, she may be redeemed—and perhaps the walking is the sign of that redemption. Her meeting with Little Dorrit is so powerful an image that we are likely to forget, soon after the book is closed, that this redemption is short-lived. Mrs. Clennam gets to walk from her house to the Marshalsea, and back, but not further. What she has willed, the narrative puts aside: the trauma of the collapsing house sends her into a paralytic stroke. This novel is of sterner stuff than the sentimentality that inclines toward redemption. In a novel in which the last farthing of debt must be repaid, in which human suffering has no place in the ledgers of cash transactions, and in which strict properties govern the mingling of cash and love, Mrs. Clennam cannot go unpunished. The lame shall walk only if they deserve to.

Repeatedly, conflicting ideological bits undermine satiric or radical stances assumed by the narrative, revealing a text paradoxically enmeshed in the system it is trying to criticize. The novel's maneuvers within the ideology of plot may seem at first surprisingly different. The story presents two initial strands: the Dorrits in the Marshalsea and the somewhat amorphous mystery Arthur is trying to solve—or perhaps trying to find in order to solve. One might expect that the solution to Arthur's mystery would somehow be entwined with the liberation of Mr. Dorrit, especially since Little Dorrit's employment at Mrs. Clennam's tells us that she has something to do with Arthur's dilemma. One might expect so because this is a novel and the more because Dickens assures us that things will indeed be fully linked:

And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.

—at the end of Chapter 2, and again in Chapter 15, at Mrs. Clennam's:

Strange, if the little sick-room fire were in effect a beacon fire, summoning some one, and that the most unlikely some one in the world, to the spot that must be come to. Strange, if the little sick-room light were in effect a watch-light, burning in that place every night until an appointed event should be watched out! Which of the vast multitude of travellers, under the sun and the stars, climbing the dusty hills, and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another; which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey's end, be travelling surely hither?

And more:

Time shall show us. The post of honour and the post of shame, the general's station and the drummer's, a peer's statue in Westminster Abbey and a seaman's hammock in the bosom of the deep, the mitre and the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the guillotine—the travellers to all are on the great high road, but it has wonderful divergencies, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound.

But it does not come out that way. Mr. Dorrit is freed by the solution of a very different mystery, which is of no broader interest at all. And the mystery surrounding Arthur is entirely moot as to any effect it might have or any action anyone might take, except perhaps that Mrs. Clennam owes Little Dorrit 1,000 guineas. The confusion of the denouement enforces an impression that all the threads are being pulled together, but if we pause to unravel the detail we see that the convergence is not there. The conventions of plot, that we very much expect Dickens to uphold and that are expressed in the passages I just quoted, require signification in the juxtaposition of events. At the end of Little Dorrit the story breaks loose from this ideology.

The divergence of the two plot strands—Arthur's mystery and Little Dorrit's story—may be further masked, or confused, by the forced joining of their two iconic figures, Amy and Mrs. Clennam. Rigaud is a savvy operator who has laid his last trap with great care. Yet, almost spontaneously, Mrs. Clennam fools him. She gets away, gets out, and foils his fail-safe stratagem by confronting Little Dorrit, while he sits smugly in the window-seat awaiting her return. Why does she succeed? Perhaps because it is so irrational a move that Rigaud cannot anticipate it. What she achieves is that she gets the box of papers back from Little Dorrit, who otherwise would have followed Rigaud's instructions and handed them over to Arthur, thus betraying his step-mother's perfidy to him. But for one thing, as Mr. Meagles figures out right away, there remain the originals of the papers, hidden somewhere but still liable to cause mischief (especially without Rigaud's death, a happy event Mrs. Clennam could not have expected). For another, her sudden passion for saving her living image before Arthur is dramatically out of character. She also intends to bring Amy back to the house to display to Rigaud that Amy is not an alternate customer for his blackmail, but this would serve only a purpose of driving down Rigaud's price, not of suppressing the story, which he would be quite capable of revealing out of sheer spite were his plans for profit spoiled.

