[Spoiler alert! In this commentary, I have written about everything that happens in this 1857 novel, two instalments at a time. After having read two, I wrote about them before reading on.]
The first two instalments—Book 1, Chapters 1-8
It’s good to be back. I haven’t reread one of Dickens’s great novels for a while, and it’s been decades since I read this one. As ever, I’ll only write about instalments as I read them this time around.
This is Book the First—Poverty, and there’s plenty of it in these chapters. And, while there are different kinds of poverty, and different ways to endure it, there are characters with money living alongside the poor ones. But, of course, it’s more complicated than that. In the first chapter, we meet Rigaud, the man who is going to be one of the novel’s villains. He’s already murdered his wife before the start, is in prison awaiting trial, and is one of Dickens’s great chancers. ‘I have been treated and respected as a gentleman universally. If you try to prejudice me by making out that I have lived by my wits—how do your lawyers live—your politicians—your intriguers—your men of the Exchange?’ It was Thackeray who had coined the phrase—or the motto—How to Live Well on Nothing a Year. It’s the title of a chapter in Vanity Fair, published the previous decade, and it fits the lifestyle of the moustachioed Rigaud perfectly.
In Chapter 1 he’s in a cell in a cold, dark prison in a hot, oppressively bright Marseilles. He’s sharing it with an eternally cheerful little smuggler called ‘John Baptist’ Cavaletto, and it’s all he does share. Cavaletto is at the opposite end of the scale of entitlement from Rigaud, making light of his penniless state and seeming not to feel any resentment that Rigaud eats and drinks like a lord while he, John Baptist, gnaws a piece of dry bread. I get the feeling we haven’t seen the last of him as Rigaud is escorted off to trial. But before that happens, he demonstrates that he has a kind of natural clock and GPS system, and Rigaud irritably asks why. ‘How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am.’ He demonstrates it by drawing imaginary maps of exactly where they are. He starts with the prison, out into the city, then out to everywhere he must ever have been—most of France and northern Italy. I can’t imagine Dickens endowing him with such skills if he wasn’t going to be using them somehow later in the novel. Meanwhile, we can be pretty sure that Rigaud won’t be found guilty, despite the murder looking like an open and shut case. He’s much too entertainingly villainous for Dickens not to have something in mind for him later.
Prisons are a thing in these chapters, as is the stark contrast with the alluring world outside. ‘Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside….’ As Rigaud puts it, ‘To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that never shines in here!’ Meanwhile (or later, it isn’t clear) in another part of Marseilles Mr Meagles, a middle-class English traveller, is complaining about feeling imprisoned by the quarantine rules. An accidental fellow-traveller is the mild, conciliatory Arthur Clennam. He’s 40 years old, and we will find out during the next couple of chapters how he feels he has wasted most of his life so far propping up the family business in China. He was working there with his cold, unemotional father, after whose death he has decided to quit. He knows it will be difficult for him to tell his mother, whose own coldness and hardness is established on Clennam’s return to London in the next chapter.
But we are still in Marseilles, and we start to see, as every Literature student knows, that there are other kinds of prison in this novel—and different kinds of freedom. Most of what Mr Meagles says is little more than conversation-filling, but he voices his opinions, all the time. Clennam has remarked that they will be out today, and Meagles has his view on that. ‘Out to-day! … It’s almost an aggravation of the enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we ever been in for?’ But once they are out, celebrating at a little farewell party he insists on, he’s OK with it. ‘One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind; I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let out.’ He hasn’t asked any prisoners, of course, and another traveller, Miss Wade—she whose USP is super-polite froideur—seems not so sure. ‘“Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?” said she, slowly and with emphasis.’ A Frenchman with them is able to see that she isn’t so ready to forgive. We wonder what virtual prison she feels herself to have been in—or is still in.
Meagles has no such curiosity. His easy good humour is often satirised by Dickens—his pride in being a ‘practical’ man in a practical family is constantly disproved—and we aren’t surprised to discover that their maid hates the ‘practical’ nickname they have for her. Harriet, as she was in the Foundling Hospital, with her own surname, has become Tatty with a different surname referring to the hospital’s founder. She is forever now Tattycoram. And she hates how these practical people assume she’s happy, assume she’s being looked after, assume she loves their timid, spoilt daughter ‘Pet’ as much as they do. She doesn’t. The ‘reserved,’ observant Miss Wade discovers this when she finds the maid railing against her fate in the side room where she has been left with nothing to eat, because all her practical superiors’ assumptions about her are wrong. ‘I’ll run away. I’ll do some mischief. I won’t bear it; I can’t bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!’ She eventually calms down and apologises for her own rage, which she says she now considers wrong. ‘They think I am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want. They are nothing but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could ever be kinder.’ The reader might not be so sure she really forgives her own prison. Dickens doesn’t have her call it that, but I’m sure the observation isn’t a new one.
Enough of Marseilles. We find Clennam in a coffee-house, and he hates that it’s ‘a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb….’ The inhabitants are ‘condemned’ to stay in and look out at the disconsolate scene, and… we realise that this is Sunday as Clennam has always known it. His parents and his teachers when he was away at school, turned Sunday into one long penance. A priest would make his nine-year-old self contemplate the inevitability of his own doom, and nothing about the rest of his upbringing lightened the despondency of his childhood. OK.
He’s deciding whether to go to his mother’s that evening. She won’t like this clear evidence of his having travelled on the Sabbath… but he goes anyway. The house, once grand but now propped on ‘crutches,’ the old retainer—far more than that, as we shall see—looking, with his twisted neck and crablike gait, as though he had just climbed down from the gallows, and the downtrodden woman servant tentatively offering help… all these are an extension of poor Clennam’s dark Sunday of the soul. And so, when Flintwinch, the man in charge—he always seems like that—deigns to take Clennam to see his mother, it’s no surprise that she’s the personification of unforgiving coldness. She now confines herself to her room that doubles as her office, and the unsmiling Flintwinch, as judgmental as she is, has already told Clennam she has only left it fifteen times in as many years.
Clennam had spent his childhood having his spirit beaten down by her, and she isn’t going to stop doing it now. She is an acolyte of a relentlessly cruel version of icy Protestantism, and demands that all about her bow to her will on this. Her prison—her word—is of her own making. Her self-incarceration seems somehow connected to her punitive-sounding religion
The meeting he has with her is short—she seems to regard it mostly as ‘business,’ inappropriate for the Sabbath. But he notices on the bedside table the gold watch he sent after his father’s death. ‘I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that his watch should be sent straight to you.’ The old man couldn’t open it when he tried and, despite herself, this catches her attention. ‘Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open it?’ she asks, and when Clennam says not, ‘Mrs Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or opposing herself to her son’s opinion, was not clearly expressed.’ Like so much else in these early chapters, we know the watch is going to take on some as yet unknown significance
Affrey is making Clennam’s bed in a bedroom that has become a mausoleum of worn-out furniture, and when he asks her why she has married Flintwinch she tells him. She is completely in thrall to ‘the clever ones,’ so when he had told her she was to be his wife there was no way for her to refuse. Speaking of Mrs Clennam, Flintwinch had told Affrey ‘She’s of my opinion … so if you’ll put your bonnet on next Monday morning at eight, we’ll get it over.’ He had posted the first of the banns two weeks before telling her, so it’s a done deal. And inevitably, in a novel full of images of prison, we see hers without having to be told…. But that isn’t all she has to tell him. When he asks about a girl he had noticed, working in the shadows, she tells him it is Amy Dorrit, who sews for Mrs Clennam.
As a kind of final flourish, she tells him that the woman he hoped to marry before he left England is now a widow, well-to-do, and ‘if you like to have her, why you can.’ She had heard ‘them clever ones’ talking about it, and Clennam finds himself forced to face ‘the last thread wanting to the pattern. The airy folly of a boy’s love had found its way even into that house. … Little more than a week ago at Marseilles, the face of the pretty girl from whom he had parted with regret, had had an unusual interest for him, and a tender hold upon him, because of some resemblance, real or imagined….’ The girl he means is the insipid Pet, and it makes me wonder about his emotional maturity. It wouldn’t be a surprise for it to have been severely stunted by his experiences.
To end the first instalment, there’s a chapter presented as though, according to its title, ‘Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream.’ It’s nothing of the kind, although Flintwinch pretends it is and issues her with a dire threat after realising what she has witnessed. She has seen two Flintwinches together, one of them asleep. This one wakes up, drinks and then leaves with an iron box. The Flintwinch she knows to be her husband is merciless when he notices her. He pretends he’s just woken up from a nap, to ‘find you in your wrapper here, with the nightmare.’ Smilingly, he lets her know, ‘if you ever have a dream of this sort again, it’ll be a sign of your being in want of physic. And I’ll give you such a dose, old woman—such a dose!’ She thanks him and goes back to bed.
Next morning, Clennam goes to see his mother again. She is up and awake, and at her desk. She has a wheeled chair for moving around the bedroom that doubles as her office. The whole house had once been a place of business, but now he wonders why she feels she still has to live like this. Meanwhile she seems impatient to know why he had stayed away for a year and a half after his father’s death. ‘There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did leave, I travelled a little for rest and relief.’ This doesn’t go down well. ‘She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or understood his last words.’ Which she repeats back to him. This is what she’s like, judgmental and showing no sign of any affection. And when he tells her he feels he has wasted enough of his life on a business that is a long way behind the times and will never prosper, she is scornful, as though it is a betrayal. Dickens has the narrator put into words what we’re all thinking. ‘Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet…’
…but worse is to come. Something about his father’s anxiety and insistence before his death, and that business with the gold watch and the paper inside its case that he couldn’t open, has made Clennam almost certain that there’s some unfinished business he is unaware of. His new-found determination to confront his past, and his future, gives him courage to ask her as delicately as he can. ‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to suspect—’ She doesn’t like that word, and the narrator compares her frown to the ‘hard granite face’ of an Egyptian carving. Meanwhile, Clennam has continued ‘—that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of mind—remorse?’ Oh dear. Her reaction is almost instantaneous, and horrifying. It is as though he has accused them both of murder, and she backs her chair away shielding herself as though from an attack.
Enter Flintwinch, who of course has been listening, and he immediately begins his usual pushing at a door he knows to be open already. ‘You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he asks, and pretends he resents having to come between them as he always used to come between Mr and Mrs Clennam. But, as he knew would happen, Clennam has left a space for him by leaving the firm. He immediately becomes what it seems he already really is anyway, a partner in the business. His manipulative, twisted nature is more than a metaphor—we realise he must always have been the twisted genius of the twisted house. His pretended distaste in the family disagreements hides the truth, that it’s exactly what he needs in order to fulfil his ambitions.
Two more things in this chapter. One is to do with why Mrs Clennam imprisons herself. ‘“But let him look at me, in prison, and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?” Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven, posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and claiming her due.’ Dickens is explicitly dismissing as specious her ‘balancing’ of her sins with this self-imprisonment. But he leaves us wondering whatever it was that happened fifteen years ago. It isn’t the ruining of ‘Little’ Amy Dorrit’s father, because we find out soon enough that he has been in the Marshalsea prison for 22 years and more. Her mother died thirteen or fourteen years ago, never having been in robust health. I wonder…. Was it to do with the end of any hope of repaying their debts?
The other thing is to do with Little Dorrit herself, and the crumbs of information we get in this chapter lead almost seamlessly, in the next, to the full story of her father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea followed by her own birth there. Despite having ‘the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued child,’ Clennam correctly estimates that she is 22. She does more than sewing for Mrs Clennam, bringing her meals—which, this particular morning, the old woman steadfastly refuses in spite of the tempting look of the oysters: ‘she resisted all persuasions, and sent them down again—placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in her Eternal Day-Book.’ However, Dickens sows another tiny seed of speculation in the reader’s mind. Why is it that ‘in the asperity of Mrs Clennam’s demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.’ Clennam is intrigued. What is this little woman’s story? Where does she go after leaving? Why will she never eat in public? And—seed of speculation alert—‘he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself the possibility of her being in some way associated’ with that suspicion of his about his father’s sense of guilt.
It’s through the rest of this second instalment that Dickens gives us the full story—or as much of it as we’re going to give us for now—of ‘the Father of the Marshalsea.’ He arrives at the place ‘a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was going out again directly.’ That’s what they all think, that this is a temporary inconvenience. But in this gentleman’s case—his name is never given in two full chapters of narrative, although we know it to be Little Dorrit’s father—he is wrong, and stays for good. As for his debts, all we know is that he invested in some ‘partnership,’ but that now, ‘nothing comprehensible could be made of his case. To question him in detail … was only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility.’ Over a full paragraph, Dickens never makes anything clear except that his accountants give him up as hopeless. ‘The debtor,’ as he is always referred to in the narrative, has a wife as useless as he is, and a young son and daughter. When his wife gives birth in the jail, some weeks or months into her husband’s imprisonment there—he has taken his whole family—it is to the tiny child who will become Amy Dorrit.
Meanwhile, as years pass, her father becomes the oldest there. This is how, at the likeable turnkey points out, he is now the ‘Father’ of the place. He takes to this role happily, being introduced as such to new arrivals and, over time, developing the habit of accompanying to the gate anyone lucky enough to be leaving. It becomes understood that a small ‘testimonial’ would be welcomed, although he always performs a transparent little pantomime of surprise, and nobody ever mentions it. His wife dies when ‘the youngest child’—this is her father’s chapter, so we don’t know her name yet—is eight. Her mother had paid a visit to ‘a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died there.’ So it goes….
…as does the rest of the chapter. We meet characters, some of whom grow old, and at least one of whom dies. There are established routines, and only once does ‘the debtor’—known as an educated and capable gentleman, and tolerated in his firm belief in his own gentility—come face-to-face with his own situation. A plasterer is leaving, and makes an unintentionally public show of offering him a few halfpennies. But our man ‘had never been offered tribute in copper yet. His children often had, and with his perfect acquiescence it had gone into the common purse to buy meat that he had eaten, and drink that he had drunk; but fustian splashed with white lime, bestowing halfpence on him, front to front, was new.’ He says ‘How dare you!’ and ‘feebly’ bursts into tears.
Feebly indeed. Even the hypocrisy of this man is feeble, and there must be a part of him that knows it. The plasterer is mortified to have caused offence, and William Dorrit, as we will come to know him in another couple of chapters’ time, is chastened. The plasterer is a good soul, and offers something he suggests nobody else ever has. He will visit Dorrit every week. In the next chapter, indeed, he is able to help the family—it’s he who places the advertisement that Mrs Clennam sees, and that leads to her offering Amy some eight hours a day of paid work. But that’s in the next chapter…
…‘The Child of the Marshalsea.’ This is Amy’s chapter, and in it Dickens describes how the little girl, as soon after the death of her mother as she is old enough to manage it, takes over the running of the shabby household. Dickens presents her as the poster-girl for the self-help movement, seeing to it that her older siblings receive some outside education, managing the little money they receive and, really, caring single-handedly for their father whilst always letting him believe he is living a safe, independent life. Whilst Dickens satirises the way the longer-term residents of the jail are comfortable with the creditor-free, anxiety-free life, Amy has to shoulder everything her father knows nothing of.
She has one important ally. The long-standing, good-hearted turnkey is like a second father to her, more thoughtful about her upbringing than her real father. He had become her godfather shortly after her birth—Dorrit had very quickly learned how to ask favours of people without seeming to realise he was doing it—and takes her to be christened. She spends a lot of time with him as a young child, and later, everyone says how he was made to be a family man. Later, he is able to help her in more practical ways although, later still, he doesn’t manage to bequeath her his savings. Long before his eventual death, he had sought advice from the many self-proclaimed experts in the jail. Unfortunately, none can offer a watertight method of making a daughter the beneficiary of a will without her father being able to claim the money, and he dies intestate. If there had been a way, I’m assuming his debt-ridden advisers hadn’t been aware of it. But as I say, that comes later.
When she is still a girl, her self-help skills reach new heights of enterprise. She speaks to a financially embarrassed dancing-master about lessons for her sister Fanny, and he is so impressed with this womanly little creature he does it for free. He soon leaves—but is so impressed by Fanny he gives her lessons outside. She becomes his protégée and is later able to find work in the musical theatre. Some time later, Amy speaks to a milliner fallen on hard times, who at first thinks she will be too weak for the work. Amy is resolute, having to admit that she is ‘very, very little,’ as the woman says, but insisting she isn’t weak. The woman, of course, ‘was touched, took her in hand with goodwill, found her the most patient and earnest of pupils, and made her a cunning work-woman in course of time.’
Her brother Tip is harder to place, always giving up after a few months any job the turnkey finds for him. There’s a bravura comic paragraph to sum it up: ‘Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging … his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend, got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade, into the law again, into an auctioneers, into a brewery, into a stockbroker’s, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon office, into the law again, into a general dealer’s, into a distillery, into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks. But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired.’ When he does find himself a job in the horse trade—alarm-bells are immediately ringing, obviously—it’s as part of a con game, and he ends up a debtor himself. He’s fine with it but, after breaking down in tears for the first time over her cares, Amy has to get him to pretend when he sees their father that he’s just visiting…
…because she has had to concoct fictions about where their money comes from. As the narrator tells us, for instance: ‘To enable [Fanny] to earn her few weekly shillings, it was necessary for the Child of the Marshalsea to go through an elaborate form with the Father.’ If he is to be kept safe in his self-image as a beneficent gentleman, he mustn’t know that any of his children go out to work. Amy pretends Fanny is going to live as a companion for her uncle Frederick, ruined at the same time as his brother and now scraping a living as a clarinet player in third-rate theatre orchestras. Tip disappears in order to do ever more important errands for Mrs Bangham, the drunken, well-meaning housekeeper he’s always done it for.
This is the situation at the time of Clennam’s return from China. The final chapter of the second instalment describes what happens when he follows Amy after a day at his mother’s house. He doesn’t recognise the Marshalsea for what it is, and asks a stranger whose identity we guess—it’s the poverty-stricken, determinedly unwashed Frederick—what the door is. After some pantomime of misunderstanding—’ “My name, sir,” replied the old man most unexpectedly, ‘is Dorrit”’—Clennam explains he’s looking for William Dorrit. It’s the first time we’ve heard the name, which is a game Dickens often plays, with almost endless variations. And Frederick invites Clennam inside…
…where he comes to understand exactly what Amy has taken on in her life. Frederick has warned him about the fictions created over the years around his brother: ‘much that happens even among ourselves, out of doors, is kept from him …. Be so good as to say nothing of my niece’s working at her needle. Be so good as to say nothing that goes beyond what is said among us. … Now! Come and see.’ Clennam does see, sees Amy’s mortification that he has found her out, and that he realises she is bringing her own food out to feed her father. As he sees her father’s bland assumption that he is justifiably at the head of this genteel, if threadbare household, he sees Amy’s embarrassment, and the gentle resting of her arm on her father’s, when Dorrit begins to tell a completely unconnected story of someone who was so kind as to leave a very large testimonial, in the most discreet manner possible.
Clennam gets it all, and understands why Tip doesn’t leave with his uncle at the end of it. He, Clennam, waits to talk to Amy as the last bell is being rung. He is most interested about how and why his mother came to employ her, and she explains about the advertisement placed by the plasterer. She tells him little more—she doesn’t need to, really—but he has stayed too long anyway, and is locked in. He spends the night at what passes for the jail’s drinking establishment—Dickens enjoys himself with these slightly pathetic parodies of things in the world outside—and he spends long hours undergoing a succession of his waking dreams. They centre on—guess. They are ‘but the setting of a picture in which three people kept before him. His father, with the steadfast look with which he had died, prophetically darkened forth in the portrait; his mother, with her arm up, warding off his suspicion; Little Dorrit, with her hand on the degraded arm, and her drooping head turned away.’
It makes a kind of nightmarish sense to him. His father’s ‘look’ when he died, his mother’s kindness—almost imperceptible, but real—towards Little Dorrit and, most of all, her self-incarceration: ‘did his mother find a balance to be struck? “I admit that I was accessory to that man’s captivity. I have suffered for it in kind. He has decayed in his prison: I in mine. I have paid the penalty. … He withers away in his prison; I wither away in mine; inexorable justice is done; what do I owe on this score!”’
But is he right? I know what I think.