What I suggest is happening here is that iconographic representation is deforming plot and character to its purposes, and that these purposes turn out to be the representation of the novel's—though not the narrator's—ideology. Here is the narrator's, a doctrine of right and wrong, of a figure of light and a figure in shade:

In the softened light of the window, looking from the scene of her early trials to the shining sky, she [Little Dorrit] was not in stronger opposition to the black figure in the shade than the life and doctrine on which she rested were to that figure's history. It bent its head low again, and said not a word. It remained thus, until the first warning bell began to ring.

The warning bell stirs Mrs. Clennam to action, and she and Little Dorrit set off to the house. Dickens shifts to a language of reconciliation:

It was one of those summer evenings when there is not greater darkness than a long twilight. The vista of street and bridge was plain to see, and the sky was serene and beautiful. People stood and sat at their doors, playing with children, and enjoying the evening; numbers were walking for air; the worry of the day had almost worried itself out, and few but themselves were hurried. As they crossed the bridge, the clear steeples of the many churches looked as if they had advanced out of the murk that usually enshrouded them, and come much nearer. The smoke that rose into the sky had lost its dingy hue and taken a brightness upon it. The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the long light films of cloud that lay at peace in the horizon. From a radiant centre, over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns into a glory.

(Book 2, Chapter 31)

Not a sentence of this paragraph fails to underline the point: peace returns as the lion and the lamb hasten through the streets together. It is not simply peace, however: the novel acknowledges the values of only one, only the figure of light, but it participates in both. Little Dorrit's life and doctrine have been woven of devotion, loyalty, generosity; so have the novel's. Mrs. Clennam's history has been one of strictly told ledgers, long-nurtured vengeance, smug self-righteousness; so has the novel's. The two come together not in the triumph of one but in an impure mixture, the inconsistent, contradictory compromises wrought of the constitutive tensions of a popular art.

Despite the discomfort of some early reviewers, notably Fitzjames Stephen,² the novel is not seditious because it attacks the Circumlocution Office. If it is seditious at all, it is because it refuses to develop properly. The background plot is close to chaos (prompting such aids to the reader as the Penguin edition's summary in Appendix A), the hints about roads of life converging do not pan out, and the ending does not reach closure. The description I just read of the streets as Little Dorrit and Mrs. Clennam return to the house has the sense of ending we recognize—but there are two chapters yet to go Mrs. Clennam, Amy and Arthur alike seek rest, stability, resolution. Mrs. Clennam gets it in the punitive form of paralysis. What Amy and Arthur achieve finds no resonance in the world around them, natural or human. These are the last lines of the novel:

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

The page goes blank, but it was not the falling note we expected. The story completes its break from the ideology of plot: having not quite brought action and chance into coherent history, it does not quite close. There are still lumps in the paste.

Within the two strands of the plot—Arthur's mystery and Little Dorrit's story—other strands are identified but not developed. Peter Brooks, following Benjamin, reminds us that “traditional storytelling [is] allied with travel, with the reports of those coming from afar, and with the marvellous” (155) because the narratable must be beyond the ordinary. Little Dorrit, however, presents the potential for plot in exotic places only to reject it. Flora, ever of literary sensibility, recognizes this locus for story as she urges Arthur to an account of his experience:

“Oh good gracious me I hope you never kept yourself a bachelor so long on my account!” tittered Flora: “but of course you never did why should you, pray don't answer, I don't know where I'm running to, oh do tell me something about the Chinese ladies whether their eyes are really so long and narrow always putting me in mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards and do they really wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off their foreheads don't they hurt themselves, and why do they stick little bells all over their bridges and temples and hats and things or don't they really do it?” Flora gave him another of her old glances. Instantly she went on again, as if he had spoken in reply for some time.

“Then it's all true and they really do! good gracious Arthur!—pray excuse me—old habit—Mr. Clennam far more proper—what a country to live in for so long a time, and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everybody carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are!”

(Book 1, Chapter 13)

Arthur is no more capable of responding than he was the first time she paused for breath, but the problem is not merely the impossibility of talking to Flora. Whatever Arthur's exploits in China were, they are not narratable. They seem, indeed, not to have had any bearing on him. The twenty years are a blank, a void that closes when Arthur returns to London, to take up the unchanged relationship with his mother in the unchanged house of his childhood.