Instalments 3 and 4—Book 1, Chapters 9-14
Chapter 9 is long, and establishes not so much that Amy is on the side of the angels as that she really is an angel. The chapter is called ‘Little Mother’ because that’s what she is to the poor, damaged ‘girl’ who is actually older than Amy herself. And how much more angelic can you get, in this universe? We’ve already seen inside the Marshalsea how she is the mother her siblings never had, to say nothing of the housewife—as in, the manager of the household—her father didn’t marry. Outside—same. We briefly see how she manages Fanny’s life with her uncle pretty much along the lines she manages it in the prison. But we really see her as the little mother, as literally as Dickens can make it aside from the biology of the matter, with the needy, brain-damaged Maggy. She calls out ‘Little mother!’ to Amy after she has spilled her basket of potatoes in the street. Amy, no doubt kindly enough—it’s her only setting—has told her what a clumsy child she is, but we are soon told she is in her late twenties, mentally forever ten years old following a terrible fever at that age. But physically she grew as normal, and beyond—everything about her is big, from her head to her feet. And Clennam, who is with Amy at this time, understands that without Amy’s help she would have been destitute, or dead. That’s Amy for you…
…and this is the chapter in which Clennam comes to understand the extent of her qualities. He has woken early in the Snuggery, and decides to wait outside the prison so he can catch her and speak to her properly. He wants her to know that he is acting completely in good faith, and that he would love to know if there are Clennams among her creditors. It turns out to be her day off, so he sends a message to her inside, to meet him at her uncle’s house. Once she comes, they can speak long enough for her to realise that he genuinely wants to help. But, as well as establishing her angelic credentials, their time together also closes down this line of enquiry. Clennam is not a name either she or her uncle have heard of in connection with her father’s debts.
They are out of the tiny apartment now, have left behind them the scrawled ‘Dirty Dick’ additions to Frederick’s name card outside—done by boys who attend the school where Amy had paid for lessons of her own some years before—and have found a quiet place away from the busy streets. Finding no connection with his family’s firm doesn’t stop Clennam wanting to help. She doesn’t know any creditors, but she remembers a name, Tite Barnacle, in connection with the debts. Clennam promises he will find whoever this man is and, meanwhile, wonders whether she has any friends outside. There’s Plornish, she says, ‘only a plasterer,’ who lives at the far end of Bleeding Heart Yard, of all places. Ok. But before he takes his leave—he knows she will have a lot to do, as always—there’s one thing he really needs to let her know. ‘There is one friend,’ he said, putting up his pocketbook. ‘As I take you back—’ he can’t bring himself to use her word, home—‘let me ask you to persuade yourself that you have another friend. I make no professions, and say no more.’ She knows now that he is sincere, and no longer regrets that he followed her the previous night…
…and, after he has already made up his mind about her qualities, comes the confirmation in the form of the damaged Maggy. We get nearly two pages of her history, and the part Amy has played in it. She wants to show Clennam how well she can read the signs in a grocer’s window—guess who taught her to read—but it’s somewhat hit-and-miss. However… ‘When he saw how pleasure brought a rosy tint into Little Dorrit’s face when Maggy made a hit, he felt that he could have stood there making a library of the grocer’s window until the rain and wind were tired.’ As they part, he watches her. ‘Little as she had always looked, she looked less than ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage, the little mother attended by her big child.’
It’s a long chapter, and establishes a lot, not only about the somewhat fatherly relationship Clennam has with Amy. We also find out about the way Amy regards herself and those she helps—most especially her father. It’s one of those take-it-or-leave-it situations Dickens sometimes presents. This child, neglected all her life by the members of her own family (if not by that good old turnkey), feels nothing but love for them, and regards her father as a good man, the innocent victim of others. Dickens comes back to that in the fourth instalment.
Meanwhile, in this one, he needs to introduce us to the Circumlocution Office. In Bleak House he’d given us a satirical take on another great British institution, the Law. Now it’s the workings of government, and we get it all in the first few sentences. ‘If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.’ He uses a favourite stylistic trick, the repetition of a tired little phrase, introduced in small caps: ‘HOW NOT TO DO IT.’ After conceding that this is what government is all about—‘How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians’—he repeats the phrase five more times in a single paragraph, to clarify how the Circumlocution Office makes it impossible for any meaningful business to get done. OK…
…and dealing with this institution is the task Clennam sets himself. The man Little Dorrit had mentioned, Tite Barnacle, is at the head of it, and Clennam will needs to go through all the right form-filling and appointments to get to him. It’s only his doggedness and an occasional lucky break that get him anywhere at all, and it takes a long time. The place seems to be run on nepotism—it’s as though ‘[e]ither the nation was under a load of obligation to the Barnacles, or the Barnacles were under a load of obligation to the nation’—and Clennam happens upon one of the idiotic sons and other family members who fill the place. He tells him, more or less accidentally, that the paterfamilias is at home, suffering from an attack of gout. So that’s where Clennam heads.
The house is ‘not absolutely Grosvenor Square itself, but it was very near it. It was a hideous little street of dead wall, stables, and dunghills,’ and Dickens describes the low-end activities that go on there. ‘Yet there were two or three small airless houses at the entrance end of Mews Street, which went at enormous rents on account of their being abject hangers-on to a fashionable situation….’ Ah. And, like the house of Clennam’s mother, it tells us all about its occupant. Far better houses with less desirable addresses are available by the dozen at a fraction of the rent, but Tite Barnacle wants the address, however inconvenient. The absurd, over-buttoned footman invites Clennam in. ‘It required some judgment to do it without butting the inner hall-door open, and in the consequent mental confusion and physical darkness slipping down the kitchen stairs.’ Another prison? I couldn’t possibly comment.
When Clennam asks about the Dorrit case Barnacle, of course, offers him nothing useful. ‘The Circumlocution Department, sir, may have possibly recommended—possibly—I cannot say—that some public claim against the insolvent estate of a firm or copartnership to which this person may have belonged, should be enforced. The question may have been, in the course of official business, referred to the Circumlocution Department for its consideration. The Department may have either originated, or confirmed, a Minute making that recommendation.’ He always talks like this, and Clennam finds himself taken through the door and out on the street. But he takes Barnacle’s suggestion literally, that he should return to the Circumlocution Office to seek clarification. Hah. All he gets is confirmation, again, of what we know. It’s another Barnacle with a comedy monocle who makes him realise it’s ‘a politico diplomatic hocus pocus piece of machinery, for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs.’
But, this being a Dickens novel—I always say that when otherwise implausible chance encounters take place—Mr Meagles also happens to be there at the same time. As the sponsor of an inventor who has wasted twelve years of his life getting no useful response from the Circumlocution Office, Meagles is able to explain to Clennam, and to the reader, how all initiative and enterprise is effectively discouraged. The inventor, Daniel Doyce, wants to use his idea for the good of the country, but accepts—to Meagles’s exasperation—that It Isn’t going to happen. They are going back to his factory—which, this being etc,. is in Bleeding Heart Yard. Clennam was on his way there anyway, so he goes with them.
Suddenly, the narrative takes us back to France again. It’s the next chapter, and we’re following some unknown, footsore man along the road. But nobody’s a stranger for long in a Dickens novel, and this is clearly Rigaud. He’s got away with murder and, as he tells it later, the Marseilles crowd were so incensed he had to be kept locked away for his own good. He escaped, hidden in a hay-wagon. Who could he be telling this to, when he’s pretended to be somebody else to all the other guests at the inn he’s found? And the landlady—who, along with everyone else, wants to talk about how justice hasn’t been done. In fact, he’s telling the man he’s sharing his room with, who is—guess. Rigaud is pleased to find an amenable, submissive travelling-companion, and tells John Baptist he’d better agree, or he’ll discover how easily he’ll become guilty by association. Very guilty, Rigaud hints if their cover is blown and the going gets difficult. But John-Baptist doesn’t fancy that. He plays along, letting Rigaud patronise him exactly as he did in jail—and makes his escape as soon as he knows Rigaud is asleep. Oh, and did I mention they are both on their way to England? I’m mentioning it now.
On to the fourth instalment which, like every instalment so far, introduces key characters for the first time. This time it’s the Plornishes, the hardworking, impoverished lower classes; and Casby and his daughter Flora Finching. He, Casby, is the personification of bland, well-heeled hypocrisy, while she is the woman Clennam had long ago thought was the love of his life. He’s very dismissive of the idea now, especially after he meets her again. How long is it since the brainless Dora in David Copperfield? Six years, and Flora seems like a thought experiment now. What if David hadn’t been allowed to marry Dora? What would she be like 20 years later? (There’s also a well-known autobiographical connection: Dickens had recently met Maria Beadnell, a former love of his, and had been shocked by how much she had changed.) I’ll come back to Flora when Clennam meets her in Chapter 13…
…but in Chapter 12 it’s the Plornishes’ turn. He is the good-hearted but almost simple-minded plasterer who caused Dorrit such heart-searching in an earlier chapter, and who helped Amy to find work with Mrs Clennam. That’s why Clennam goes to see them in Bleeding Heart Yard, to find out if there’s any earlier connection with his mother. The Plornishes lead a hand-to-mouth existence. He can never find enough work, although it isn’t for want of trying, while she, ‘a young woman …[is] so dragged at by poverty and the children together, that their united forces had already dragged her face into wrinkles.’ (It’s worth filing this description away for when we meet an opposite case in the carefree—or care-averse—Casby.)
Bleeding Heart Yard, where they live, is almost a character in itself. Dickens presents its layered, mostly forgotten history as a mixture of misremembered fact about the derivation of its name, and the romantic story of a woman who was heard to utter it after being forbidden from marrying the love of her life. (There really is an urban myth about the name, based on a murder, but it isn’t romantic enough for Dickens, so he’s invented his own.) It had been the hunting-ground of royalty in the past—but times have definitely changed. It has a bad reputation, Mrs Plornish tells Clennam, because the residents are blamed, as is so often the case, for their poverty. ‘From time to time there were public complaints … of labour being scarce—but Bleeding Heart Yard, though as willing a Yard as any in Britain, was never the better for the demand. That high old family, the Barnacles, had long been too busy with their great principle to look into the matter.’ Ah. So if it’s anybody’s fault—and Dickens isn’t saying—look to the ruling classes.
Plornish knows about Tip’s debts, and is happy to take Clennam to his creditor, a horse-dealer known as Maroon. This man is a comic turn in himself, especially in his bombastic approach to negotiating repayment. In fact, he’s useless at it, Clennam’s calm refusal to move from his offer of ten shillings in the pound completely flooring him. Clennam doesn’t talk to the man in person, and Plornish is acting as go between. He simply keeps returning to Maroon saying his terms don’t suit, and Maroon lowers them until he writes off half the debt entirely. It’s imperative that Amy should never know who has paid off Tip’s debt, Clennam says. Plornish is fine with this…
…and as he drives away in Clennam’s cab he elaborates a little more on what it’s like to be poor among wealth. ‘Then you see, some people as was better off said, and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves if not beyond it so he’d heerd, that they was “improvident” (that was the favourite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a year, they says, “Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!” Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man!’ Plus ca change.
Plornish has told Clennam that the connection he’d made to Mrs Clennam on Amy’s behalf was via the landlord of the Yard, Casby. Clennam tells himself—and, maybe, Dickens is speaking from experience—that this is why he wants to visit a house where his old flame happens to live. Whatever, the chapter containing his visit is bitterly comic. Or grotesque. Or… it’s one of those chapters only Dickens can write. The world has allowed Casby, the callous landlord, to appear nothing of the sort—to the extent that there might even be some doubt that he understands where his money comes from at all. He looks like an Old Testament Patriarch, and although now an old man still has ‘the same smooth face and forehead, the same calm blue eye, the same placid air.’ Casby carries this off, but Dickens wants us to be vigilant. ‘Oh! why, with that head, is he not a benefactor to his species! Oh! why, with that head, is he not a father to the orphan and a friend to the friendless!’ He Is definitely none of these–but he is, ‘by common report, rich in house property.’ You bet.
And then in comes Flora. Dickens has written her as a comic grotesque who isn’t comic at all—the simpering, flirtatious coquette grown fat and middle-aged. And he adds a layer of pathos by showing her through the eyes of the once lovelorn Clennam. As soon as he sees her, his old passion ‘shivered and broke to pieces.’ The character traits that were so beguiling in her as a young woman make It Impossible to take the older Flora seriously. Her constant reminders of their former relationship and her incessant talking make him almost desperate to leave. But ‘you could never be so unkind as to think of going, Arthur—I mean Mr Arthur—or I suppose Mr Clennam would be far more proper…’ and he has to stay for dinner. Where Mr F’s aunt—part of her husband’s ‘legacy’—is, it seems, completely batty. But, this being etc., you never know.
Before dinner, he has met Casby’s agent, Pancks. He is another grotesque, always a ‘little labouring steam-engine’ with all the puffing and wheezing that goes with it. Casby is ‘an unwieldy ship in the Thames river … when all of a sudden, a little coaly steam-tug will bear down upon it, take it in tow, and bustle off with it.’ But the comedy isn’t allowed to mask the reality. In a conversation before dinner, we hear the agent talking to the landlord about the nitty-gritty of the business. He’s just come upon Casby looking at ‘a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard,’ and hauls him away from it. ‘Bleeding Heart Yard? It’s a troublesome property. Don’t pay you badly, but rents are very hard to get there. You have more trouble with that one place than with all the places belonging to you.’ We might guess why Plornish was in the Marshalsea for a short while….
After his highly ambiguous time with Flora—he still can’t forget the strength of his passion, and finds it hard to leave it behind—Clennam goes back to his lodging and muses gloomily. ‘To review his life was like descending a green tree in fruit and flower, and seeing all the branches wither and drop off one by one, as he came down towards them.’ Meanwhile, he has watched the fire die down from vigorous heat to cooling ashes, and he reaches a low point. ‘That he should have missed so much, and at his time of life should look so far about him for any staff to bear him company upon his downward journey and cheer it, was a just regret.’ No staff to bear him company…. If only somebody would arrive to make it worth his while to make up the fire and get it going again.
Sorry, but he does lay it on a bit thick sometimes. Dickens. The last words of the chapter—what else could they be?—are ‘Little Dorrit.’ Which aren’t in his head, but spoken from just outside the door. Uncharacteristically, Dickens warns us he’s going to show us things from Amy’s point of view as the next chapter opens. His rooms seem ‘spacious … and grandly furnished’ to her, and Dickens has her matching this in her mind to a romantic image of Covent Garden—and contrasting with the homelessness and poverty she has seen there. Meanwhile Clennam becomes the ‘brown, grave gentleman, who smiled so pleasantly, who was so frank and considerate in his manner….’ OK, his earnestness is as marked as his mother’s, but in a good way. He begins to show those qualities immediately, making up the fire of course, and being as tactful as he always is about not wanting her to think he notices her poverty. She’s constantly ‘my child’ to him, until ‘a slight shade of distress fell upon her, at his so often calling her a child. She was surprised that he should see it, or think of such a slight thing’—and, in a single sentence, we can see all their mutual understanding. She feels something, and he notices. And she notices that the notices, and is touched by it. It’s happened before…
…and it happens again. Or, rather, she knows he is so quick in his perceptions she knows she can take his understanding for granted. She’s there for several reasons. First she thanks him, despite his having made it clear that she isn’t to acknowledge that he was the one who freed Tip of his debt. (They are completely on the same wavelength, both accepting the charade of her wishing she could thank the anonymous donor.) But the thing she’s really worried about is to do with her father. How can she let Clennam know? ‘Can you guess … what I am going to ask you not to do?’ He reassures her, ‘I think I can. But I may be wrong.’ ‘No, you are not wrong,’ she says.
There are other things in this chapter. She’s out late because something about a woman Fanny has met is worrying her and she wanted to see how things were at the theatre. She’s ashamed to admit that she told an untruth, pretending to her father that she was going to a party, something she has never, ever done. She has been locked out of the Marshalsea, but she assures him they will be able to stay at Maggy’s lodgings. Clennam, having failed to get Amy to eat or drink anything to speak of, has made sure Maggy’s big pockets are filled with the food he has. Amy won’t let him accompany them, assuring him they will be well looked after, but he follows them until they go down a little alley near the prison and he decides they’re safe. In fact, they have nowhere to go, and spend most of the long, chilly night outside. The people they encounter aren’t unkind, one prostitute telling Maggy she shouldn’t have her child out on the streets in the early hours. She’s mortified when she realises the child is really a woman, dreading her disapproval—but, of course, Amy is only grateful to her for her consideration.
They end the night in the vestry of the local church, Amy having been recognised by ‘the sexton, or the beadle, or the verger, or whatever he was’ as a Marshalsea celebrity. He actually calls her ‘one of our curiosities’ and gives her a register of deaths to rest her head on. And Dickens offers one of those little reminders to the reader that we have a long way to go in this novel. Just as Miss Wade had made her remark in Chapter 2 about the way we can never know whose paths may cross in the future—did I mention that?—now the verger muses on his registers of deaths: ‘what makes these books interesting to most people is—not who’s in ‘em, but who isn’t—who’s coming, you know, and when.’
But it’s the pathos of Amy’s plight that Dickens focuses on to end the instalment. ‘This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital…’ and the rest of her long night. She’s ‘Little Dorrit’ to both Clennam and the narrator now, so maybe I’ll call her that too from now on.
Instalments 5 and 6—Book 1, Chapters 15-22
Imagine being inside Dickens’s head as he starts to write the fifth instalment. A week or two after the fourth number was published in March, he knows there’s a lot to get through. There are to be more hints about the murky dealings of the Clennam firm, Arthur Clennam’s love life—he resolves, preposterously, not to have one—and a different love in the shadow of the Marshalsea wall. Relationships between key characters are at the heart of all these, and Dickens ties them together in ever more complicated ways. Meanwhile, all along, he must be calculating just how much information to withhold from his readers. Mistress Affery in Chapter 15 isn’t the only one who’s pretty sure she doesn’t know the half of it.
So he’d better get on with it, yes? As if. Dickens makes his own rules, and instead of a sentence to establish that we’re back with Mrs Clennam after two months’ absence, he goes for a bravura display of one of those things he’s really good at. It doesn’t advance the story, but it’s great fun. ‘The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot,’ like so many buildings in Dickens, presents a vision in architectural form of the lives going on inside. Those crutches we know about from Chapter 3 are wearing out at the same rate as the house, and its exterior ‘never knew a cheerful interval.’ The sun hardly ever shines into its shadows and, while the snow might stick there longer than anywhere else, the place has ‘no other adherents.’ No.
Affery is described inside, in the gloomy silence broken only by the brief sound of wheels passing the gateway before moving on quickly. It’s as though she’s deaf, ‘and only recovered the sense of hearing by instantaneous flashes.’ But Dickens isn’t ready to stay inside her head just yet—he’ll be back there soon enough—because there are other things to be noticed, like Mrs Clennam’s fire. ‘On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did; but for the most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon itself evenly and slowly.’
We get used to things being presented indirectly: ‘changing distortions’ of Mrs Clennam in her wheeled chair, ‘of Mr Flintwinch with his wry neck, of Mistress Affery coming and going, would be thrown upon the house wall that was over the gateway, and would hover there like shadows from a great magic lantern.’ The fire is always there, and so is Affery, until she disappears ‘as though she were off upon a witch excursion. Then the solitary light would burn unchangingly, until it burned pale before the dawn, and at last died under the breath of Mrs Affery, as her shadow descended on it from the witch-region of sleep.’
This isn’t Gothic. It’s Dickens doing an almost comic pastiche of Gothic. But he slips in a little reminder of something he’s making a thing of. We know we’re in a Dickens novel—where else could we be?—but the characters don’t. And whilst we might know there’s a plan, we don’t know what it is yet. We’re still in that room, with its ‘beacon fire, summoning some one, and that the most unlikely some one in the world, to the spot that must be come to. Which of the vast multitude of travellers … coming and going so strangely … which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey’s end, be travelling surely hither?’
Why is he making such a thing of what always happens in Dickens novels anyway?. People always come together in unforeseen ways, but this time he’s foregrounding it. As far back as Chapter 2 he’d had Miss Wade introduce the idea: ‘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.’ All we know is that Arthur Clennam has his suspicions about his mother, and that she feels guilty about something involving the Dorrit family.
When we’re properly back with Affery, the house is presented to us through her confused and anxious eyes. Somehow, Dickens has taken us deeper inside his magic box where normal rules—other writers’ rules—don’t have to be applied. I already mentioned the indirect way he has the story come to us. Now, in a chapter entitled ‘Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream,’ we’re back in the netherworld of her confused imagination. As in the first instalment, Dickens pretends she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing and hearing—a confirmation of our strong suspicion that her husband is no mere underling. Mrs Clennam can’t shield herself from Flintwinch as she could from Arthur’s suspicions because he simply won’t let her. The first thing Affery hears is, ‘None of your nonsense with me. I won’t take it from you.’ Mrs Clennam, despite her efforts, can’t stop him saying exactly what he means—that her husband, whom he knew when he was his uncle’s clerk in this very house, was no businessman, and that once he’d married it would be his wife who ran the show. But she’s never put right the mistakes he made….