Similarly, Daniel Doyce's experience abroad is not narratable. It offers one paragraph of contrived contrast to the dominion of the Barnacles, and beyond that only a place to get Doyce off to so Arthur can fail and back from so that Arthur can be revived.

One might argue, however, that the motif of travel is centered on neither of these two but on the Dorrit family in Book 2. But what turns out to be narratable in their experience is only the continuation of the internal family dynamics that form the subject of Book 1. The purpose of their journey is to tell a false tale, to efface the narrative of Book 1. The effect of their journey is to return them unchanged to its starting-point: the futility is etched in the pathos of Mr. Dorrit's reversion to the Marshalsea in his last conscious hours. For the Dorrits, travel is just what Mr. Meagles, the inveterate traveller with nothing to tell, who never learns a language and stares at all he meets (Book I, Chapter 14), calls it: just “trotting about the world,” a deal of motion that may serve purposes of various sorts, but not narration.

The promises of a tightly-knit plot were made in the metaphor of journey, and broken. The travels themselves do not produce narrative. And the sense of non-ending, the failure of closure, arises in part from this. Dickens' metaphor of journey at this point seems almost perverse:

They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun's bright rays, and then went down.

The phrase “went down” is a bit odd, certainly neither obvious nor necessary. Dickens makes it the structural basis of his next, and final, paragraph:

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother's care, in the fullness of time, to Fanny's neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

At the beginning of the paragraph the “went down” is made figurative—“went down into a … life”—but at the end it is re-literalized—“went down into the roaring streets”—so that the novel concludes its length of unnarratable journeys with the start of another.

We realize now that the plot notion of significant journey has been parodied from the start. The same chapter (I,2) that concluded with the sentence I quoted earlier, of “journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another,” offered first another version of this motif:

“In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads, … and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.”

This is the voice of Miss Wade, who, seeing Pet shrink at the ominous tone, pushes it further:

“… you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road, who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.”

There is a promise here—or threat—of a tightly knit narrative converging on Pet or her parents, and later some foreboding of its fulfillment when Rigaud attaches himself to Gowan, but nothing happens, except for the death of Gowan's dog.

In place of the journey as the source of narrative, the novel appears to offer the plot of knowing, the mystery plot with the pusillanimous Arthur at its center. To Clarence Barnacle, he is the man who “wants to know,” and the tag fits even better Arthur's relation to his mother and their past than it does his efforts on behalf of Amy. What the two efforts share is ineffectuality: Arthur never gets anywhere against the Circumlocution Office and he also never gets to learn the secret of his past. The reader finds out at the end, and Little Dorrit comes to know some of it, but Arthur remains wholly ignorant. And when, at Little Dorrit's nuptial request, he burns the codicil, he does not know that he is destroying his last chance of knowing. His father's name is withheld even from the reader, resulting in the awkwardness of Jeremiah Flintwinch's repeated reference to him only as “Arthur's father” even in private conversation with Mrs. Clennam (Book I, Chapter 14). All this diminution of the hero for the sake of saving Mrs. Clennam's memory (a grace she hardly merits) and emphasizing Little Dorrit's selflessness (a virtue that hardly needs repetition). Arthur sees, at last but not too late, his love for Little Dorrit, but he never learns his own story. The blind shall see, but only partially. Yet, unlike Mrs. Clennam's walking, Arthur's sight is a gift he would seem to deserve. His frustration appears to be something that, like the disappearance of Cavalletto at the end, the novel does not recognize. It is not just a matter of Arthur's not knowing something; it is a matter of his being denied knowledge he was specifically seeking, including the fact that this turned out to be the knowledge of his own birth. The novel is eliding its derailment of a mystery plot it has trailed through eighteen numbers by substituting a chaotic, unrememberable, and altogether creaky tale of double Flintwinches, double mothers, and double wills.