And there’s something else happening, either in Affery’s fevered imagination or in a reality her husband wants to hide from her. We can guess which it is, but Dickens is letting Flintwinch gloss over it for now. Affery has been hearing strange sounds, like the footsteps of somebody in the house who shouldn’t be there. Flintwinch, as he did after the first dream, threatens her with ‘such a dose’ she’ll regret ever opening her mouth. We won’t be surprised if, at some future point, the second Flintwinch turns out to have been there all the time.
Time for a change of air. Clennam hasn’t seen Mr Meagles since his ridiculous visits to the Circumlocution Office, so he decides to visit him in a bucolic-sounding Twickenham. He walks the fifteen miles just to enjoy the day, and someone is ahead of him on the road. Who would believe (aside from anyone who has ever read a Dickens novel), that the man in front is Daniel Doyce? And who would believe (etc.) that, just after Clennam has been contemplating what he will do with his life, Doyce tells him he could do with a partner who could see to the business side of things and leave him to get on with the fixing and inventing? Well.
If only the rest of his life fitted into place so neatly. It’s possible to think that it does, and Dickens haws been dropping hints to him since he met Amy Dorrit that she’s the one for him. She realises it—later in this instalment we know she regularly goes to the iron bridge the scene of that all-important conversation she had with him, to muse about her life—but he seems unable to do the arithmetic. Literally. In the back of his mind (in other words, at the front of it), he had been remembering Pet Meagles and thinking about why it would/wouldn’t be a good idea to fall in love with her. And this is the transparent little self-deception that Dickens has him keep up for both the chapters he spends at Twickenham. At one point, before he’s told himself he definitely isn’t going to fall in love, he pretends it’s Ok that she is less than half his age. The arithmetic he doesn’t relates to Little Dorrit, the woman he had been wishing he could provide a good home for—as ‘his adopted daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea.’
These chapters are entitled ‘Nobody’s Weakness’ and ‘Nobody’s Rival’—because nobody around here would be weak enough to fall in love inappropriately, or feel any jealousy towards the self-entitled young gent who arrives, as he seems to do most Sundays, for dinner with the Meagles family and relaxed conversation with Pet. By now, she is Minnie, as spoilt as she ever was but no less attractive for that. And the gent is one Henry Gowan, a failing artist who only ever got to where he is because his father worked for the government and his mother now lives on her widow’s pension in rooms at Hampton Court. Henry has no private means, but has a good enough flair for for painting to be able to pretend to be an artist. Regrettably, the public think otherwise. And meanwhile, Arthur genuinely dislikes his arrogance and too-easy manner.
Minnie, to the Meagles’ chagrin, is all too interested in him. Their foreign trips are as much to do with putting distance between the two as with any real desire for travel… and, being a nicely brought-up girl, she hates causing them pain. But it doesn’t stop either her or Gowan from carrying on as before. OK. But this isn’t all that happens in the Twickenham chapters. We see that the ‘practical’ Meagles is as prejudiced a anybody. Arthur notices the way he patronises Doyce, and knows that Doyce notices it too. It’s about class complacency: Arthur’s ‘curious sense of a general superiority to Daniel Doyce’ makes him wonder whether ‘there might be in … Mr Meagles, any microscopic portion of the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the Circumlocution Office.’ The particular way Meagles has of showing this is to pretend that there’s no practicality in Doyce, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Meagles really shows his snobbery when Henry Gowan pretends to apologise for having invited a friend to dine with them. Meagles is enraptured by the prospect of having the great-nephew of both a well-known Tite Barnacle and a well-known Stiltstalking. The scion of these two eminent families is the monocled idiot that Arthur had met at the Circumlocution Office, and he tells Gowan what a dangerous radical he is. ‘He wanted to know!’ The appalled stare he keeps giving Arthur means Dickens can have great fun with the way the monocle keeps falling into everything.
Enough of Twickenham? Probably—except there’s a moment when Tattycoram admits that she has written to Miss Wade and met her at the church, after Miss Wade had told her to write if she was troubled by anything. Minnie is surprised, and so appalled she seems to see Tattycoram in an entirely new light. And I’m sure we’ll see more of Henry Gowan and Daniel Doyce….
Meanwhile, in and around the Marshalsea, Little Dorrit is assailed by another problem. The likeable but terribly blinkered John Chivery, son of one of the turnkeys, thinks that nothing could be better for either of them than spending their lives as a married couple. He composes poems about their simple life together, their future home in the Marshalsea a pastoral-seeming grove of romance, and the loving epitaphs that will be on their graves at the local church. He is a picture of would-be elegance on the same Sunday, when he has finally plucked up the courage to make his feelings known to her. Amy’s father tells him, after pretending to be surprised and charmed by John’s usual gift of good cigars, that he will find her on the iron bridge.
This would be bad enough. Amy has to cope not only with the unwelcome attention, but with the embarrassment of knowing he has seen her look of appalled surprise as he catches her unawares. His poems and other tokens have made it clear both to her and the other Dorrits what his intentions are, and whilst she has been careful not to raise his hopes, her sister and brother treat him with contempt. Don’t they know who the Dorrits are? Doesn’t he realise he’s getting above himself? (This is a new trait in these two, but one that Dickens will return to in the next instalment.) She is scrupulously polite with him, and he is considerate enough not to press her after she has told him—he has graciously asked her permission—that no, she doesn’t want him to ask her anything. She even asks him to consider that as she is friendless outside the prison, she hopes she can rely on him not to approach her on the bridge again. Problem solved…
…except it isn’t. She knows her father has set up this meeting, and it isn’t surprising what poor John sees when he looks back at her: ‘she sat down on the corner of a seat, and not only rested her little hand upon the rough wall, but laid her face against it too, as if her head were heavy, and her mind were sad.’ As he makes his way home, he composes a new epitaph for himself, to appear on his headstone later that same year.
And don’t things come around quickly? It’s time for Dickens to think about the May instalment, and he really needs to get stuck into those pressures Amy is under. At the same time, he’s going to give us a three-chapter satirical take on money, society and privilege. Better get started. It’s still Sunday, and Dorrit has had a fine time lording it over his brother, and the new arrivals who are so shocked and mortified he is able to patronise them as easily as poor Frederick. There but for the grace of God go I—it’s a thought that never passes through his head. Frederick is like that because he has never got over his loss, and spends his days in as shocked a condition as the new inmates. Worse, he has to keep body and soul together while his brother lives off the efforts of everybody else. It’s the cleverest satire on privilege in the novel. William doesn’t ever think about where the money comes from, congratulating himself that he has 12s 6d from the day’s ‘testimonials’ because nobody questions his entitlement to it. And as for what he needs both to be kept fed and to keep up the wafer-thin appearance of respectability—‘indeed, those shirts [Amy] proposed would be exceedingly acceptable, for those he had were worn out’—he takes it for granted as another right.
In this chapter, Dickens confirms William as a perfect representative of the privileged classes. Frederick the free man—Dickens calls him this as long as he is in the prison yard with William ‘the bond’—would never have been able to make such a success of life there. He lacks the gentlemanly qualities. William, meanwhile, is exactly like Casby, blandly looking over the same people who will offer him testimonials when they leave. Dickens explicitly reminds us of this, and spells out his utter self-centredness as Amy looks after him. ‘All this time he had never once thought of her dress, her shoes, her need of anything. No other person upon earth, save herself, could have been so unmindful of her wants.’
This comes near the end of the chapter, after Amy—with so much tact he thinks he has thought of it himself—has made him face the reality of his behaviour regarding John Chivery. He has begun to justify it through a threadbare fairytale about a similar case in which the woman involved—a sister, not a daughter—had done the right thing. But he stumbles, she quietens him, and he falls into a bout of wretched self-pity. Which doesn’t mean that he has come to know himself, of course. He recovers, wishes he could have done even more for her than he has—Dickens makes the most of the reader’s double-take—and, ‘giving her his kind permission fully,’ lets her stay and look over him as he sleeps.
In the previous instalment, Dickens had prepared us for the way this attitude to birth and privilege has rubbed off on Tip and Fanny. Tip is now making a shady living through billiards, and lords it over the people he meets in a way he’s clearly learnt from his father. Also like his father, he admires Amy’s self-sacrifice whilst patronising her Marshalsea shabbiness. Meanwhile Fanny is ‘pretty, and conscious, and rather flaunting; and the condescension with which she put aside the superiority of her charms, and of her worldly experience, and addressed her sister on almost equal terms, had a vast deal of the family in it.’
The next two chapters continue the satire, and extend it—by way of the Merdles and the ‘Society’ they move in—to cover the fawning attitude to new money. It starts when Amy decides to act on her concern about something Fanny has said about having received a gift from some lady. Amy worries her sister might have compromised herself in some way, and goes to see Fanny at the theatre during a rehearsal. Cue an affectionate, knowing picture—like a Degas or, more likely, a Toulouse-Lautrec—of life behind the scenes. And cue Amy’s seeming innocence, Fanny’s sense of superiority over all the ‘common’ girls she has to work with, and a hint of her resentment that a career in dancing was Amy’s idea…. Amy, meanwhile, continues to show unending patience, and never blames any of her family for the way they are. Her angelic perfection is one of the givens we simply have to accept in some of Dickens’s heroines.
Fanny surprises Amy by telling her she is going to see the lady—it’s the walking jewel-rack that is Merdle’s Society-pleasing trophy wife—and that they can go together. Fanny leaves Frederick, whom they’ve rescued from his own world in the orchestra pit, in a dirty eating-place, and they go. The meeting is with Mrs Merdle in her house on Harley Street, and it’s a superb set piece. The woman’s icy coldness, as she speaks of her own sensitive nature and longing for a simple life, Fanny’s insistence on speaking to this kept wife as at least her equal, Amy’s unease that neither of them has any problem with the idea of the rich woman buying off Fanny’s connection to her idiot son. (Yes, another one.) When Amy expresses doubts as they leave—‘I am so very sorry, Fanny, that you suffered this lady to give you anything’—Fanny is contemptuous. ‘You little fool!’ she cries, and cruelly mocks her. ‘You have no self-respect, you have no becoming pride, just as you allow yourself to be followed about by a contemptible little Chivery of a thing….’ At last, Amy’s had enough and says so. As if. Instead, she swallows the insults—‘you mean little thing’—and they walk on in silence.
(Inside the Merdles’ house, Dickens had indulged himself in the most blatant double entendre I can think of in any of his writing. There is a screeching parrot, which always saves its loudest interruptions for any mention of ‘Society.’ It climbs all over its golden cage, ‘with its scaly legs in the air, and putting itself into many strange upside-down postures. This peculiarity has been observed in birds of quite another feather, climbing upon golden wires.’)
The next chapter is set entirely in Harley Street, where ‘the mansions and their inhabitants were so much alike … that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dullness of the houses.’ Neither the house nor the people have anything in their heads, and every one has its own story. The housing market is like the marriage market. ‘The house that nobody will take, and is to be had a bargain—who does not know her? The showy house that was taken for life by the disappointed gentleman, and which does not suit him at all—who is unacquainted with that haunted habitation?’ Neither of these seems to match the Merdles. He married whoever Society would approve of—Society approves—and we know why she married. She has room for a lot of jewels, which don’t come cheap, and she needs Sparkler to be well looked after. He’s her idiot son from her first marriage, and he is always asking unsuitable young women to marry him.
The set piece is a long dinner party at the Merdles’. Everybody is there. Bar, Bishop, Horse Guards, Treasury and the rest try to outbid each other in estimating Merdle’s latest killing. Bishop starts it at a hundred thousand. As the evening progresses, with everybody but Merdle himself having a great time boring everybody else, Bellows outbids them all with half a million. Merdle eats his eighteen pennyworth of dinner and drinks his tuppence worth of tea and says almost nothing. He isn’t drawn by any of their tips for a good bet, or Bishop’s bid for a philanthropic gift. But something isn’t right. A famous physician, ‘who knew everybody, and whom everybody knew’ arrives and notices Merdle in a quiet corner. He asks Merdle quietly if he feels better, and Merdle quietly replies that no, he is ‘no better.’ The physician tells others in confidence that Merdle has the constitution of a rhinoceros… so what could possibly be troubling the great man? Bar has an opinion, saying, ‘there was a certain point of mental strain beyond which no man could go.’ And whatever might be causing it, Dickens isn’t telling us.
Enough of Society and its money. Clennam, who is often at the Marshalsea, has gone a long way down in Dorrit’s opinion. After that fine testimonial at the start of their friendship, nothing else has arrived. He doesn’t know about Amy’s stipulation, of course, but perhaps he guesses—he writes Arthur a begging letter, containing a different fairytale, and I’ll come back to that. Clennam hasn’t got out of the prison yet, and the older Chivery asks him, now ‘a visitor of mark,’ whether he would look in on the family tobacconist shop. His ife would like a word with him… and it’s about John. There’s a mixture of comedy—a yard blowing with washing sees him ‘sitting disconsolate in the tuneless groves,’ and Mrs Chivery’s absurdly pompous syntax—and genuine pathos. And, for the first time ever—although not for the first time in any Dickens novel—a man understands that there might be another side to a woman he platonically idealises. Amy a potential lover? And one who has refused one man, he hears, because… why?
He leaves the tobacconist’s and sees Amy on the iron bridge. His conversation with John Chivery’s mother helps him to realise, although dimly—it’s always dimly in these situations in Dickens—that he has become very special to Amy. She recognises his footstep before she sees him, he sees a ‘tremor’ on her lip, and…. ‘Something had made her keenly and additionally sensitive just now. Now, was there some one in the hopeless unattainable distance?’ And who could it possibly be?
He’s stopped in his half-formed speculations when Maggy arrives. She brings letters for his eyes only, from Dorrit and Tip. Clennam takes them from her some distance from Amy, and reads that a remittance Dorrit is expecting is late, and would Mr Clennam… etc. He sends ‘the sum of Three Pounds Ten Shillings upon his I.O.U.’ as requested—but he doesn’t send Tip the ‘trifling balance of one pound seventeen and fourpence’ that he had asked for. It isn’t only class snobbery Tip shares with his father. Amy, of course, guesses exactly what the letters are about, but doesn’t try to stop him. It’s just more pain for her to swallow. Thank goodness Arthur Clennam knows his own mind. (Sorry, sorry.)
Instalments 7 and 8—Book 1, Chapters 23-29
We’re nearer the end of Book 1 than the beginning, and the focus in the seventh number is ever more on Amy Dorrit’s future. Or, rather, on tireless investigations being made by Pancks into the affairs of the Dorrit family. Meanwhile, Dickens manoeuvres things to bring about as much confusion and pain as possible for Amy. (He likes to make his heroines stew—but, while Amy has all the patience of Agnes in David Copperfield, she Doesn’t know Arthur the way Agnes knows David.) By the end of this number, Pancks has assembled a little band of ‘Conspirators,’ as the title of Chapter 25 has it, who will travel the country to check all kinds of details for him: ‘Here’s a Clerk at Durham for you, John, and an old seafaring gentleman at Dunstable for you, Mr Rugg. Two to me, was it? Yes, two to me. Here’s a Stone; three to me. And a Still-born Baby; four to me. And all, for the present, told.’
Pancks is secretive—as far as Amy is concerned, she should think of him as a ‘fortune-teller’ (pun intended), and that ‘he’ll tell the rest of my fortune one day—I shall live to know it.’ This comes early on, when he first tells her he’s on her side, and she never has any idea what he’s talking about. We know little more—except that after he has paid a visit to Mrs Clennam much later, in the next instalment, she becomes almost affectionate towards Little Dorrit. We’re as sure as Arthur is that his mother is hiding a guilty secret, and when Amy mentions her father, the old woman can’t help glancing at the watch. It’s always there, as though she is making sure she never forgets. Her self-imprisonment, we know, is all she has to offer to her God by way of seeking redemption. Dickens has already reminded us, in a different context, that this isn’t how things work with the God that anybody else would recognise.
Plenty more is happening, mainly to do with Arthur Clennam, in both instalments. Dickens seems determined to present not only him but both Doyce and Meagles as the embodiments of decency and honesty. Doyce nearly refuses the idea of a partnership, fearing Arthur might think he was trying to manipulate him into it when they first met on the road to Twickenham. Only a morning of persuasion by Meagles gets him to agree, on condition that Arthur inspect the books while he absents himself for a week. Everything is so above board, in its sensible, workmanlike way, that Arthur realises he’s met his match for every kind of probity. So, now there’s a new sign in Bleeding Heart Yard, Doyce and Clennam.
But nobody (or Nobody) is perfect. Arthur is limited by his own emotionally straitened upbringing, as Dickens reminds us with a peculiar little image when we see him at work in his makeshift office on the upper floor of the workshop. ‘A communication of great trap-doors in the floor and roof … made a shaft of light in this perspective, which brought to Clennam’s mind the child’s old picture-book, where similar rays were the witnesses of Abel’s murder.’ The son of that particular mother would never connect a shaft of light with anything but the judgmental and punitive scrutiny of her God. And as I’ve said before, he understands almost nothing about himself and what would make him happy.
He’s in the workshop when who should arrive but one of the women who has no chance of making him happy. Does Flora know it? There’s no doubt that a part of her does, but there’s more than one part of her. Ostensibly, she’s come to let Arthur know that he has been missed at her father’s house, but we see the ‘mermaid’ in all her pomp. It’s an image Dickens had first used when Arthur first met her again in the fourth number. In Chapter 13, for most of his visit, she had been in role as her younger self. Eventually, she had come out of it—but not quite: ‘she left about half of herself at eighteen years of age behind, and grafted the rest on to the relict of the late Mr F.; thus making a moral mermaid of herself.’
This is what she always does with Arthur, and she goes into the routine now, in his workshop office. After having coquettishly scolded him for his neglect, she introduces, by way of the ambiguous ‘her,’ that she needs to see him about Little Dorrit. She gets there in the end, but it takes a lot of time while she does her random word-association thing until even she admits it: ‘I am running into nonsense.’ Arthur compliments her for her kindness, and for a moment she sloughs off the silly half of herself. ‘Poor Flora rejoined with a plain sincerity which became her better than her youngest glances, that she was glad he thought so. She said it with so much heart that Clennam would have given a great deal to buy his old character of her on the spot, and throw it and the mermaid away for ever.’ But why has Dickens made her like this? I’ll say more about it when she speaks to Little Dorrit in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, Flora isn’t there alone. She’s brought Mr F’s aunt with her, and she continues aiming her incomprehensible, often vituperative judgments straight at Arthur. Then Pancks arrives too, with Casby. The way Casby speaks and behaves, as though he never thinks about where his money comes from, whilst making small-talk with the air of delivering benefactions, is bound to remind us of William Dorri—except, as we see later in the chapter, Casby is projecting a calculated image, whereas Dorrit believes in his own beneficence. It’s Pancks who lets Arthur know they are there to check up on him, and his new status as co-tenant with Doyce. That’s his business—his favourite word—as far as his ‘proprietor’ is concerned. But there’s something else, nothing to do with that. ‘Desiring to serve young person, name of Dorrit,’ he tells Arthur. And they agree to share anything they know about her. (He’s clearly a forerunner of Wemmick in Great Expectations, keeping work and the rest of his life completely separate. But for Pancks, until now, there’s been little outside of his ‘business’ role, except—and this becomes important—his comfortable lodgings and friendly live-in landlord.) After speaking to Arthur, he’s Casby’s runner for the rest of the day, terrorising Bleeding Heart Yard as he always does.
So, Flora having delivered her wish to offer work to Little Dorrit, Amy finds herself one morning at the Casby house. Flora is absurd, presenting essentially the same mermaid persona to her as she does to Arthur. And we see one of the reasons Dickens has created it for her. He needs there to be a misunderstanding between her and Amy, and he can do it by having Flora go into her comfortable roaring-cataract-of-consciousness routine. Poor Amy has never met Flora before, and doesn’t understand that the ongoing romantic attachment between her and Arthur only exists in her head. She misses any nuances there are in Flora’s narrative, and there are some, ‘the galloping pace of her new patroness having left her far behind.’ And all the time, Flora is the heroine of her own melodrama: ‘“when rent asunder we turned to stone in which capacity Arthur went to China and I became the statue bride of the late Mr F.” Flora, uttering these words in a deep voice, enjoyed herself immensely.’