What we are left with is one mystery—the origins of the Dorrits that connect them to the unclaimed estate—solved by Pancks but not worth knowing (and not told to us), and another mostly known to us but not to the would-be detective hero. The novel has foiled our expectations for mystery as for adventure, expectations derived from our indoctrination in the ideology of nineteenth-century novelistic plot, from our belief in beginnings and endings. But it has done so so subtly, and surrounded its reversals with so much distraction, that we may not notice. We may be conscious not of a novel that subverts the conventions of its own form, but of the structures and statements that indicate continuity with those conventions: yet if we are true believers, we feel somehow uncomfortable, a sense of something amiss.

Dickens' contemporaries, undisturbed by the antics of the twentieth-century novel, were very much true believers, and to boot were equally agnostic of Dickens' infallibility. Listen, then, to the howl of pain from one reviewer, E. B. Hanley, writing for Blackwood's for April, 1857, with only sixteen numbers of Little Dorrit published (as though he could not wait):

Even if, in the few remaining numbers, the joints of the story should be tightened up, and the different parts of the machinery made to work in something like harmony, yet that would not now retrieve the character of so aimless a work. A most cumbrous array of characters and scenes has been set in motion, and all for what?

Absolutely, the only event yet described which can be called a leading incident, is the deliverance of old Dorrit from the Marshalsea. And how is this brought about? Not by any cause with which any of the characters are even remotely connected, but by the extremely probable circumstance, accidentally discovered, that the old gentleman, after a captivity of twenty years or so, has been all the time the right heir of the great estates of the “Dorrits of Dorsetshire,” of which distinguished family we then hear for the first time. We would pardon this violent wrench in the story if the dislocation produced any interesting results, but the contrary is the case; for, whereas old Dorrit was, in his character of Father of the Marshalsea, the best-drawn personage and the most interesting study (we might really say the only one of any value) in the book, he becomes, in his accession to wealth, a prosy old driveller, whose inanities are paraded and circumstantially described in a long succession of twaddle, till the favorable impression made in his former phase is quite effaced before his decease, which happily took place in the last number, and which, to all appearance, might just as well have occurred a long time ago. There is positively no dramatic result whatever from the marvellous convulsion in the fortunes of the Dorrit family up to the old gentleman's decease, except that one of his daughters is married to a Mr. Sparkler, one of the amateur idiots of the book, who is the stepson of the great speculator, Mr. Merdle, another of the amateur idiots of the book.

The fortunes of the Clennam family, occupying as they do a space nearly as large as those of the Dorrits, would, by an artistic writer, have been so interwoven that the opposing or blending interests should have elicited character and sustained curiosity; yet four-fifths of the book have elapsed without any connection being even hinted at, except that Little Dorrit came to work as a seemstress for Mrs. Clennam, without any result whatsoever, except that young Clennam noticed her peculiarity of taking home some of her dinner instead of eating it, and Mrs. Clennam (a most unpleasant old image, that sits always bolt upright in a wheeled chair like some grim heathen deity, and habitually talks in the most unchristian manner) once relaxes from her stony sourness so far as to kiss her. There is some hint of some influence that some Clennam may have had formerly on the fate of old Dorrit, but so obscure and shadowy as to induce the reader to believe that the author had not made up his mind as to what it should turn out to be, and was, therefore, anxious not to commit himself—a blemish that might injure a much better work than this. Meantime the Clennam household have experienced no vicissitudes, and are exactly where they were in the first number. Then there is the Meagles family, whose fortunes, whatever they may be, are totally distinct, so far, from the Dorrits and the Clennams, and have experienced only one change—viz., that the daughter, whose courtship was in progress when the book began, is now married, and has an addition to her family. The Casbys are in statu quo. A murderer and a smuggler, who were introduced at the beginning, in prison together, in a scene well calculated to excite attention, have done nothing in any way worthy of their formidable antecedents.