Is this a reality for her? I don’t think it matters—and besides, she isn’t wrong about the effect on Arthur at the time. Is she jealous that Little Dorrit ‘had known Mr Clennam ever since his return,’ as she had guilelessly told her? No doubt. She’s bored, finds comfort mainly in frequent doses of medicinal brandy, and has nothing better to do than re-tell old stories to herself—or, preferably, to a captive audience. Whatever, Dickens has achieved his aim: he has made poor Amy believe that Arthur has passed her by, on his way—as she puts it in her story to Maggy after her return home—to ‘those who were expecting him.’
I’m always impressed by the way Dickens makes these useful turns of the plot appear seamlessly character-driven. When the ‘Someone’ in Amy’s story had first met Flora again in Chapter 13, his eyes ‘no sooner fell upon the subject of his old passion than it shivered and broke to pieces.’ But he is constitutionally incapable of letting her know that he finds it hard to be in the same room as the creature she has become. Worse, his reluctance to see her since then has predictably—for anybody who isn’t him—made her think about him all the more. Meanwhile, he is a stranger to his own needs. Later, we see him (of necessity) bringing to an end the silly charade of ‘Nobody’s’ love for Pet Meagles. Having allowed the disaster of Gowan’s pursuit of her to unfold before his eyes, he discovers too late how much her father would have welcomed him as a son-in-law. Meagles, getting it half-right, tells him it’s as though he’s the widower following the imagined death of Pet’s sister. Having died as a young child, to her parents she has a ghostly parallel life to Pet’s. Arthur would have made her a good husband.
(While I’m on the subject of Arthur and his women, a short digression. There is, of course, a third (real) woman in his life, one we know to be two years older than the spoilt twenty-year-old he originally thinks of as a possible future wife. But this third woman is the one he insists on thinking of as a child. He, ‘old and grave,’ as he decides he is after pretending to have given up on Pet, can be a father-figure to ‘Little Dorrit.’ It’s the only name he ever uses for her and, despite his perspicacity in many ways—the way he had noticed her discomfort even before she asks him to stop calling her ‘my child’ that first time on the Iron Bridge and, later, the way she doesn’t need to spell out that she would prefer him not to give her father any more money—he doesn’t understand what he means to her. Even worse, he doesn’t recognise what she could be for him.
As I’ve already described (see above in the ‘Instalments 3 and 4’ section), Dickens had signalled this clearly at the end of Chapter 13. This comes after Arthur had spent that gruesome afternoon and evening with Flora at Casby’s. With Flora no longer an option—he had been wondering about her before the ‘fatal shock’ of their meeting—and having decided that Nobody is going to fall in love with Pet Meagles, he’s in his rented rooms feeling completely lost: ‘That he should have missed so much, and at his time of life should look so far about him for any staff to bear him company upon his downward journey and cheer it, was a just regret.’ The signal—and a kindly author couldn’t offer a clearer one either to Clennam or the reader—comes after he reaches a real low point. ‘From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother’s welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora, what have I found!’
The clue is in the exclamation mark. In his depressed state, he isn’t looking for an answer—he assumes there is none to be found—but Dickens offers him one anyway. It comes as an immediate reply: ‘Little Dorrit!’ Thanks, Dickens, we get it. But Clennam doesn’t. And it’s because he doesn’t—an entirely plausible response from this man we know to be completely unacquainted with what he really needs—that by Chapter 24 Amy is able to believe Flora’s preposterous story and sublimate her own into a fairy tale for an overgrown child. Maggy must be the only child she can ever imagine having to take care of.)
But Pancks, Casby’s unfeeling runner and wheezing tug-boat, has another persona. Unlike Flora, he’s fully in control of when he’s one thing or the other, and it’s only when he’s the other that the reader comes to understand that he’s on the side of the angels. In this novel, that means he’s on the side of Amy Dorrit. He’s personable enough to anybody who doesn’t owe rent to be perfectly likeable, in his way, which is how by the end of the next chapter he’s stirred John Chivery so far from his pining disappointment to be on his band of conspirators. He’s keen to tell Pancks how he would walk to Durham for Amy if it didn’t take so long—Pancks knows how to read his man—while Pancks’s landlord, a retired lawyer, relishes the idea of bringing down anybody who has wronged a young woman. He has past form: his pursuit of a baker who jilted his daughter made the man a laughing-stock and his daughter far too grasping and materialistic to be seen as a possible romantic interest for John. I think.
Meanwhile, the bizarre love triangle—bizarre because one of the participants doesn’t realise he’s in it—is my favourite thing in these chapters. Flora’s fantastical story sends Amy into something of a decline, so she keeps to her room when she can and tells Maggy that no, she doesn’t feel well enough to see Arthur. Maggy returns to tell her Arthur is happy to send for a doctor but, of course, Amy isn’t going to let that happen. Dickens has already hinted at the parallel with John Chivery. The story she tells Maggy ends with her death, the shadow of the ‘Somebody’ going with her to her grave. The only thing missing is the epitaph.
One final thing in this instalment: Cavaletto. Did I mention that in the previous number Arthur had rescued him from a mob? Whatever, Arthur vouches for him when Pancks asks him if John Baptist would be a reliable tenant at the Yard. At first, he’s merely a figure of fun to the ‘bleeding hearts.’ But he is so cheerful, hobbling around on his injured leg and smiling and playing with the children, that they start to make an effort with him. Pancks is pleasantly surprised by the smiling promptness of his first payment of rent, and… we wonder how Dickens is going to use this resourceful man. For a living, he carves wooden flowers, some of which are for Doyce and Clennam. And while he’s slow to learn English—the bleeding hearts try to be helpful but they’re useless at it—his leg is slowly mending.
We’re with Arthur for most of the eighth number. Is he finally growing out of the introspection and self-doubt brought about by his unhappy and unfulfilled past? Nope. But Dickens puts him in some awkward situations that perhaps he’ll learn from. Perhaps. The first is to do with Harriet Beadle, as Miss Wade insists on calling Tattycoram when Arthur and Meagles track her down. She’s absconded, or escaped—Meagles had locked the door after she had failed to get beyond seven when advised, again, to ‘count to five-and-twenty.’ Is it only modern readers who completely sympathise with her, rather than Meagles? ‘Tattycoram’ has always been as annoying for the reader as it is humiliating for her, but Meagles just can’t see it. And while he carries on repeating it—and his five-and-twenty mantra—Arthur says nothing to suggest he’s uncomfortable with it. Meagles turns to him for support when they find her with Miss Wade. ‘You yourself … want to give the poor passionate girl another chance, I know, Clennam,’ and Arthur says nothing to distance himself from one of the only two friends he has in the world. ‘It would be strange and hard indeed if I did not … when you are all so forgiving.’
But it’s an ambiguous scene. Miss Wade is presented as wilfully destructive, ‘with her composed face attentively regarding her, and suggesting to an observer, with extraordinary force, in her composure itself (as a veil will suggest the form it covers), the unquenchable passion of her own nature.’ As she stirs up Tattycoram’s anger, Dickens appears to side with the two men. We’ve often seen how happy he is to be satirical about Meagles’s complacency but, following their confirmation as all-round good guys in the previous number, he seems to be allowing them the moral high ground now. Meagles says, ‘I don’t know what you are, but you don’t hide, can’t hide, what a dark spirit you have within you. If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against yourself.’
‘Gentlemen!’ said Miss Wade, calmly. ‘When you have concluded—Mr Clennam, perhaps you will induce your friend—’ and, although Meagles tries yet again, Miss Wade is triumphant. ‘What your broken plaything is as to birth, I am. She has no name, I have no name. Her wrong is my wrong. I have nothing more to say to you.’ Dickens makes sure we can’t possibly be on her side. But does this make the rather absurd Meagles right? Arthur supports him, but that can be accounted for—he has so few friends he isn’t going to stint in his support. Yet, meanwhile, we definitely don’t trust this woman, and wonder what her motive is. To help a downtrodden foundling, as she was? It seems unlikely. Was Miss Wade ever really a foundling anyway?
And she hasn’t finished with this man who had supported the hated Meagles. As Arthur follows him out, Miss Wade, ‘with a smile that is only seen on cruel faces,’ now sticks the knife into him: ‘I hope the wife of your dear friend Mr Gowan, may be happy in the contrast of her extraction to this girl’s and mine, and in the high good fortune that awaits her.’
Ah, Mr Gowan. In the next chapter we get confirmation of the kind of man Pet is going to marry. He has Arthur accompany him to see his mother, and to be offered another bitter insight into how things work in England. Gowan has laid the groundwork, so the old woman knows all about Pet, and that Arthur is a family friend. Gowan knows exactly what will happen at her lodgings, randomly divided-up and cluttered staterooms at Hampton Court that have been shared among pensioned-off hangers-on. She interrogates Arthur about these ‘people,’ the ‘Miggles’ or whoever they are, who are only after the status of an old family name. Nothing Arthur says will sway her, and she snorts in contempt at his efforts to pretend that nothing could be further from their minds. After this, another venerable ruin gives him a lesson in what is wrong with the current system of government.
‘If William Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, when they came over to one another and formed their ever-memorable coalition, had boldly muzzled the newspapers, and rendered it penal for any Editor-person to presume to discuss the conduct of any appointed authority abroad or at home, he thought the country would have been preserved. / It was agreed that the country (another word for the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings) wanted preserving, but how it came to want preserving was not so clear. It was only clear that the question was all about John Barnacle, Augustus Stiltstalking, William Barnacle and Tudor Stiltstalking, Tom, Dick, or Harry Barnacle or Stiltstalking, because there was nobody else but mob.’ In the carriage afterwards, with Gowan driving and Arthur trying not to reveal his mortification, Arthur reflects both on the moribund state of the country’s system of patronage and on the death of whatever hopes he might have retained with regard to Pet…
…so the title of the next chapter, ‘Nobody’s Disappearance,’ comes as no surprise. He and Doyce are going to Twickenham and, as usual, Arthur will walk. I’ll spare you the details beyond the vision he receives as he approaches a last bend in the road. Up ahead is… guess who, clearly there to speak to him alone. It becomes a poignant set piece, as Arthur proves how good he is at swallowing his own feelings out of consideration for Pet’s. She only speaks of ‘one whom I need not name,’ so and is clearly struggling to speak of what has happened—so he pre-empts it. He calls her by the name she is to have, ‘Minnie Gowan,’ and she is grateful, offering him a posy of roses for a buttonhole. And the poignancy count only increases after this. Not only does Meagles talk about imagining Arthur—he calls him this for the first time ever—as a son-in-law. Arthur has often allowed the river here to represent the course of his own life. And now…
Which only leaves one chapter, set in—and just outside—Mrs Clennam’s house. Pancks has been there, arousing her suspicions concerning his motives for seeking out Little Dorrit, and we’ve had that scene in which the old woman embraces her. Something about Amy’s stoical acceptance of her life, and that others are worse off, appeals to Mrs Clennam. Perhaps it assuages her sense of guilt, or perhaps she feels gratified that a great good—Amy’s uncomplaining acceptance of her lot—has come out of her impoverishment. Whatever it is, it convinces Affery that the only way to explain this behaviour to herself is that it’s ‘another dream,’ as the chapter title has it.
Affrey is a ghostly figure now, hearing noises, afraid of the clever ones, and spending a lot of her evenings with her apron over her head. When Amy leaves, Affrey follows her down, and sees her speaking to Pancks. Another dream? Perhaps—but the gust of wind that slams the door behind her is real enough to lock her out. Things couldn’t become any worse—until a hand on her shoulder promises a shaking from Flintwinch. Except it’s a sinister-looking man we recognise as Rigaud. He tells Affrey, in clear English, that he is just off the packet-boat. Does she know where the Clennam house is? She does, and points up to the window of Mrs Clennam’s room. He promises to climb through a downstairs window to open the door if she will get somebody to introduce him to Mrs Clennam. She fetches Flintwinch from the pub where he’s started to do a lot of business of his own. He responds to her explanation as you would expect—and is surprised that there really is a traveller waiting outside to be shown upstairs.
Instalments 9 and 10—to the end of Book 1, Chapters 30-36
At the beginning of the seventh instalment I hinted that Dickens is looking forward to the end of Book 1, because a lot of that instalment has to do with Little Dorrit’s future. Pancks’s running joke that he will be her fortune teller— two puns yoked together, quite clever for a tug-boat—starts at this time and carries on right until the tenth number. The Dorrits are going to be rich, and a new chapter—or, rather, Book 2, Riches—will begin. So the ninth and tenth numbers often feel mainly like a confirmation of what we already know, and a finishing-off of Book 1 in preparation for Book 2. They aren’t unengaging, but some episodes seem predictable.
The ninth number begins where the eighth ended, Rigaud having arrived and proudly playing the character we’ve met only twice before. Dickens, no doubt to remind us after all these months, makes constant references to his evil-looking physiognomy, while Rigaud himself makes constant references to his gentlemanliness. ‘On this man, with his moustache going up and his nose coming down in that most evil of smiles … Nature, always true, and never working in vain, had set the mark, Beware! It was not her fault, if the warning were fruitless.’ Of course, the joke is that in this novel Nature is often far from true. But this time she’s right, and we can be sure that he brings nothing but trouble to the Clennam house.
There’s clearly a back-story here, because Flintwinch is preoccupied as he sits in on the conversation. Before it, Rigaud pretends he has met him before, correcting himself by admitting it was someone who could have been his twin. We don’t know what business the house of Clennam has had with him, or with ‘Blandois,’ his current pseudonym. (The last time we saw him, on the road at the inn where Cavaletto got away as fast as he could, he was Lagnier.) As he settles himself to speaks to Mrs Clennam, he picks up the watch, and remarks on the initials on it: DNF. He pretends to imagine this must refer to some former admirer of hers, but he might already know that really the letters stand for Do Not Forget. No, says Mrs Clennam, rather ambiguously, she doesn’t forget. As ever, she makes a proud show of her self-sacrifice and her sin-abjuring motives for it, she isn’t going to admit, not even to herself what it is she mustn’t forget.
But Rigaud only pretends to be interested. He has come with a letter from French lawyers, supposedly with another on its way to confirm his bona fides. It will arrive tomorrow, he says, and goes to the only lodgings nearby. A gentleman is far above disdaining such a place, he tells whoever is listening, and happily becomes the most high-maintenance guest they have ever had…. And, reader, the letter we might have suspected to be a figment of his imagination arrives next day. He’s already drawn £50 from the house of Clennam, and he immediately gets on the next packet back to France.
So the plot is being moved forward—I wonder whether Flintwinch’s secretive dealings, perhaps with his brother acting as an agent, have got him in over his head—but by now it’s as though the characters are so set that Dickens doesn’t have to do too much to keep them ticking over. Mrs Clennam? Yes, we know. Rigaud? Yes, yes…. And the Flintwinches, complete with apron and shakings. It’s a nagging feeling I often get in these chapters—sometimes with Dickens pushing a known characteristic so far it feels like an exaggeration. This can be caricature—Pancks, any member of the Tite Barnacle family gathered for Gowan’s marriage to Pet, the epitaph-composing John Chivery—but he does it with his key characters too. If we thought the Dorrit family were becoming too far up themselves in the eighth number, you should see how they’ve become even before the unexpected news of their good fortune near the end of the tenth. And once they do hear of it, they become instantly and categorically unbearable.
And what about Arthur and Amy? He’s the only man in the world that Doyce would trust with everything, while she’s the only Dorrit who is so far from being corrupted she must be solid Teflon, They think as one on every moral issue, and see what is going on with the family. They each understand that they are as uneasy (Amy) or faintly disgusted (Arthur) as one another. They realise they are made for one another, yes? Ha. Not until Dickens is ghood and fready, no doubt very close to the end of the novel. But there’s a long way to go yet…
…because Dickens has some consolidation to do. He has a new character appear, as though from the stars, ‘if there were any star in the Heavens dull enough to be suspected of casting off so feeble a spark.’ This old man, a workhouse pauper known as Old Nandy, is only needed for one chapter. He’s there for Amy to be kind to, Fanny to turn her nose up about, and Dorrit to present all the worst sides of himself. He is revealed as Mrs Plornish’s father, so we get a brief look at how lovely both she and her husband are to him. Amy is there visiting, and when the old man says he’s on his way to the Marshalsea, Amy offers to go with him. How kind could she possibly be about her offer, telling him in all sincerity what a pleasure is company would be? Yep, there she goes.
Oh dear. By chance—yeh, yeh—Fanny is on the same road, and is appalled by the sight. She was never so inveterate a snob as she is now, and gives full vent to her anger at the way Amy is determined to show up the whole family. Dickens’s readers would recognise the implication of her telling Amy she will walk on the other side of the road—there’s only one Good Samaritan around here—just as they would recognise the flamboyant way William Dorrit later makes a big public show of charity towards Old Nandy. He has definitely not learnt the lesson of the widow’s mite, another of those parables everybody used to know from childhood. (Remember Chapter 6? That was when Plornish offered his mite to Dorrit. ‘It ain’t much,’ said the Plasterer, putting a little pile of halfpence in his hand, ‘but it’s well meant.’ Oh dear, again.)
In other words, as Book 1 draws to a close, Dickens is getting the Dorrits ready for the part they are going to play in Book 2. Before the giving of the shilling to Old Nandy, William Dorrit had been as patronising as it is possible to be towards a man he refers to as a ‘pensioner’ of his. He is no such thing, of course—he simply slips the old man a few coppers when he visits. The shilling he ostentatiously gives is because he’s in a good mood, having just received £10 from Arthur Clennam. And all through the chapter, Amy is roundly criticised by everybody for her mean little dress, her associating with Old Nandy—Dorrit’s show of grief is only matched for repulsiveness by his equally awful show of forgiveness once he’s recovered—and for deliberately, it seems, letting the side down.
It couldn’t get any worse. Except it does, because Tip arrives. He has been taking his cue from the Dorrit playbook, right down to his use of the word that is the title of the chapter: ‘Spirit.’ It has no definite meaning for the Dorrits beyond a catch-all term for the right of the gentry to be as entitled and snobbish as they like. Dorrit criticises Amy for her lack of it in associating on equal terms with Nandy. He, William Dorrit has it, ‘Becoming Spirit,’ in speaking kindly to the old man (younger than Dorrit, in fact) in a way that makes it clear they are not equals. Amy’s lack of spirit is what causes him now to feel the kind of ‘humiliation [he has] been spared to this day,’ and to sob quietly to make his point.
Tip doesn’t arrive until after Arthur, who is being made very welcome following the earlier arrival of the £10. It’s his turn to be appalling, this time to Arthur. ‘The individual present’ hadn’t been gentlemanly to him in refusing a loan, and it’s when Dorrit angrily tells him off—we know why he’s on Arthur’s side, at least for now—that Tip comes back with the S-word: ‘you ought to be proud of my showing a proper spirit.’ And the ensuing exchange reveals it for what it is, sheer nonsense. ‘A proper spirit? Yes, a proper spirit; a becoming spirit. Is it come to this that my son teaches me—me—spirit!’ And that’s enough of them for now. The next time we see them is after Pancks’s revelations about their fortune.
Next… further consolidation. We know what Arthur and Amy are like, and we get their self-burying habits in spades now. Arthur tells her he regrets how he hasn’t been seeing much of her, and she finally opens her heart and tells him how she feels. As if. Really, she pretends to have been busy, and he is able to go into father-figure mode. He puts his arm around her, tells him he will provide for her even if there’s somebody she has a fondness for (I’m paraphrasing.) He means John Chivery, and she does what Arthur does in the same scene, pretending there’s definitely no possibility of any attachment, ever. Arthur doesn’t pick up on any of Amy’s signals to him—and even Maggy can’t help her. His blindly ignoring Maggy’s astute mention of the princess and the little woman’s secret is completely predictable.
Enter Pancks to liven things up. Arthur already knows about his investigations, and Pancks is in fine form as he drops broad hints that he’s practically finished sorting it all out. Amy, as ever, is confused, and doesn’t understand the looks the two men exchange. No. It’s all very jolly, but…
…the new instalment brings a new scene. Or two new scenes, to bring the Gowan/Meagles wedding to a satisfactory—as in extremely doubtful—conclusion. First, having witnessed the bleak comedy of the Dorrits’ Marshalsea version of patronising or bruised gentility, we are now treated to the real thing. Or, in fact, three more versions, a recapitulation of the whole bleakly comic nonsense of the English class system. There’s a coda, of course. As the title of the final chapter has it, The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan. I’ll come back to that.