Unhampered by notions of Dickens' necessary excellence, Hanley is free to find fault (and he finds much more than what I quoted); deeply and unself-consciously committed to the ideology of novelistic form, he is sensitive to and outraged by the novel's contraventions of it. He points them out more thoroughly and succinctly than I have done, albeit with a very different understanding of the phenomenon. It is significant that he was not alone. The Saturday Review, for example, attacked Little Dorrit repeatedly. Here is an excerpt from July, 1857, probably by Fitzjames Stephen:

As far as we can judge he wrote Little Dorrit, month by month, at haphazard, without ever having sketched out a plan, and failed in executing his conceptions. He invests his characters with mystery, which he quite fails in clearing up. He suggests complications which involve nothing, and secrets which all end in no meaning. He hints at difficulties which are never unravelled, and we flounder on to the six hundredth page expecting to find a discovery when there is nothing to discover. Either idleness or inability compels him to abandon his characters with the unsatisfactory conclusion that they had no story to tell. Mrs. Clennam's house is haunted by some ghostly mystery—the weird old woman has some impenetrable secret—horrid anticipations of coming doom are in the garrets above and in the cellars below. Will Mr. Dickens assure us that the fall of the house in Tottenham-court road was not a happy solution to a difficulty which he had not the skill to disentangle? Does he ask us to believe that, when he first introduced us to the old house in the City at p. 23, he foresaw the very prosaic catastrophe of its fall at p. 600? Are we to understand that all Affery's horrors were meant to be resolved into the every-day phenomena of dry rot?

Then take Miss Wade. It is plain that the author intended to connect her former history with the other characters. He throws out hints and suggestions of some such relation between her and old Casby; but it all comes to nothing. … So again with Tattycoram. It is impossible to believe that the parentage of a foundling was not intended to be developed and woven into the plot. … Blandois, too, and Mr. and Mrs. Gowan—was it not meant that the future of the latter and the antecedents of the first should be connected with the drama of the tale?

In other words, the artistic fault of Little Dorrit is that it is not a tale. It neither begins nor ends—it has no central interest, no legitimate catastrophe, and no modelling of the plot into a whole.

(15-16)

No beginning, no ending, and false directions throughout the long middle. While reviewers worried about the British body politic fumed at the novel's satiric agenda, reviewers who cared for the experience of the novel were beside themselves at this one's disruption of their expectations. (Sometimes these were the same person.)

One could respond to the argument I have just made by saying that all it tells us is what we have long known, that the novel is another loose, baggy monster. One could support such a response with an analysis of another plot strand that does not develop: the Clennam/Pet Meagles/Gowan triangle. Here we have the beloved, the lover, the rival, and the father inclined towards the lover. Something should happen. Nothing does. The beloved marries the rival and they live unhappily ever after. The lover's fixation on this beloved blocks for a while, perhaps, his recognition of another love, but it is neither the sole nor the central cause of the blocking. Nor is there any suggestion that the second love is truer, as for instance in David Copperfield Agnes is truer than Dora. In the end, the romantic triangle turns out not to have much to do with anything, except possibly for those of us who harbor the undoubtedly inappropriate thought that a marriage between Arthur and Pet (achieved, say, through Rigaud's murder of Gowan) would be a lot healthier than his marriage with Little Dorrit. Little Dorrit becomes for Arthur at once child and mother, both endearing relations but, for the conventional among us, not comfortably joined with marital consummation. At this point, the road of our argument branches, and we may choose. Down one path lies the simple explanation, loose baggy monster. Down the other, the recognition of the fit between the odd-course development of this strand of plot and Dickens' recurrent circling around themes of incest and adolescent female sexuality. On this path we find numerous images compatible with a conventional ideology of love and marriage—Flora (fat women do not marry, or, frustrated women grow fat); Mr. F's aunt (the irreducible hatefulness of spinsters, distilled to an essence); Miss Wade (the dangers of uncontained female friendship); Minnie Gowan (the penance of a society-marriage); the Plornishes and the Chiverys (the silliness of the lower class); Fanny Dorrit (the emptiness of a society-marriage); and more—numerous images compatible with a conventional ideology of love and marriage surrounding, one might say obfuscating, a plot line that supports the unspeakable.

The secret of Arthur's birth and his father's will is a secret of sexuality. It may be that Arthur could not solve this mystery—or even learn what it was—for the same reason that the narrative obscures the nature of his relationship with Little Dorrit. On the fateful night at his lodgings, Arthur suggests that he call her “Little Dorrit”:

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

“Little Dorrit.”