First we get the two most appalling female representatives of ruling classes—Fanny is only a novice compared to them—Mrs Gowan and Mrs Merdle. It’s family versus money, both highly problematic in their own ways. Mrs Gowan’s grip on the tenuous enough links he has to the Barnacle and Stiltstalker axis needs reinforcement. She visits Mrs Merdle to have it confirmed that Society finds Henry’s marriage not merely acceptable but laudable. It’s one of the best scenes in any of these chapters, presenting the charade of their absurd little courtly dance. Mrs Gowan pretends she has grudgingly offered her consent—she never had a choice, of course—and is very pleased to have Mrs Merdle confirm that for a gentleman to marry for money is almost a requirement in her echelon of Society. ‘Mrs Merdle, who really knew her friend Society pretty well, and who knew what Society’s mothers were, and what Society’s daughters were, and what Society’s matrimonial market was, and how prices ruled in it, and what scheming and counter-scheming took place for the high buyers….’
In fact, she offers almost no pretence of listening, focusing instead upon the jewellery collection displayed on her person. None of it matters , so long as the conversation has taken place. ‘Mrs Gowan, who of course saw through her own threadbare blind perfectly, and who knew that Mrs Merdle saw through it perfectly, and who knew that Society would see through it perfectly, came out of this form, notwithstanding, as she had gone into it, with immense complacency and gravity….’
As she is leaving Mr Merdle blunders in. He’s drifting aimlessly around the house he is never comfortable in, and his wife insists on a conversation about a ‘complaint’ she has. He isn’t trying hard enough, isn’t behaving according to the required forms, doesn’t play the game. She doesn’t say it like this, but it’s summed up in something her idiot son, also drifting idly by, is able to confirm. ‘Fellers referring to my Governor—expression not my own—perfect phenomenon of Buyer and Banker and that—but say the Shop sits heavily on him. Say he carried the Shop about, on his back rather—like Jew clothesmen with too much business.’ Money: yes. Everything else: no. When she compares his non-Society face to a carpenter’s, he wistfully says that he wouldn’t mind being a carpenter. And when he’s on his own, he looks out of nine windows one by one—‘and appeared to see nine wastes of space.’ Later, he gets bullied by the butler, then at some big Society dinner, and then by the butler again.
Next: the wedding. It’s a Barnacle-fest—subtly, or not so subtly different from Society—and its awful. Mr and Mrs Meagles hate it, Pet has already shed tears over the break-up of the family she loves, and the Barnacles take over. Enough said? We get more details of them, essentially Dickens satirising the way the ruling classes have inherited the Earth. Empire is incapable of planting a flag anywhere without a Barnacle being dispatched to supervise it. At the end of the day, Meagles pretends to have enjoyed it, but Arthur knows the truth. And he knows Meagles knows, too. Meanwhile, Doyce isn’t there. He’s the only one who will have nothing to do with this particular courtly dance.
Next: Pancks’s follow-up announcement and explanation to Clennam, and the last gasp of the Amy/Arthur thread as he breaks the news to her. And William Dorrit’s reaction. And, in the last chapter of all, the Dorrits in all their pomp.Has Dickens milked the possibilities enough yet? What do you think? How much do I need to say now, beyond what I’ve already mentioned or hinted at?
Pancks has spent all his money, and risked more on a loan from Casby. Had he failed, it would have meant seven years on half salary…. The bottom line, he tells Arthur, is a thousand pounds. No problem, says Arthur, understanding that the estate—one of those Dickens-can’t-be-bothered-with-a-story waves of the magic wand—will be able to cover it from petty cash. But how to break it to the Dorrits? Through Amy, of course, at work that day for Flora. All sorts of possible misunderstandings re opened up when Amy is brought to meet him. Why is he looking like that? What is this ‘piece of great good-fortune … Wonderful fortune?’ I’ve been trying to imagine what might, just might be going through her head, if only for a moment:
‘They stood in a window, and her eyes, full of light, were fixed upon his face. He put an arm about her, seeing her likely to sink down. She put a hand upon that arm, partly to rest upon it, and partly so to preserve their relative positions as that her intent look at him should be shaken by no change of attitude in either of them. Her lips seemed to repeat ‘Wonderful fortune?’ He repeated it again, aloud.’ The truth is almost too bizarre—‘Dear Little Dorrit! Your father’—and, after more details, she faints in his arms. We’re seeing the almost infinite depth of her unaccountable devotion to the dreadful old man.
So, to the Marshalsea by coach, Amy disorientated by this sign of having been catapulted to a world of wealth. And what comes next, when they tell William Dorrit, is more interesting than it might have been. Amy’s bemusement has prepared us for his. He doesn’t instantaneously become his posturing, patronising self, but a bewildered old man. Significantly, Fanny and Tip aren’t there to wind him up, and we see the human side of him that Dickens reminds us of from time to time. He isn’t wicked, he’s weak, as he’s always been. When he was dreadful towards Plornish that time, he later realises his mistake and weeps. When he’s discovered trying to manoeuvre Amy into a marriage with John Chivery, he knows it wasn’t right, tries to justify it with an invented story, then breaks down, again. Now, he frankly doesn’t know what to do, feels the other inmates would want some sign from him, tells Amy off for not letting him find more suitable clothes before showing himself. It’s always clothes with William Dorrit.
It’s after the others arrive that everything is back to as it was in that awful scene with Old Nandy. Her father never recognises that Amy embodies the better nature of the family, instead taking all his cues from the others. Before the end of the chapter, he is patronising those who are now the poor unfortunates, accepts his good fortune as a right and, as ever, looks down on or is frankly critical of all those who have helped him. As with Amy since her earliest years, he turns his attention away from any thought of the hard work of others, and soon his lawyers are looking into the probity of Pancks and the others without whom his fortune would always have remained hidden. Are the gentry and the ruling classes always like that? Dickens doesn’t make the observation, but we remember Mrs Merdle, her husband, Mrs Gowan, and her son’s small but useful income derived from his marriage. To be forced to think about money is to be reminded, like Society, of the vulgarity of ‘Shop.’
Now, it’s all a matter of confirming that the Dorrits are going to be worse now they’re rich than when they were poor. Their oleaginously condescending farewells to the bereaved institution end that chapter of their lives—and, when they realise Amy isn’t with them as they climb into the carriage, it hints at the troubling future Book 2 is likely to hold. Amy herself had been persuaded to buy a smart dress for the first time in her life, but had gone back for all sorts of sentimental reasons to say a last farewell to her old room. She had fallen asleep, and when Arthur hastily returns to fetch her—in his arms!—she’s still in the shift dress Fanny hates so much. Amy isn’t of their newly discovered world. She had asked Arthur whether her beloved father would really have to pay off his old debts, as well as paying with over twenty years of his life. Arthur thinks of it as a speck, if the only one, of the ‘taint’ of the Marshalsea. Another way of looking at it is, she doesn’t know that money has nothing to do with the value of a life.
Instalments 11-12—Book 2, Riches, Chapters 1-7
A new chapter in their lives? Maybe, but with this family it’s the same old story. All the worst features of the Dorrits we’d come to be disgusted by at the end of ‘Book the First’ are confirmed now that they have their wealth and can flaunt it. The pull of the Grand Tour has them arriving, finally, at the Convent on the St Bernard Pass, and for a chapter Dickens does that thing where nobody is identified by name. We recognise them through their now well-established patterns of behaviour, except for ‘an elderly lady’ with them, eventually identified as one Mrs General. I’ll come back to her, and their courier, and the squad of servants that has more than doubled their numbers. Part of the show, this superfluity. Obviously.
And guess what, there are other familiar faces too. A supercilious man with his big dog and his self-effacing young wife. And an ‘insinuating’ gent with a dangerous-looking moustache, who has accidentally met up with the Gowans in Geneva. And if that isn’t enough familiar faces, in the next chapter they briefly meet—or clash with—two more, a fine-looking lady and her brainless son. I’ll come back to them too, but first Dickens feels he has to carry on what he started at the end of Book 1. Chapters like these are about confirmation, reinforcement (as if we need it) of what the Dorrits are like. Fanny and Tip, now Miss Dorrit and Edward Dorrit Esq. are, as we knew they would be, worse than ever. She loves to pretend she’s been swanning around like a duchess all her life, and he does what boorish gents do. Gowan is sarcastic when he blocks the warmth from the big fire by standing right in front of it—always a signifier in Dickens. Tip is ready for a fight after Gowan’s remark about nobody wanting ‘roast man’ for dinner, but the insinuating hanger-on, later identified through his signature in the guest-book as ‘Blandois of Paris,’ knows the type and smooths things over.
So the big thing for the Dorrits is confirming their status. They constantly make sure nobody is in any doubt that they are the best people in the room, with William particularly anxious to gloss over what he’s been doing for the past twenty-odd years. As these chapters go on, events occasionally keep them on their toes—Fanny’s strategy with Mrs Merdle is straight out of the Becky Sharpe playbook—and one particular problem causes them all some difficulty. That would be ‘Miss Amy Dorrit,’ who has changed as little from how she was in Book 1 as the rest of the family. Fanny, in particular, treats Amy’s compassion and/or consideration for others as an affront to the family’s dignity. The servants will talk about the easy life they have, because Amy is always wanting to help.
None of it is any more subtle than it was in the final instalment of Book 1. Then, it was Amy’s care for Old Nandy, treated by both Fanny and their father as though she’s deliberately seeking to humiliate them all in public. Now, it’s anything Amy does that isn’t as haughty and careless as Fanny. Later, after their arrival in Venice, Amy just isn’t playing the game. ‘The family began a gay life, went here and there, and turned night into day; but she was timid of joining in their gaieties, and only asked leave to be left alone.’ They tolerate it at first, but just you wait….
That’s later. The company are still making their way over the St Bernard Pass, and Dickens needs to set a few more things going. The family’s status anxiety is ever-present, so they’re always on the lookout for snubs. There’s a wonderful set piece scene in which William pulls so much rank it gives way and he falls over backwards. On their arrival at the hotel in Martigny he makes such a fuss about their rooms having been borrowed for an hour or two—‘Nothing could exceed Mr Dorrit’s indignation’—he tells his party that right, they’re leaving. The owner is as bemused as he is apologetic, but there’s no stopping William. The trunks and bags have to brought back, the horses and mules have to be dragged back out of the stables…. It’s the idiot son who eases things with Tip, and his majestic mother finishes off the act of lofty, faux-humility. The family will stay after all, William having been beaten by a pro.
But this encounter is doing two jobs. The mother and son are Mrs Merdle and Edmund Sparkler, of course, and it’s a godsend for Fanny. Godsend as in, it sets something up for her that will no doubt be the worst scheme of her life. By the second instalment of Book 2 she’s not only reeling in poor Sparkler inch by unrelenting inch, but explaining every step along the way to Amy, temporarily in her good books and utterly mystified. But now, in Martigny, it’s William Dorrit being reeled in, by Mrs Merdle’s careful assemblage of words that sounds to him like a flattering apology. ‘Mr Dorrit, on the altar of whose dignity all this was incense, made a gracious reply; and …. he would—hum—overlook what he had at first supposed to be an affront.’ And you just wait till he finds out, in Venice, who she’s married to.
Something else that Dickens is setting up is the connection between Amy and Minnie, aka the former Pet Meagles. (We hadn’t learnt Pet’s real name until Chapter 16 of the first book. But she’s Minnie now.) Amy goes to Minnie’s room because a) Minnie had been bruised in a fall on the road, and Amy is always concerned about everybody’s welfare; and b) she has a letter from Arthur Clennam to give to Minnie whenever she might meet her. Which she does. All Minnie tells Amy about it is that she’ll tell her the full story one day, but that now she’s read it she’ll give it back to Amy to keep it safe from being misunderstood. OK… but, of course, Fanny doesn’t like the way Amy scurries about after people. She’s really got to stop it…
…which is a sentiment the appalling Mrs General would endorse. (In a few chapters’ time she will indeed endorse it, when called upon to judge.) Mrs General, the widow of some anonymous-sounding army man, is an expensive charlatan. Her previous employer had composed a glowing reference designed solely to pass her on to a new victim. She’s a great advocate of something Dickens decried in Pictures from Italy, the incontrovertible received opinion. That’s all she ever does with opinions, receive them—and pass them on, untouched by any thought in her own head. She consists of no substance whatsoever, only blandness and surface. And we are introduced to Dickens’s key-word for her, varnish. ‘Passion was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs General, and blood was to change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs General’s province to varnish.’ The word appears six more times in the next four sentences—which end the chapter dedicated to her.
The Amy/Minnie connection is going to get more complicated, because Dickens is busy reminding us of another unappealing feature of the Dorrits’ recalibration of the past. Arthur Clennam was endlessly helpful to them, but by the time they are leaving the Marshalsea he is both ungentlemanly and determined to put them in their place. Tip never forgets the loan that Arthur refused him, William Dorrit pretends his gifts were grudging loans—his lawyer had calculated the interest to be paid, to the penny—and Fanny will never forget, in the moment of their glorious departure, the way Arthur paraded Amy in her poor dress for everyone to see. They are talking about this now, and it’s part of their resentment against Gowan and Minnie. They are all in it together, determined to undermine the Dorrits.
It’s time we got to Venice. On the journey, Dickens mixes sardonic descriptions of the dilapidation beneath the undeniable beauty with consolidation of character traits we know about. But ‘Blandois’ gets special attention. For instance, as he offers to accompany Amy downstairs—how does it go? ‘She went down, not easily hiding how much she was inclined to shrink and tremble … he inspired her with an aversion that made him little less than terrific.’ Ah. We knew back in Chapter 11 of the first Book—‘Let Loose’—that once away from Marseilles he’d be playing a big part. You just wait till they get to Venice…
…which they do, and you already know some of it. But there are other things, and a character I realise I haven’t mentioned. Frederick Dorrit. He comes into his own, once, briefly emerging from his nodding passivity to take issue with William and Fanny. In a chapter titled ‘Something Wrong Somewhere,’ the ‘something’ is ostensibly to do with Amy falling short of requirements. The family have form in this regard. I’ve already mentioned the Old Nandy atrocity, which had involved Fanny winding their father up to an absurd pitch of righteous anger, and reducing Amy to tears. Now Fanny’s doing it again, this time enlisting Mrs General’s support and having a similar effect on Amy. As ever, the reader might well be repressing the urge to shake Amy into some sort of riposte but, as ever, it only sends her to her father to lovingly put her hand on his arm. As he often is, William is discomfited by this, and the scene comes to an end with Amy fulfilling her usual role of passive non-resistance.
But Frederick, during a conversation next morning, has had enough. William, Fanny and Mrs General have been performing a stately dance around the appropriateness of [Gowans?] and the desirability of knowing the Merdles [example?] We’ve occasionally had our attention drawn to Frederick’s quiet unease with the family’s treatment of Amy, and he isn’t going to be quiet any more. He says what Amy would never say for herself because she doesn’t understand the truth of it, and it’s a joy. ‘Brother! I protest against it!’ And after deeply assuring them of his sincerity and love for them, he tells them why. Which Fanny doesn’t like one bit—until he shuts her up with the irrefutable truth. ‘How dare you … how dare you do it? Have you no memory? Have you no heart?’ She wonders why he is ‘attacking’ her. What has she done? ‘Done? … where’s your affectionate invaluable friend? Where’s your devoted guardian? Where’s your more than mother? How dare you set up superiorities against all these characters combined in your sister? For shame, you false girl, for shame!’
It seems not to work, Fanny collapsing into sobs of self-righteousness. ‘I never, never, never was so used! … There never was anything so harsh and unjustifiable, so disgracefully violent and cruel!’ But the next time she sees her sister, poor Amy can’t understand what’s going on. Suddenly Fanny is the affectionate older sister, so that when Amy is about to visit the Gowans, Fanny accompanies her. Do The Dorrits know about the distant family connections by now? Probably, because Henry is now no longer non grata—and it time for another set piece. Gowan is in is studio, demonstrating his usual mixture of contempt for everybody and everything, including any pretence in his own talent. As though it matters, he implies.
But soft—who can that be, posing as a figure of something fiercely allegorical? It’s Blandois of Paris again, back in Gowan’s company after having stayed behind for a time at the monastery on the St Bernard Pass. The way Dickens describes him, I always get the impression it’s a game he’s playing with the reader. How far can he go down the pantomime villain route? Answer: pretty far. There are always villains in his novels, with perhaps Uriah Heep as bad as they get. Like Heep, Rigaud/Blandois looks as repellently villainous as he really is, and I remember the sense of physical disgust David Copperfield feels when Heep invites himself to sleep over in his rooms one time. It’s akin to what Amy feels in the presence of ‘Blandois of Paris,’ and we see it again now. You want a pantomime villain? You got it. Gowan teases Amy and Fanny. Here is his cattivo soggetto, but what is he?
‘A bravo waiting for his prey, a distinguished noble waiting to save his country, the common enemy waiting to do somebody a bad turn’? Gowan decides, as he adds another amateurish stroke: ‘a murderer after the fact. Show that white hand of yours, Blandois. Put it outside the cloak. Keep it still—’ because Gowan’s remark has made Blandois’s hand shake. ‘He was formerly in some scuffle with another murderer, or with a victim, you observe,’ says Gowan, and Blandois gives a twist to his moustache, ‘which had a damp appearance; and now he stood in the required position, with a little new swagger.’ He fixes his eyes on Amy: ‘throughout he looked at her. Once attracted by his peculiar eyes, she could not remove her own, and they had looked at each other all the time. She trembled now…. Gowan, feeling it, and supposing her to be alarmed by the large dog beside him,’ grabs the dog roughly by the collar. It wants nothing more than to get across the room and attack Blandois….
There are plenty of other takeaways from Chapters 6 and 7. Sparkler is welcome at the Dorrits’ shabby palazzo—they’re all shabby in Venice—because Dorrit has realised who his widowed mother is now married to. It’s later, in Rome, that he is able to tell Mrs Merdle in person that he must make better acquaintance with her husband when he gets back to London…. Meanwhile, when Fanny speaks to her again in Rome, it’s she, Mrs Merdle, who perpetuates the fiction that their first ever encounter was in Martigny. In fact, the narrator allows that she looks on admiringly at the way Fanny handles it like a pro (I’m paraphrasing), able to outdo Mrs Merdle at her own game. Amy is mystified by it all, and Fanny explains what’s going on.
This has become Fanny’s role to show ‘kindness’ to Amy by tutoring her about how society works. ‘It was nothing to her that the kindness took the form of tolerant patronage; she was used to that.’ At the beginning of Chapter 7, Fanny asks her, knowing the answer, whether she can see Mrs General’s designs on their father. Amy finds it hard to believe that the varnish queen is reeling him in, wondering how on earth Fanny can know. ‘Lord, my darling,’ said Fanny, tartly. ‘You might as well ask me how I know when a man is struck with myself!’ Amy has had all those lessons about how Fanny is leading Sparkler on as a kind of playful power game—but she’s shocked by what Fanny says next about how she couldn’t stand the idea of having Mrs General as a stepmother. ‘I should not be able to bear it, and I should not try. I’d marry young Sparkler first.’ I’d say, watch this space.
Other things. Somebody has poisoned Gowan’s dog, following its snarling lunge at Blandois/Rigaud. Amy and Minnie, who meet often now, hate the insinuating Frenchman—Dickens is keeping up the pantomime villain presentation of him—and Minnie is sure he was the one who did the poisoning. Gowan himself doesn’t see it, and is becoming almost as bad. He perpetuates the received view that he was the victim of the Meagles’s determination to bring about a distinguished match for their daughter, and treats Minnie almost contemptuously. He is a dreadful snob, treating his own chosen way of life with just as much contempt. Art is ‘hocus pocus,’ but he tells Dorrit he will be happy to take his ‘hundred guineas’ for a bad portrait, because at least it won’t be as expensive as a bad portrait carrying a more famous name.
What else? The title of Chapter 7 is ‘Mostly, Prunes and Prism,’ based on the words that are Mrs General’s favourites because they form the mouth of a young person so acceptably. It comes to represent everything to do with her superficial gloss, and the chapter opens with a satire of the aimless, unquestioning attitudes of tourists relying on received opinions about everything. Amy is the insightful one, and Dickens has her reaching an insight he clearly applauds. ‘It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home.’ He pursues the conceit for a paragraph, concluding that they ‘fell into a slouching way of life: still, always like the people in the Marshalsea.’ It’s a waste of everybody’s time.
But what about Fanny and Sparkler? Blandois and the possessive looks he gives to the two vulnerable young women? Gowan and Millie? And, of course, Dorrit and the mistakes he’s making? We’ll see.
Instalments 13,14—Book 2, Riches, Chapters 8-14
For me, these two numbers—and the previous two—are a master-class in Dickens’s approach to the long form serial novel. As I started reading ‘Book the Second’ last month, I suspected that the Dorrits’ journey to Italy hadn’t signalled a true turning-point yet. Everybody was behaving exactly as they did in London (or anywhere else), and Dickens was busying himself reiterating and confirming character traits and patterns of behaviour we already knew well. Was Dickens doing more than simply repeating himself? In their insecurities and new-found snobbery, the Dorrits are like this, Henry Gowan is like this, Rigaud/Blandois is like this. I was thinking his main technique to avoid any sense of tedium the reader might feel—his efforts weren’t always working for me—was a mixture of comedy and his usual skilfulness in social and psychological observation.
I realise now that this reiteration is integral to the structure. It’s the long-form version of one of Dicken’s favourite sentence- and paragraph-length techniques, repetition. At the chapter and instalment level, following the recapitulation comes the development, just as it does in music. In every chapter, things move on. Take William Dorrit’s embarrassing row about their rooms at Martigny in Chapter 2, the one that lays bare, again, every one of his insecurities. The main development there is the chance for Fanny—and Dickens—to draw up the battle lines with Mrs Merdle, ready for the war of attrition to come in later instalments.
But for me, the best recapitulation/development episode had come in Chapter 5 of the second Book. Not for the first time, Fanny and William (with Edward in the background) subject Amy to a humiliating dressing down. Fanny is embarrassed by Amy’s continuing all-round Mrs General-defying mousiness, and tells her so. When their father joins in, doing his usual thing of cranking up Amy’s sense of having failed him, it’s almost too much for both Amy and the reader to bear. So far, so Dorrit. They are subjecting her to exactly the same treatment—it feels like more of a straight repeat than a recapitulation—as when she dared to treat Old Nandy as a human being in Chapter 31 of the first Book….
But this time, there’s perhaps the most welcome development in the novel so far. Frederick has been quietly looking on and, again not for the first time, expresses his disagreement. But, unprecedentedly, he the gives the whole family such a dressing down regarding their treatment of Amy that it actually changes things. It’s a really satisfying moment, because Frederick says exactly what we’re all thinking. And Fanny, through her carapace of snobbery and narcissism (long anteceding Mrs General’s varnish), is moved. Of course, she sobs at the injustice of it, and sees it as proof—reiterated nine chapters later—that Frederick isn’t safe to be let out. But this is the moment when Fanny begins, within her limited capacity, to treat Amy more kindly. True, ‘the kindness took the form of tolerant patronage; [but] she was used to that.’
So things have definitely moved on somewhat by the end of the twelfth number. Nevertheless, I still had the impression that, really, Dickens was mainly consolidating—or, at most, tweaking—situations and circumstances from which future developments might spring. Is Mrs General really plotting to marry William Dorrit? Is the Gowans’s marriage as unhappy as it appears? Does Fanny really have a long-term plan to marry Sparkler…? And so on. But there is far more movement in the next two numbers and it’s in them, for the first time, that the reader begins to sense an array of gathering crises. We guess these will only be fully worked out between now and the end of the novel, but there’s definitely the beginning of a new momentum.
13th Number—the peregrinations of Arthur Clennam and another ‘Letter from Little Dorrit’
Question: how to reintroduce the reader to ten or more different plot-threads in London, kept on hold since the ninth and tenth numbers, and after two instalments spent in Italy? Answer: take a tour around them all with Arthur. We don’t even realise that this is what Dickens is doing, because almost every part is also touching on the glacially slow rate of Arthur’s coming to terms with living in his own skin. He has always been uncomfortable, despite the evidence Dickens piles on that he really, really is one of the good ones. Friend after friend tries to reassure him of his worth—Doyce, Meagles, and in the fourteenth number, Pancks—but he suffers from a kind of negative confirmation bias. He’s only interested in doing himself down.
In the first few pages Doyce, confirming his position as another of the good ones—remember his spotless probity in Chapter 23 of the first Book, when he moved out of town for a week while Arthur inspected the books?—tells him he’s as capable as any man. ‘You have as good a head for understanding such things as I have met with.’ He’s talking about the practicalities of the firm and its products, but Arthur is, as ever, full of self-doubt. ‘A totally uneducated one, I am sorry to add,’ he says, but Doyce won’t let him get away with it. ‘I don’t know that … and I wouldn’t have you say that.’
It’s the beginning, or perhaps the continuation, of a very slow process of change. Will Arthur ever fully believe in himself? We’ll have to wait and see. He and Doyce have been talking about the possible revival of Doyce’s rejected invention (plot thread 1, as it were), and now, following Doyce’s positive remarks about him, and a painstaking explanation of the invention—Doyce could explain absolutely anything to anybody, it seems—Arthur feels confident enough to try tackling the Circumlocution Office again (plot thread 2). Nothing has changed there, obviously—it might be one of those times when the reader wishes Dickens would hurry up and get on with it—but, for variation’s sake, the narrative briefly moves away from Arthur and into Parliament, so that we can see how some Barnacle or other routs any opposition to their precious Office through sheer force of (meaningless) number-crunching. Plus ça change.
This, in fact, is plot thread 3. It starts small, with the parliamentary Barnacle’s comic-sounding images of red tape stretching ‘in graceful festoons, from Hyde Park Corner to the General Post Office.’ But it’s the beginning of a theme that really only starts to come into its own in the 14th number, the corrupt way the Barnacles retain power without reference to any merit. By then, any possibility of an objective assessment of a project has disappeared, as the Barnacles’ endorsement of Merdle leads to a dangerous ‘epidemic’ of investment. The Barnacles’—that is, the Establishment’s—determination to bolster their own power and wealth has led to the top-to-bottom obfuscation of what is really going on. In the same chapter there’s a neat metaphor, in the smoke emanating from Arthur and Pancks’s ‘eastern pipes,’ of how judgment is clouded beyond all capacity to be useful. ‘Clouds’ has become a favourite metaphor by then.
But that’s later. This is still only Chapter 8, and there’s a different—though related—atrocity to be encountered before it ends. Plot thread 4 is the fiction perpetrated by ‘the dowager Mrs Gowan’ concerning the marriage of her ‘poor fellow’ to ‘the pretty one.’ It’s another masterclass. It was only in the early 20th Century that ‘Show, don’t tell’ became a mantra of writing courses. Dickens was a master of both, sometimes at the same time. Through dialogue, he has shown us, for instance, Doyce’s sound judgment of character and the dishonest rhetoric of one of the Parliamentary Barnacles. Meanwhile, he has been telling us about the ingenuity and worthwhile nature of Doyce’s invention, through his, Dickens’s, descriptions of how Doyce describes it and how Arthur appreciates its value. He’s also told us—when does he ever stop, when it’s in his sights?—of the all-round uselessness of the Circumlocution Office. Its workings remain as closed and mysterious to the reader as Doyce’s invention, but that’s OK. Dickens is good at telling it like this, and it works.
But what about Mrs Gowan and her ‘poor fellow’? Arthur is present, again, when she pays one of her occasional state visits to the Meagles’. Her reason for going, beyond subjecting them to the most insolent insinuations she can muster—she’s well-practised at them, so she can muster plenty—is two-fold. She wants to put an end to these tedious visits to Twickenham for good, but not before shaming Meagles into sending more money to her son and daughter-in-law. The conversation is presented verbatim, with Dickens’s usual finely-tuned commentary on reactions and effects, particularly on poor Meagles’s mood. We read every nuanced insult, spoken as though innocently, but always with a subtext of disdain.
This is maestro-level show and tell. Dickens makes sure we understand every bit of it: ‘My poor fellow was her son; and this mode of speaking of him politely kept alive, without any offence in the world, the pretence that he had fallen a victim to the Meagles’ wiles.’ Meanwhile, ‘the dear pretty one … also delicately implied that her son had been captured by mere beauty, and under its fascination had forgone all sorts of worldly advantages.’ Meagles is fuming by now, so she can blame the almost palpable tension on his social awkwardness. She prepares to leave with a more transparent show of disdain than ever. All pretence is unnecessary, because she has done what she came for—tell Meagles he needs to provide her son with a better income, whilst simultaneously letting him know she won’t be visiting again. Later, with her cronies, she can pretend that all her best efforts to be civil had failed: ‘she had found it impossible to know those people who belonged to Henry’s wife, and who had made that desperate set to catch him.’
Meanwhile, Arthur had tried to do the right thing at the Meagles’ without stepping on anybody’s toes. It’s impossible. He daren’t be open with Mrs Gowan about his opinion of Henry, because he thinks he can keep up, for Minnie’s sake, the supposed friendship that he, Henry, holds in contempt. So his support of Meagles is underwhelming. He has a long way to go yet.
Will he do any better in Chapters 9 and 10? Well…. Next morning, he’s still in Twickenham, and perfectly understands why Meagles wants to avoid even thinking about Mrs Gowan and the threadbare, but still toxic, version of Society she inhabits. He and Mrs Meagles will go travelling again, and catch up with Minnie and their son-in-law in Rome. He makes some feeble jokes about it, but the overall mood is loss. The old cottage has no life left in it, and he often glances at the double portrait of Minnie and her dead sister. (Is it now, or had it been yesterday, that he muses on the son-in-law he would have welcomed? Of course, he keeps up the fantasy that Arthur would have made a lovely widower of the daughter who died.) They leave, and for the next weeks and through the change of a season, Arthur often makes his way to the old place. Just house-sitting, you know—as if. He has his own memories, and still measures the time of his giving up on happiness from the scattering of the flowers on the river.
How to segue into the next plot thread? 6 had been the Meagles’ concern about Minnie’s welfare. She’s pregnant, and Mrs Gowan had been sarcastic about the small allowance Meagles provides for them. He’s a man of business, she had reminded him, and knew it would never do for one with her poor fellow’s expensive tastes. It’s the talkative housekeeper who provides the spark for thread 7. She might have been dreaming, but she’s sure she saw Tattycoram looking into the garden and the cottage—and, within a few sentences, Dickens lets us know that the story must have been true. The next part of Arthur’s three-chapter itinerary takes him to the Strand, where a convenient stoppage lets him see—can it be?—‘Tattycoram and a strange man of a remarkable appearance: a swaggering man, with a high nose, and a black moustache.’ (Blandois/Rigaud is never, ever named when he makes a new appearance, as though being confirmed as unknowable, or unpindownable.) And who can that haughty-looking woman be? Guess.
There’s some narrative business to get Arthur within safe, unobserved hearing distance of the conversation Blandois has with Miss Wade. Tattycoram plays no part, and Arthur guesses it’s because she knows what it’s about. Miss Wade must find a sum of money, and her tone with Tattycoram is peremptory. ‘Harriet, arrange with him—this gentleman here—for sending him some money to-morrow.’ Blandois leaves, and Arthur follows Miss Wade and the girl in the opposite direction—towards territory that’s familiar to him. They go ‘through Covent Garden (under the windows of his old lodging where dear Little Dorrit had come that night)’ and, with growing incredulity, he follows them, street by street and house by house, to where Casby and Flora live. You couldn’t make it up.
But to get to Casby, he has to pass the gatekeeper in the guise of Flora. And although this is all described from Arthur’s point of view, we can only guess at the effect of her random speculations about ‘the good dear quiet little thing and all the changes of her fortunes carriage people now no doubt and horses without number most romantic … and has she her health which is the first consideration after all for what is wealth without it…’ This nonsense is her trademark, but it adds another layer to Arthur’s habitual discomfort… and by the time she’s gone to ask Casby whether Arthur can speak to him, it’s too late. Miss Wade and Tattycoram/Harriet have gone, and Casby benevolently keeps anything he might know to himself. I love Arthur’s first attempt to discover anything useful: ‘Pray, sir … is Miss Wade gone?’ / ‘Miss—? Oh, you call her Wade. … Highly proper.’ … / ‘What do you call her?’/ ‘Wade. Oh, always Wade.’
Between these two wastes of time—Flora and her father—had come an interlude with Mr F’s aunt. Is her determination to recognise him as someone she hates a plot thread we don’t know about yet? Whether it is or not, Arthur gets a lot more sense out of Pancks. He confirms that Miss Wade very occasionally visits Casby for money, and we get a glimpse of the dry humour he is capable of. ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to that woman, young and handsome as she is, if I had wronged her; no, not for twice my proprietor’s money! Unless … I had a lingering illness on me, and wanted to get it over.’
Enough of Chapter 9. How many plot threads can Dickens rekindle in Chapter 10? He has Arthur making frequent visits to the Circumlocution Office, with—because Dickens is never one to leave a favourite gag alone—its ‘troublesome Convicts who were under sentence to be broken alive on that wheel.’ It’s time to go and see his mother for one of his dull, dutiful visits, and the narrative lays on a thick coating of doom over the scene outside. It’s Arthur’s view—‘It always affected his imagination as wrathful, mysterious, and sad’—but it’s Dickens’s narrative, hinting at—what, exactly? ‘[The] secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill, among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal … the secrets of the lonely church-vaults, where the people who had hoarded and secreted in iron coffers were in their turn similarly hoarded, not yet at rest from doing harm.’ Secrecy, and harm perpetrated from beyond the grave. Perhaps we should file them away for later.
Who should be on the street but the unnamed man we know as Rigaud/Blandois? And, once he turns out to have business to do inside the Clennam house, suddenly it all becomes troublingly personal for Arthur. All through his wanderings, there have been those accidental little reminders of his own unhappiness—Meagles and the imaginary son-in-law, the lodgings once visited by Little Dorrit, Flora’s chatter about Amy’s imagined prosperity—but now comes an episode that shakes him to the core. His childhood home was always a miserable place, and his mother reminds him how he only visits through duty. But, over a few pages, Blandois takes away any vestige of certainty he might have had. First, there’s his unsettling familiarity with ‘my Flintwinch! Tell him that it is his old Blandois … his little boy who is here, his cabbage, his well-beloved!’ Then, in Mrs Clennam’s room, there’s a demonstration of his power over both Flintwinch and his mother.
What makes it so appalling for Arthur is what comes next. He’s witnessed plenty of insolence lately—Mrs Gowan towards Meagles, Miss Wade and Blandois towards one another, Casby, in his blandly stonewalling way, towards Arthur himself—but nothing like what is shown to him in his mother’s room by both her and Blandois. Arthur has been showing his dislike of him through his refusal to engage with him, and Blandois doesn’t like it. ‘It appears to me, madame, that Monsieur, your son, is disposed to complain of me. He is not polite.’ When Arthur offers a riposte as forthright as anything we’ve ever heard from him—‘Sir, whoever you are, and however you come to be here, if I were the master of this house I would lose no time in placing you on the outside of it’—his mother cuts him down. ‘But you are not …. Unfortunately for the gratification of your unreasonable temper, you are not the master, Arthur.’
This is terribly undermining. She is protecting this man, who is clearly a villain, by choosing to quibble with Arthur’s form of words and reminding him he has no status there. She ignores his reminder to her that it is for her sake—‘I object on your account’—and carries on undermining him. Even after Blandois laughs at them arguing, she speaks to Arthur in the same dismissive tone. ‘You have no right … to speak to the prejudice of any gentleman.’ He’s there on legitimate business, she says, and Arthur has no right to object. Arthur says no more—his usual habit—but the scene isn’t over. The man’s swaggering, proprietorial bonhomie returns when Flintwinch arrives—and Flintwinch lets him get away with his grotesque and patronising demonstrations of affection. But they can get on with the real business now, and Mrs Clennam is short with Arthur. ‘Please to leave us. Come back at any other time when you may consider it a duty to bury half an hour wearily here. Good night.’
Having snapped his fingers at Arthur contemptuously, Blandois makes sure he hears a little story he has about ‘a friend’ who considered going into a house where both people in it wanted him dead: ‘he wouldn’t have done it, my Flintwinch, unless he had known them to have the will to silence him, without the power.’ He snaps his fingers again—and Clennam, almost choking with anger, asks Mrs Flintwinch what is going on. ‘Don’t ask me anything, Arthur. I’ve been in a dream for ever so long. Go away!’ When he looks back, his mother’s window seems to be telling him the same thing, to Go away. He’s an outsider even from his childhood home now. It’s a wonderful coming together of Arthur’s uncertain, diffident progress to some sense of himself and so many plot threads I’ve stopped trying to count.
Enough of Arthur? Not at all. The instalment ends with Little Dorrit’s letter to him from Rome, and we are left to fill in for ourselves what must be the painful effect of its contents on him. It’s mostly about Minnie and Henry Gowan, but there are enough details about travel for it to neatly book-end the instalment’s opening sentence. That had been a sardonically valedictory leave-taking of the country as the setting moves to London: ‘While the waters of Venice and the ruins of Rome were sunning themselves for the pleasure of the Dorrit family, and were daily being sketched out of all earthly proportion, lineament, and likeness, by travelling pencils innumerable….’ Amy’s letter is as unsardonic as could be, her simple observations, about both the tourist hotspots and the Gowans’ unhappy lives, offering a wide-eyed truthfulness that must be torture for Arthur.
Meanwhile, it demonstrates another of Dickens’s long-form novel techniques, exposition by way of an informed narrator. But, this being a Dickens novel, not only does this narrator have a partial, particular viewpoint, but her narrative does a lot of work in furthering one of the most important plot threads of all—Arthur and Amy’s feelings for one another. The bittersweetness of her ingenuous offer to concentrate on news of the Gowans—she knows his feelings for Minnie had always been genuine—must be as painful for her to write as for him to read. He reads of Minnie’s closeted life, in another poor lodging with the windows blocked, where the only company is the old man who brings her meals and talks to her because he has a daughter too. Amy doesn’t say he shows Minnie more sympathy than her husband ever does… and, meanwhile, she can only wonder at the strange paradox of the British pitying Henry for having been somehow ‘ensnared,’ when none of them would ever have allowed their own daughter to marry him.
But the most poignant things in the letter don’t refer to Minnie. They are about herself and her fond memories of the poverty she misses because Arthur’s kindness was a part of it. She has dreams in which she is transformed back into a child, sometimes in the mourning dress that must have been rags by the time she stopped wearing it at the age of eight. She doesn’t dream of more recent times, and ‘I have never even dreamed of you.’ Ouch, we might think, until she clarifies her meaning: ‘Dear Mr Clennam, it is possible that I have thought of you—and others—so much by day, that I have no thoughts left to wander round you by night.’ Ah. Here is a depth of feeling that isn’t going to go away.
14th Number—Harley Street, Bleeding Heart Yard, and Rome
New instalment, new setting. Not a new setting at all of course, because we’ve been to a Merdle dinner party before. Mrs Merdle isn’t there this time, but none of it is Merdle’s idea. His house has become a free venue for anyone in Society to use as they wish, so long as they don’t mind the ‘sluggish’ presence of the great man himself. Chapter 12 is a self-contained episode, a perfect dissection of the minutiae of how the Establishment comes to decisions on great affairs of state. The title, referring to a ‘Great Patriotic Conference’ is heavily ironic. As ever, it’s really all about self-interest, about what goes on behind (literally) closed doors.
Even the form of the chapter, now I think about it, is apt. The reader might be lulled into thinking that this is just a reprise of what we’ve seen before at the house in Harley Street. The ‘basilisk gaze’ of the butler, the forms of precedence and address, the dress codes—‘Mr Tite Barnacle never would have passed for half his current value, unless his coat had been always buttoned-up to his white cravat’—are all smoke and mirrors. This is no ‘patriotic conference,’ but a sleazy little charade to get a fool into a position of influence—Edmund Sparkler, of all people—and, through mutual back-scratching, for Merdle to get the Establishment’s endorsement for the bank that will be his apotheosis. (Have I got the details right? Does it matter?)
In other words, the whole evening is the Establishment in miniature. Money, privilege, sinecures, nepotism, political and financial favours—all of it present at this lavish dinner, with ‘Bishop’ happily smiling on. Dickens is satirising the Church’s willing endorsement, based on the Establishment’s fraudulent rhetoric, of practices that amount to corruption. And, meanwhile, there are plenty of other satirical hits along the way. There are the fixers, Ferdinand Barnacle and the professionally persuasive ‘Bar,’ the one making fools seem less so, the other making sure absolutely everyone who has strings to pull is happy to pull them for his cause. (Art note: Tite Barnacle and Merdle, looking lost among these adepts, bear ‘a strong general resemblance to the two cows in the Cuyp picture over against them.’)