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

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

(Book I, chapter 14)

Amy, “my child,” whose womanhood shocks a prostitute, Amy the “little mother” who slips into her old place beside her father, beside Arthur: to love Amy is another way to keep the secret of human sexuality, as is to make hers the highest form of marriage. For both Arthur and the narrative, Amy is at once the medium of sexual denial and the locus of forbidden sexual impulse.

At this point of tension more than others one can perhaps see why Dickens does not follow through. This is a novel full of stories that do not get told: mysteries unsolved or unexplained, journeys unnarrated, romances unprecipitated. The undeveloped romance may demonstrate most clearly the connection between these deflections of narrative and the ideological contradictions. The novel represents the contradictions but cannot explain them: hence not only deflections, but confusions, doublings, and disruptions.

The novel's subversions of plot are not visible enough to show as radical and probably are not conscious. In contrast, where the novel presents itself as radical, in its professed ideological stances, it cannot hold position: it slips back, here and there, into the system it condemns. The contrast, however, is specious. What happens with the ideological issues I have looked at—debt, love, imprisonment, clothing—is confluent with the novel's disruptions of form and the ideological tenor of that form. It may seem that with one set the orthodox is undermining the radical and with the other the radical is deflecting the orthodox, but aside from the fact that radical and orthodox are matters of perspective, what is upsetting what matters less than the continuous process of upset. The continuous process of upset raises the spectre of indeterminacy—not of the text, but of the world implied by the text. The world has too much meaning to allow coherent interpretation, single vision, moral certainty, or neat plotting.

In psychoanalytic terms, one might understand the indeterminacy as defense, an obfuscation designed to repress, or at any rate to deflect, what Dickens does not wish to confront directly. If one were to apply such a reading more broadly, in terms not of the author but of the culture, one might argue that what the novel reveals is a society caught between what it cannot face and what it projects in consequence of this denial. More simply, one might educe the threat of indeterminacy as it stalks the novel, within the novel's own tropes.

In the face of indeterminacy, the entire novel may be circumlocution. Thus the Circumlocution Office becomes an (unintended) figure of the novel itself. At the Circumlocution Office, as at the novel, you can ask and ask, but you cannot know. Like the novel, the Circumlocution Office is concerned to perpetuate itself, by stringing out its business as long as possible. In the Circumlocution Office secrets are buried, information is obscured, and in consequence an endless flow of language—most of it on paper—is generated. So, too, in the novel. The Circumlocution Office battens on disorder, the frustration of inquiry and the inconclusion of enterprise. The Circumlocution Office, the novel, and Flora all take their fecundity from their incoherence: their actions fail to culminate in shapely outcomes, they evade beginnings and endings.

It may be that all any of us can do is circumlocute. That threat arises not from the Circumlocution Office as a satire upon British government, but from its emblematic relation to the novel's plot and the plot's contraventions of novelistic expectation. These provoked the deepest cries of pain from contemporary reviewers, and may continue to trouble us even today, when we are probably as smug about our superiority to the satire as Fitzjames Stephen was about its targets.

Notes

1. In Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (1987), Leonard Davis spends a full chapter (12٪ of a text to which I am much indebted) explaining what he means by ideology. At the end, he concludes that he uses the word in three “general and overlapping ways”:

   • •“a system of beliefs of a particular group or class”
   • •“false ideas or false consciousness”
   • •“the general cultural system for the creation of signs and meanings” (p. 51)

   • (p. 51)

   I will use the word here principally in Davis's first sense, somewhat in his third, and not at all in his second. That is, to some extent as “the general cultural system for the creation of signs and meanings,” but mainly as “a system of beliefs of a particular group or class.”

2. See “Mr. Dickens as Politician,” Saturday Review, 3 (January, 1857), 8-9.

Works Cited

Anonymous. “Little Dorrit.” Saturday Review 4 (July 1857): 15-16.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot.

Davis, Leonard. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction.

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. London: Penguin Classics, 1967.

Hanley, E. B. “Little Dorrit.” Blackwood's Magazine 52 (April 1857).

Stephen, Fitzjames. “Mr. Dickens as Politician.” Saturday Review 3 (January, 1857): 8-9.