The deed is done, Merdle and Decimus Barnacle having been left alone to get on with it, and nothing will stop Merdle now. Dickens, near the start of the chapter, had given us fair warning about the high regard everyone has for him: ‘O, what a wonderful man this Merdle, what a great man, what a master man, how blessedly and enviably endowed—in one word, what a rich man!’ The whole sorry affair is a preparation for the downfall that, we gather, is bound to come. The title of the next chapter is explicit about his new influence: ‘The Progress of an Epidemic.’ (Did Dickens know Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816)? In it, there’s a darkly comic showpiece aria, ‘La calunnia,’ a step-by-step guide to how scandals might start with false rumours, but eventually lead to catastrophe for the maligned party. I’m not an opera fan, but my Italian teacher is….) The progress of the ‘epidemic’ described, step by step, in Chapter 13 is another self-contained jewel of a chapter. Except, like the events in the ‘Great Patriotic Conference,’ there’s nothing self-contained about the outcomes that will eventually follow. Both chapters are about spreading influence, not containment.
‘As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle.’ In other words, absolutely everybody knows about him and his unimaginable wealth. Pancks stumbles over his name as he is used as a conversation-stopper by tenants trying to avoid paying. ‘Ah, Mr Pancks. If I was the rich gentleman whose name is in everybody’s mouth—if my name was Merdle, sir—I’d soon pay up, and be glad to do it.’ This is in Bleeding Heart Yard, and its denizens have no money to invest. But other people do, and soon anyone who can is jumping in and, at first, it’s darkly comic. But it isn’t comic by the end of the chapter, when even the assiduously careful Pancks has been hoodwinked. I’ll come back to that.
Other characters and plot threads are reintroduced. The Plornishes and Mrs P’s father, now Mr Nandy. ‘John Baptist’ Cavaletto—often enduring Mrs P’s comedy ‘Italian’ explanations, although he now speaks good working English—and the terror he has of a man he would avoid at almost any cost. He’s telling Arthur, who has no idea they have encountered the same man—and the reader wonders how this thread will develop. Cavaletto has made a tiny handful of appearances in the novel so far, but we know he’s one of the good ones. We also know that in Dickens, the good ones often come together in a kind of ad hoc fellowship to vanquish the ones who aren’t, and we wonder how that might come about later in the novel….
And yes, Arthur’s back in the frame, for the first time in this number. Dickens is keeping plot thread 1 alive, the one concerning the fortunes of Doyce and Clennam. But he’s also keeping alive the subject of Arthur’s metaphorical wanderings in the land of self-discovery. He is more open with Pancks, in the conversation they have near the end of the chapter. First, he voices his old worry, that he’s growing too old for new things. ‘“Growing old?” cried Pancks. “Ha, ha!” / There was something so indubitably genuine in the wonderful laugh, and series of snorts and puffs, engendered in Mr Pancks’s astonishment at, and utter rejection of, the idea, that his being quite in earnest could not be questioned.’
But Arthur broaches other subjects. His anger at the way Doyce has been thwarted in his enterprise is only the start of it. We have been told early in the chapter that ‘he was depressed and made uneasy by the late occurrence at his mother’s,’ and he tells Pancks how it is affecting him. ‘I am in a very anxious and uncertain state; a state that even leads me to doubt whether anything now seeming to belong to me, may be really mine.’ We’ve never heard him say anything like this before, although he has thought it often enough. Without mentioning his mother, he tells Pancks about how what he witnessed might indicate some dreadful past wrong, and this gives Pancks the chance to talk about the necessity of ‘investments.’
Arthur is an astute and careful accountant in his own right, and is uneasy about the way Merdle and his enterprises are regarded as unstoppable. Left to himself, he would resist the popular compulsion, but Pancks has, he assures Arthur, ‘looked into it.’ Arthur wonders whether he would invest the thousand pounds he now has? ‘Already done it, sir.’ And, later, ‘They’re the best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.’ Arthur is struck, but Dickens is ringing all the alarm bells for the reader: ‘Of whom Mr Pancks had taken the prevalent disease, he could no more have told than if he had unconsciously taken a fever.’
Arthur is wondering how to make the most of Doyce and Clennam’s small enough profits. They will never be able to afford the capacity to manufacture Doyce’s product unless more money comes in, and… we can guess where this is going. Smoking one of Clennam’s ‘eastern pipes,’ Pancks presents an alluring case. Later, Arthur ponders on the subject alone. He comes to no decision, but Pancks having ‘looked into it’ is no small thing. He trusts Pancks’s acumen as much as anyone’s, and the final sentences of the chapter seem to seal his doom: ‘he began to remember, when he got to this, even he did not mistrust it…. / Such symptoms, when a disease of the kind is rife, are usually the signs of sickening.’
Chapter 14 returns the narrative to Rome following, as a sort of bridge, a brief summary of the negligible impact the great changes in London have on the lives of the travellers there. Edmund Sparkler is briefly the talk of the expats, and we hear how Henry Gowan sings his praises whilst often seeking to show him up as a fool in public. But the important thing about Sparkler concerns Fanny. She’s been stringing him along for such a long time she has a dilemma—Society demands that she give him a definitive answer. This chapter is ‘Taking Advice,’ and there’s a wonderful scene in which Fanny sets out before Amy her reasons for considering, while denying it, the idea of marrying Sparkler. Amy is appalled, and Fanny does her best—while calling poor Amy petulant names like ‘little Mole’ and ‘Miss Bat’ to mark her out for her blindness. She treats Amy with the same ‘kindness [in] the form of tolerant patronage’ as she did in the 12th number following Frederick’s tirade. She knows she won’t convince Amy, so she doesn’t try. But all the while she pretends Amy is her ‘Anchor.’ Hah.
The truth is that by the end of the scene the main thing she has done is set out the problems the marriage would solve. She would have money and independence… and she talks about the fun she will have not being the stepdaughter of Mrs General and, instead, being a thorn in the side of Mrs Merdle. She will enjoy making the most of Mrs Merdle’s age: ‘she should hear me say, Amy: affectionately, quite dutifully and affectionately: how well she looked, considering her time of life.’ Before she leaves she pretends to thank Amy, ‘my child.’ Then, with an ironic reference to what she had called Amy, ‘Fanny weighed her Anchor, and—having taken so much advice—left off being advised for that occasion.’
It’s a done deal. From then on, Fanny is careful in public to protect Sparkler, dealing with the traps that people like Gowan lay for him mainly by telling him to keep quiet. As so often, I’m reminded of Vanity Fair, Fanny and Becky being cut from such similar cloth. Meanwhile, Sparkler takes to putting his arm around Amy fraternally. Fine. Except it isn’t, of course, firstly because at one level Fanny is as appalled as Amy by her use of matrimony only for social advantage—they weep together as the chapter, and the instalment, comes to an end. And, secondly, we know the Merdle dynasty is doomed. All the reader can do is imagine the dystopia in which an impoverished Fanny and an impoverished Mrs Merdle take swipes at one another in the mud.
Instalments 15, 16—Book 2, Riches, Chapters 15-22
What an extraordinarily organic thing a Dickens novel is. In describing what’s going on in, say, a chapter, I find myself digging deep into the way Dickens achieves effects we take for granted as we read. This has to do with the real-time experience of reading that has always been a particular interest of mine. It’s interesting to speculate about how a writer like Dickens manages to engage the reader minute by minute, often surprising us with a recognisable quirk of real speech or a play on words. But the marvellous arc of the five-chapter story of William Dorrit’s decline and death brings into play one of Dickens’s other great skills, his ability to play a very long game indeed. There are key aspects of William’s behaviour in these chapters that we recognise by this time, take for granted even, because Dickens has been feeding them to us almost from the start of the novel.
When, for instance, had we first seen William behaving badly, then collapse into remorse that quickly declines into tears? It’s a character flaw that is closely linked to another, his lifelong insistence on denying any truth that reveals him in a bad light. When he recognises his own bad behaviour, he is mortified, momentarily, and then he automatically moves into a mode of self-protection. A genuine apology would be too self-revealing, so he diverts it into a tearful plea for pity. This always works on Amy, who will do almost anything to prevent him from any kind of pain. Then comes the next bit, where she comforts him lovingly, offers even more support, usually by offering to stay with him all night. This allows him, in a transparent pretence of magnanimity, to refuse to allow this. (It’s so transparent she never, ever, sees through it. But that’s Amy for you.)
The bad behaviour often takes the form of a flying rage deriving from his inflated sense of wounded dignity. We first see this in Chapter 6 of the first Book, ‘The Father of the Marshalsea.’ This chapter is our first introduction to William Dorrit, and to how he uses his new-found status to come to expect the cash gifts he likes to call testimonials. Everyone is tactful about it, until the then unnamed Plornish makes the unforgivable mistake of offering the Father of the Marshalsea a few coppers because it’s all he can afford… and he does it in public. We remember where that had led—with Amy having to comfort her father through—and away from—the sense of remorse he can’t actually confront in himself following his tantrum. It’s part of her character that she never attempts for a moment to bring him to an understanding of how he diverts his own sense of inadequacy into anger. He is taking money from people who have little and, somewhere in his mind, he knows this.
When it next happens, there’s much more going on—and it’s only now, writing about it, that I realise what Dickens does with it. In the fifth number, Dickens spends a chapter or two with John Chivery. He’s a highly sensitive and essentially sympathetic character, however comic, and when he makes a serious play for Amy, her father goes along with it. We don’t understand this until, to all intents and purposes, he forces her hand. After accepting, over many Sundays, gifts of cigars from John, the moment of truth arrives. He tells the unambiguously dressed-up John exactly where to find her alone on the Iron Bridge…. Her father isn’t pimping her, exactly, but this is a shady arrangement and she knows nothing about it.
And then she does. She gives her father a good telling off… as if. With so much tact he thinks he has thought of it himself she gets him to face the reality of his behaviour regarding John Chivery. He had begun to justify it through a threadbare fairytale about a similar case in which the woman involved—a sister, not a daughter—had done the right thing and married to help her father. Or brother…. He stumbles, she quietens him, and he falls into a bout of wretched self-pity. Which doesn’t mean that he has come to know himself, of course. He recovers, wishes he could have done even more for her than he has—Dickens makes the most of the reader’s double-take—and, ‘giving her his kind permission fully,’ lets her stay and look over him as he sleeps.
File all this away for later.
15th Number—Marriage in Rome, William Dorrit in London
One of the wonders of a Dickens novel is that whilst you can summarise a chapter in a few sentences, a plot summary misses almost everything that’s going on. Take Chapter 15. William Dorrit is pleased that Fanny is to marry Sparkler and, when the Merdles give their blessing, is happy for her to marry in Rome so that she can accompany Edmund back to London. The wedding is expensive and showy, Fanny is the star, and she leaves. William will also travel to London, but first he upsets Amy with the idea that she should be married soon as well. When he leaves her with Mrs General, she spends most of her time alone.
The obvious thing that this misses, from the first line onwards, is what Dickens does with language. It’s all about how he tells it. ‘Mr Dorrit, on being informed by his elder daughter that she had accepted matrimonial overtures from Mr Sparkler, to whom she had plighted her troth, received the communication at once with great dignity and with a large display of parental pride….’ This is only the first half of the sentence, and the pastiche of pompous formality is perfect for how William Dorrit now sees himself. It’s how he started to talk as he grew into the onerous role of Father of the Marshalsea more than half a novel ago, so now when Dickens seamlessly has the narrative slip into his idiolect, we get it. All through the first, and the pompous long second paragraph we understand perfectly—until Dickens has it collapse in a wonderful demonstration of his show-and-tell technique.
‘He concluded with some further and more general observations on the—ha—character of an independent gentleman, and the—hum—character of a possibly too partial and admiring parent. To sum the whole up shortly, he received Mr Sparkler’s offer very much as he would have received three or four half-crowns from him in the days that were gone.’
It’s the first sign of what is to come. For William, those days have never been gone—and our chapters later, time has shrunk to nothing. Dickens’s mention of those half-crowns is a master-stroke. Coming at the end of a paragraph completely bound up with William’s wrong-headed insistence on his own ‘dignity,’ the recollection of the old testimonials is inseparably linked to his consciousness. Why have them pop up in the narrative now? The answer comes episode by jarring episode, throughout William’s problematic time in London. The Marshalsea is never far away, literally and metaphorically, and Dickens creates an insistent thread of cumulative memories. There’s always something there to remind him—and sometimes, he needs no reminders at all. It’s his own mindset now, and I’ll come back to it when Dickens does…
The tone and language of the chapter are now set, ready for William to go and visit ‘the Bosom.’ Language, like so much else in this world, has nothing to do with anything real. The scene becomes a set-piece battle between the two for status advantage, and they are surprisingly—implausibly?—evenly matched. For instance, William gives the ghost of a cough in response to Mrs Merdle’s reference to her husband as a ‘capitalist.’ This word offers the tiniest—but nonetheless real—suggestion that William’s delight is at least partly mercenary. He counters this, using his most polished Society manner: he ‘threw in another compliment here, to the effect that business … was made for slaves; and that it was not for Mrs Merdle, who ruled all hearts at her supreme pleasure, to have anything to do with it.’ This carries on, and Dickens summarises it. ‘This skilful see-saw of Mr Dorrit and Mrs Merdle, so that each of them sent the other up, and each of them sent the other down, and neither had the advantage, acted as a sedative on Mr Dorrit’s cough.’ It ends in a no-score draw. Mrs Merdle knows what William is after in this advantageous marriage, and he knows she knows. It’s always like this, as Dickens has already pointed out: ‘Mrs Merdle concurred with all her heart—or with all her art, which was exactly the same thing.’
Then comes the preposterous formality of his seeking Mr Merdle’s consent, notable for a memorable simile conveying the excess of his prose. ‘Mr Dorrit surrounded the subject with flourishes, as writing-masters embellish copy-books and ciphering-books: where the titles of the elementary rules of arithmetic diverge into swans, eagles, griffins, and other calligraphic recreations, and where the capital letters go out of their minds and bodies into ecstasies of pen and ink.’ The Bosom has already written ahead to her husband, of course. She’s no doubt delighted to be rid of Edmund, but William’s letter can ‘enable Mr Merdle to make a decent pretence of having learnt it from that source.’
Once consent has been granted, Dickens can return us to the problem Fanny’s been having since the previous instalment. When William suggests they should advise Mrs General of the impending marriage, the ensuing scene is full of Society-style talk, despite its being conducted within the family. Fanny chooses her mode of discourse perfectly. The reality of their disagreement—she hates Mrs G—is hidden underneath their scrupulous politeness. But whereas William seems to believe the words he speaks, Fanny knows it’s just a game. When he insists on playing the paterfamilias card to bring an end to it, she pretends to go along with the formal announcement. In fact, she uses more of the same icy politeness to let the varnished one know exactly how she feels. She knows she can get away with the insult because neither of her adversaries, as it were, can call her out for her blatant rudeness. Language in this world, as Dickens keeps insisting in this chapter—he keeps explicitly reminding us that it’s what this chapter is about—isn’t fit for purpose.
It’s a long chapter, and now Dickens returns us to familiar territory. The conversation follows the identical pattern to the one in Chapter 14, ‘Taking Advice’—again, Fanny consults Amy about a decision she has already made. Last time, it was whether she should marry Edmund Sparkler. This time it’s whether she should marry before his return to London. Last time, she called Amy a mole and a bat for her blindness. This time Amy is a tortoise for suggesting a delay, having earlier been a ‘flurried little thing’ for anticipating her. And, in case we haven’t got it by the end, Dickens tells us: Fanny has been ‘yielding herself up, in this pattern manner, to sisterly advice.’ What is she like?
The marriage takes place, the characters behave as we would expect, and all that remains now is for William to try and tie up a loose end of his own. It has nothing to do with ‘heart,’ to quote that reference to Mrs Merdle, but to art. Alone with Amy, he ‘was sententious and didactic that night. If he had been simply loving, he would have done Little Dorrit more good; but she accepted him as he was.’ What else does she ever do? She listens, distressed, as he defines her duty to him and the family: ‘your dear sister, our Fanny, has contracted ha hum—a marriage, eminently calculated to extend the basis of our—ha—connection, and to—hum—consolidate our social relations. My love, I trust that the time is not far distant when some—ha—eligible partner may be found for you.’ Amy’s response is unambiguous—‘Oh no! Let me stay with you. I beg and pray that I may stay with you!’
But William has no understanding of, or interest in, the feelings of the woman he has just called his favourite child. He has consulted with Mrs General, and she agrees. As for Amy’s staying with him, ‘My—hum—conscience would not allow it.’ In other words he does his usual thing, making her feel guilty for being the only loving person in his life. And even Amy, perhaps having finally taken something from Fanny’s lessons, must realise what he is really up to. As so often, the form of words Dickens uses makes a pretence of ambiguity, but he knows we will see through it. ‘If the thought ever entered Little Dorrit’s head that night, that he could give her up lightly now in his prosperity, and when he had it in his mind to replace her with a second wife, she drove it away.’ Being who she is, she can’t let herself believe such a thing of the man she has devoted her life to.
Chapters 16-18, the rest of the instalment, mainly follows William Dorrit during his two weeks in London Society. In almost every scene, we see his growing difficulties in coping with his present reality. We’re back in Harley Street in Chapter 16, and the world of the ‘Great Patriotic Conference’ of Chapter 12. Dickens only needs to sketch in a few lines here and there to remind us of the key markers. Merdle’s chronic discomfort comes out in his always looking as though he expects to be arrested—hold that thought—and in his handshakes. To Fanny, he offers ‘such a superfluity of coat-cuff that it was like being received by the popular conception of Guy Fawkes,’ while he takes William’s hand ‘on’ his—no comment—‘as if his were a yellow salver or fish-slice.’ Meanwhile, the butler is still a tyrant, every last member of Society is willing to attend the banquet to welcome the newly married Sparklers, and the reverence for Merdle is still at biblical levels: ‘people were already posted … that his shadow might fall upon them when he came down. So were the sick brought out and laid in the track of the Apostle—who had not got into the good society, and had not made the money.’ That poor Apostle, in every sense.
But this chapter is about William, clinging with all his strength to the fiction of his lifelong gentility. Fanny is doing so well that ‘Mr Dorrit could all but have taken his affidavit, if required, that Mrs Sparkler had all her life been lying at full length in the lap of luxury, and had never heard of such a rough word in the English tongue as Marshalsea.’ And how marvellous it is to travel with the great Merdle to the City and to return in state in the carriage alone: ‘[when] people looked at him in default of Mr Merdle, and when, with the ears of his mind, he heard the frequent exclamation as he rolled glibly along, “A wonderful man to be Mr Merdle’s friend!”’ (It’s also worth noting that during this morning, William has asked, and Merdle appears to be considering, getting him on board in his current project. They will have to avoid any accusations of insider dealing, and they congratulate one another on how above board everything is.)
But Poor William. In this chapter, the cracks are already appearing. When he looks at Fanny in her pomp in the quotation above, the Marshalsea is there, lurking at the back of his mind. And there’s something he doesn’t like about the way a certain somebody looks at him: ‘It misgave him that the Chief Butler must have known a Collegian, and must have seen him in the College—perhaps had been presented to him….’ He would have taken him to task—we know well his tirades against servants who undermine his fragile sense of dignity—but he daren’t. ‘To hint to him that this confinement in his eye was disagreeable, or to ask him what he meant, was an act too daring to venture upon.’
Things move much faster in Chapters 17 and 18, and the Marshalsea is never far from his thoughts. First, Flora pays a visit to his hotel. She has gained access by mentioning William’s younger daughter in a message, which galvanises him. He agrees to see her only because she ‘might say something below, having a disgraceful reference to that former state of existence’—and she subjects him to such a verbal barrage he can hardly cope with it. But he realises she must once have employed Amy, a fact ‘assuming it—ha—to be fact, never was within my knowledge. Hum. I should not have permitted it. Ha. Never! Never!’ Always those vehement exclamation marks….
In connection with Blandois’s disappearance, Flora’s real reason for calling, she shows him a handbill mentioning Clennam and Co. No, this doesn’t refer to Arthur, but in her explanation she makes Mrs Clennam and Flintwinch into a ‘compound of man and woman, no limbs, wheels, rusty screw, grimness, and gaiters, [which] so completely stupefied Mr Dorrit, that he was a spectacle to be pitied.’ He does know Blandois, of course, and promises to make enquiries about him. But the experience is terribly unsettling, however he might try to distance himself. (Arthur had been somebody of whom he ‘had formerly—hum—some—ha—slight transitory knowledge.’ Always the hesitations, too.) All in all, ‘the interview had summoned back discarded reminiscences which jarred with the Merdle dinner-table.’ You bet. He makes an excuse not to have to face the Chief Butler again and will dine alone.
His own interest in Blandois takes him, of course, to Clennam and Co. The visit lets Dickens provide us with a short reminder of the state of things there—including, in passing, Affery crying out in fear at one of the strange noises the old house makes—and lets us know Mrs Clennam and Flintwinch are hiding something. No, she says peremptorily, no money was exchanged—so we wonder why they are spending so much of it looking for him. Meanwhile, as he always does when he feels threatened, William is keen to proclaim his status. ‘I am—ha—a gentleman of property, at present residing in Italy with my family, my servants, and—hum—my rather large establishment.’ As ever, it comes over as pathetic, even embarrassing.
And as if he hasn’t been buffeted enough in London, there’s worse to come. In Chapter 18 he debates whether to lay some old ghosts at the Marshalsea. ‘He had decided not to do so; and had astonished the coachman by being very fierce with him for proposing to … [take] a course which would have taken him almost within sight of his old quarters.’ (He had been just as fierce with the hotel servant who had brought the disquieting message from Flora, the memory of his fear of the Chief Butler being so fresh in his mind at the time.) His final evening has arrived and, surveying Fanny at his farewell banquet, he sees a woman of rank. It’s as though she had been married twenty years, and he ‘wished—but without abatement of patronage, and without prejudice to the retiring virtues of his favourite child—that he had such another daughter.’ If he had the stature of a tragic hero, this weakness would be the root of his tragedy.
Back at the hotel, John Chivery is waiting, come to pay his respects. In public, William is gracious, inviting him up to his rooms, and John is ‘gratified.’ In private, things are different. ‘“Now, sir,” said Mr Dorrit, turning round upon him and seizing him by the collar when they were safely alone. “What do you mean by this?”’ The scene, the evening before William’s departure, is a surprisingly perfect echo of what happened 36 chapters ago. John is shocked beyond measure, his thoughtful gift of cigars—cigars!—almost literally thrown back in his face. We know and, somewhere in his mind, William knows, that he is still looking for ways to marry off his ‘favourite daughter’ to some—ha—eligible partner. He and John go back a long way in this very respect, and what comes next is a key to understanding what is happening in William’s mind, and how it comes to a head when he’s back in Rome.
The ferocity of his anger is, as it has always been, the self-indulgence of a weak man. Within half a page he is tiring, and after having just threatened to take the poker to John, something changes. He tells him to sit down, and goes quietly to look out of the window. There’s an unsavoury vestige of suspicion when John asks after Amy—‘What’s that to you sir?’—but John’s respectful humility and, perhaps, William’s own thoughts, take William into a better self. Not perfect, but better—he’s back as the patronising role of old. After wiping a tear, he’s shaking John’s hand, looking dreadful. He asks after John’s father and the inmates he can’t find a word for. He wonders—hum—how ‘they all’ are, and a few moments later has decided a ‘testimonial’—his word—would be appropriate: ‘to be divided among—ha hum—them—them—according to their wants.’ The cheque he writes, his hand trembling so much it takes him some time, is for a hundred pounds. In today’s terms, that would be ten or twenty thousand. And we know that if this visit had not taken place—John is still pale and shaken when he leaves—there would have been no gift.
And that’s it for London. On the Dover road there are wisps of smoke from John’s cigars, smoked by the courier. They had been offered, William has told him, by a ‘former tenant’ and now given to him. Then, via Calais, with William’s mind full of the ‘castle in the air’ that give the chapter its title, to Paris…. After he has made purchases in a jeweller’s shop, one of them to be considered a ‘nuptial’ gift, the towers of the castle reach higher than those of Notre Dame. All the way to Rome, his head is so bound up in building it—when he isn’t falling asleep, leaving stones in mid-air on their way up—that even the beggars realise it’s pointless to try to speak to him. And Dickens knows how to bring both a journey of airy daydreams, and the fifteenth Number, to an end. ‘Mr Dorrit and his matchless castle were disembarked [in] Civita Vecchia, and thence scrambled on to Rome as they could, through the filth that festered on the way.’
16th Number—Deaths in Rome, Arthur’s search for truth, Miss Wade
Chapter 19 opens with William’s arrival in Rome and swift collapse, after his constant declarations of how good he feels compared to how his brother looks. Dickens, of course, is now about to bring this arc—the one that began when William first became the Father of the Marshalsea—to its final resting-place. After that, the narrative returns to Arthur Clennam, containing the strange interlude of a chapter charting the innermost psychology of ‘a Self-Tormentor.’ That phrase, it’s worth pointing out, is Dickens’s own in the title of Chapter 21. For Miss Wade, it’s the whole world doing the tormenting, not her. She’s the constantly aggrieved victim.
But that’s to come after Dickens has wound up the affairs, and everything else, of William and Frederick Dorrit. After the final leg of William’s journey, full of darkness, dread and portents of death—sometimes Dickens doesn’t make it too difficult for us—he arrives after everyone has given him up for the night. He insists on going up to find Amy, and is disturbed by the picture she makes with Frederick: ‘looking in unseen, he felt a pang. Surely not like jealousy? For why like jealousy? … as of old … so had she sat, devoted to him. Yet surely there was nothing to be jealous of in the old miserable poverty. Whence, then, the pang in his heart?’ This is William’s problem, of course. He never does recognise what his heart tells him.
He overhears their conversation, how Amy speaks to Frederick, and perhaps that disturbs him too: ‘you have been growing younger for weeks past. So cheerful, uncle, and so ready, and so interested.’ Is it a coincidence that from now on, he will constantly tell Frederick how worn-out he looks? ‘You are very feeble,’ he tells him just after he, William, has woken up from one of the short dozes he has lapsed into on the journey. And from now until his death in only ten days’ time, he is angry with Amy if she ever suggests, even with a look, that he seems tired. She and Frederick both tolerate this self-deceiving fiction until the end.
And for his first couple of days back in Rome, he continues building his castle. Once, when Amy sees Mrs General in conversation with her father, however difficult it might be ‘to displace an atom of its genteel glaze … Little Dorrit thought she descried a slight thaw of triumph in a corner of her frosty eye.’ During his second day, her father makes his intentions as clear to Mrs G as he possibly can without actually proposing…. Later that evening will come Mrs Merdle’s fateful farewell banquet which, when he can stay awake for long enough, William looks forward to.
We know something fateful is about to happen. First, the title of the chapter, ‘The Storming of the Castle in the Air.’ Since the castle is only in William’s brain, the storming of it is going to be calamitous. There had been, we remember, that ill-omened final ride into Rome, with its ‘fragments of ruinous enclosure, yawning window-gap and crazy wall … where everything was crumbling away’—to say nothing of the bizarre little night-time funeral procession they had passed.
And on that difficult first night, as she brings him supper in the way she had always done in their old life, ‘Little Dorrit, in her watchful love, would have remembered the lightest thing he said or did that night, though she had had no subsequent reason to recall that night.’ The repetition—‘that night’—puts down a marker. And yes, things are different for him now. He is ‘under the strong influence of the old association,’ and at times ‘he all of a sudden looked at her, and looked about him, as if the association were so strong that he needed assurance from his sense of sight that they were not in the old prison-room.’
He holds it together, just, musing late into the night and only causing embarrassment once next day. During ‘what may be called in these pages the Pruney and Prismatic nature of the family banquet, Mr Dorrit several times fell asleep while it was in progress.’ At first, ‘Mrs General looked almost amazed: but, on each recurrence of the symptoms, she told her polite beads, Papa, Potatoes, Poultry, Prunes, and Prism….’ It’s her rosary—Dickens’s word, another substitute for any religion in her soul—and it serves her well.
At Mrs Merdle’s banquet, of course, he suffers a complete mental collapse. The first sign is when the Bosom sends a hasty note to Amy across the table, and she goes to him. But, in his mind, he is no longer in that fine room: ‘Amy, my dear … Will you go and see if Bob is on the lock?’ It’s as disruptive an interruption to this feast as Banquo’s ghost had been to Macbeth’s and, unsurprisingly, the effect is identical: ‘his strange eager appearance and strange eager voice … instantaneously caused a profound silence.’ Soon, ‘the exceeding mortification undergone by the Bosom had occasioned the withdrawal of the greater part of the company into other rooms.’
But before they go, he addresses them all as visitors to his room at the Marshalsea. He can’t help returning to what, in some recess of his mind, must be his most embarrassing memory—those ‘offerings’ of money: ‘they are most acceptable. In my child’s name, if not in my own, I make the admission in the fullest manner, at the same time reserving—ha—shall I say my personal dignity? Ladies and gentlemen, God bless you all!’ In his child’s name. Even now, the self-serving fiction. Not that Amy is ‘ashamed of it, or ashamed of him.’ All she wants to do, of course, is ‘to soothe him and get him away, for his own dear sake.’ Which she does.
Less than a page later, he has faded away and died, having previously reverted entirely to his old self and their old relationship. Amy ‘was never out of his mind. Not that he spared her, or was fearful of her being spent by watching and fatigue; he was not more troubled on that score than he had usually been. No; he loved her in his old way.’ Exactly. Whereas Mrs General receives a comic punishment to match the horrifying punishments of some of Dickens’s great villains. She might not be cut to pieces by an express train, but it must hurt when she is brought to see her recent would-be suitor. ‘Some injurious suspicion lodged itself in his brain, that she wanted to supplant Mrs Bangham, and that she was given to drinking. He charged her with it in no measured terms’ and she is never brought before him again.
There’s a short, moving paragraph describing the way all the signs of pretence and pain fade from William’s face one by one. But the final page and more are given over almost entirely to Frederick. He is inconsolable regarding his brother’s death and, as ever, as loving towards Amy as William never was. Frederick, like Amy, had never focused on William’s faults, and now he sincerely eulogises his brother’s gentlemanly qualities. But it’s Amy he says a prayer for, based on a passage in St Luke: ‘Not a hair of her head shall be harmed before Thee. Thou wilt uphold her here to her last hour. And I know Thou wilt reward her hereafter!’
Perhaps the vehemence of his self-abasement might prepare us for his somewhat literary death a few paragraphs later. ‘William! William! You to go before me; you to go alone; you to go, and I to remain! … I, a poor useless creature fit for nothing, and whom no one would have missed!’ He is convinced they should be together and, as the last sentence confirms, they are. ‘The two brothers were before their Father, far beyond the twilight judgment of this world.’ But in the final illustration, William is no more than a shapeless mound under the bedcovers. Frederick is kneeling, having breathed his last whilst at his prayers.
The remaining three chapters are relatively short, each mainly focused on a single element. The continuous thread is Arthur’s search for Blandois, and Chapter 20 takes him to Calais. Cue a paragraph of Dickensian mise-en-scène, the usual mixture, whenever Arthur is involved, of his go-to gloominess and Dickens’s own narrative requirements. ‘The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed … might have represented an unsightly marine cemetery.’ But Arthur finds what he’s looking for. ‘A dead sort of house, with a dead wall over the way and a dead gateway at the side.’ That’s my boy. There are eight ‘deads’ in a ten-line paragraph—and somebody he wants to speak to rents rooms in this place.
What is Dickens signalling? Why should Miss Wade, for it is she, be heralded with these funereal portents? Whatever, the meeting is a trying one for Arthur. Miss Wade, we might suspect, would be trying for anyone, because she always, always seeks out whatever will be the most wounding barb. (She has form with Arthur, having made that unnecessary remark at the end of his attempt with Meagles to get Harriet/Tattycoram back: ‘I hope the wife of your dear friend Mr Gowan may be happy … in the high good fortune that awaits her.’) She is deeply suspicious that Arthur is up to no good. But, with patience, he gets her to soften enough to admit to having met Blandois in Europe and paid him for some small services. She also confirms everybody’s impression that he would undoubtedly be willing to kill if the money was right.
Meanwhile, she puts Arthur firmly on the defensive about his mother’s suspicious dealings with the villainous Blandois, at midnight, no doubt because he has something on her. She’s right, of course, and it’s as though she can guess where Arthur’s sore spots are. ‘Wrung by her persistence in keeping that dark side of the case before him, of which there was a half-hidden shadow in his own breast, Clennam was silent.’ This is what Miss Wade always does, seeking out weakness and bearing down on them relentlessly.
She invites Harriet into the room, and between them they demonstrate how they are with each other. Miss Wade is at first completely mystified by Tattycoram’s nostalgic visit to the Meagles cottage. Affectionate memories don’t compute for her, and soon she is scathing about what she sees as a betrayal. The exchange quickly degenerates, Miss Wade accusing Harriet of regretting her choice and the poverty she now has to live in compared to what she could still be enjoying. Of course Harriet denies it, but something tells us Miss Wade’s super-radar is probably right again. And anyway, who on earth would want to stay with her? Arthur surveys them before he leaves, ‘each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the other’s.’ (At the end of my previous discussion prompts, I imagined ‘the dystopia in which an impoverished Fanny and an impoverished Mrs Merdle take swipes at one another in the mud.’ A month later, I read this. Maybe Dickens enjoys a claws-out cat-fight as much as a claws-in skirmish.)
The title of the chapter tells us that it ‘Introduces the Next.’ The next, which Arthur reads on the ferry back to England, consists of Miss Wade’s own account of her life. In Calais, she had made a remark that demonstrates the fatal defect in her world-view. She had been explaining to Arthur that he can never understand the depth of her hatred for poor Minnie: ‘you can’t know, without knowing with what care I have studied myself and people about me.’ She has mistaken the ‘care’ of her highly partial view of humanity for expertise in their motives. The only person she has studied, impartially or not, is herself, and she uses herself as the template for judging others.
I mention this because it prepares us for her ‘history,’ an account of her life. It opens as robustly as we might expect, in a way that immediately demonstrates her fundamental error: ‘I have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have detected what those about me thought they hid from me.’ There’s no need to detail the succession of experiences she has during her childhood and adult life. The consistent thread, more like a running sore, is that in her judgment, one after another, every single person who ever tried to help her was at best a hypocrite and at worst frankly malicious. Is it a tour de force demonstration of unreliable narration, or a rather obvious one? Dickens gives her so much rope she can’t help but hang herself as Arthur reads. Every time she condemns anybody, which she always does, it rebounds back entirely on to her.
An experiment: can I open the chapter at random and quote? Here we are, page 729 in my edition. The context is that as a governess, Miss Wade firmly blames her charges, and their mother, and their nurse, for the black mood she is in. The nurse, in particular, is unbearable. ‘“Come to good Miss Wade, come to dear Miss Wade, come to pretty Miss Wade. She loves you very much. Miss Wade is a clever lady, who has read heaps of books, and can tell you far better and more interesting stories than I know. Come and hear Miss Wade!” How could I engage their attentions, when my heart was burning against these ignorant designs? How could I wonder, when I saw their innocent faces shrinking away, and their arms twining round her neck, instead of mine?’
The other thing we learn in this chapter is that she was seduced by Henry Gowan’s show of easy cynicism. She had been in an unhappy situation and, essentially, he had rescued her. When he arrives at the house—he’s a frequent, no doubt freeloading visitor, having been abroad—she is convinced that she has found a soulmate. ‘He understood the state of things at a glance, and he understood me. / He was the first person I had ever seen in my life who had understood me. He was not in the house three times before I knew that he accompanied every movement of my mind.’ She, who claims to have made such a scrupulous study of mankind is shocked when he throws her over for another. Minnie—not that she ever calls her by any civilised name—has a superficial prettiness, no brains, but better prospects of some sort of income. Of course she hates Minnie with a vehemence mere mortals like Arthur can’t imagine. It must have been the worst thing to have happened to any woman, ever.
Next. There’s only one short chapter left in this number, and Arthur is back in London. Doyce is going to work abroad for some ‘barbaric Power with valuable possessions on the map of the world.’ Their barbarism is proved by the fact that they are willing to pay engineers from any country to do useful work. ‘With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and energetic notions of How to do it.’ Good old Dickens, reminding us of how we laughed when he came up with his running gag 38 chapters ago.
The important thing is, it gets Doyce out of the country for an unspecified amount of time, further clearing the decks that have already been cleared of two Dorrits. We are readers, in Jane Austen’s wonderful phrase, ‘who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect…’ perfect what? We don’t know yet, but there’s much less than a quarter of the novel remaining, and there are a lot of questions that haven’t been answered yet. We know Blandois is a villain, but otherwise we don’t know what on earth is going on.
We do know that before Doyce leaves, he and Arthur remind each other that they wouldn’t dream of putting their capital into any speculative investments. They also remind each other of Pancks’s legendary reliability. At the mention of his name, Doyce nods. ‘Aye, aye, aye! That’s a cautious fellow.’ / ‘He is a very cautious fellow indeed,’ returned Arthur. ‘Quite a specimen of caution.’ So that’s all right. Perfect, you might say.
But how on earth can Arthur get some closure on the Blandois affair? He needs some help—and what Arthur needs, in this respect at least, Arthur gets. How lucky of him to be musing, as ever, on the unpleasantness of the man, his jostling, his rudeness, that French song—and to accidentally sing it out loud in the hearing of perhaps the only person in London who can cast some light on the man who likes to sing it so insinuatingly…. Cavaletto tries to deny the possibility at first, but his all-round helpfulness and reliability lead him to accept that it would only be doing the right thing for his employer and friend to help him out. ‘“I know not where to look,” cried the little man, kissing Arthur’s hand in a transport. “I know not where to begin. I know not where to go. But, courage! Enough! It matters not! I go, in this instant of time!” … And was gone with great speed.’
Whatever sense we might ever have had of ‘John Baptist’ as a comic figure—and Dickens doesn’t give up on his comic foreigner presentation of him—it looks as though he’s going to be seriously helpful now.
Instalments 17-18—Chapters 23-29
Have I been paying attention? Yes. Do I know what’s going on? No. But that’s how Dickens likes it. I don’t even know how many mysteries there are to be resolved—beyond the conundrum that might never be satisfactorily answered: why is Arthur Clennam so single-mindedly self-denying? Why, at the end of the eighteenth number, does he refuse Amy’s offer of emotional and financial salvation, despite her doing her utmost to persuade him that it is the one thing in the world that would make her happy?
All through this novel, I’ve been wondering when Arthur might start to behave in a sensible way, and now I’m not sure he ever will. There’s only the final double number to come, and I can only think of one route to happiness that could possibly be open to him. He is poor so, like an idiot, he tells Amy he can’t marry her. So she will need to be poor again too. Either she will have to give all her money away or—which is what I suspect—she will lose it all because her father invested everything in Merdle’s scam in Chapter 16. Dickens had left this possibility open in the seventeenth instalment, when he lets us know that Tip is ill and therefore can’t come to England to sort out their financial affairs. I’m guessing it’s a delaying tactic on Dickens’s part, a close cousin to his delaying tactic at the end of David Copperfield that keeps Agnes on tenterhooks until the end. And this suspicion is given a boost in the same chapter (24), when Merdle, about to cut his own throat in the public bath-house with a borrowed knife, assures Fanny that Mrs General ‘won’t get anything. Oh dear no. No. Not she. Not likely.’ Why? Because there’s no money, that’s why. (It’s a good job Doyce has been away for months. I’m betting that soon after he comes back his invention will be in production and they will all have enough to live on. Doyce ex machina.)
But to go back to the start of these numbers. Arthur is still a free man, Merdle’s criminal financial activities—i.e. forgery and theft—still as yet undetected. But Arthur is never really free. His attempts at forthrightness in the sixteenth number when dealing with whatever darkly undefined cloud is hanging over his family had ended in humiliation and failure. Blandois had dismissed him with a snap of his fingers, letting him know that his hold over Mrs Clennam and Flintwinch was unbreakable. With Blandois’s disappearance, Arthur is certain that there is something so murky in the Clennam firm’s past that it will destroy them all. He needs to get to the bottom of it—and I’m sure, before the end of the novel, he will. But I’ve already mentioned one of Dickens’s delaying tactics, to do with the prospect of a happy future with Amy…
…and in the first chapter of this instalment he brings in a different one. Arthur decides that the only person in his mother’s house who could possibly tell him anything is Affery. He is undoubtedly right—by the end of the novel, she will be able to tell Arthur, and the reader, exactly what Flintwinch has tried to convince her is nothing but a dream she’s been having. But the whole chapter is one long delaying manoeuvre on Dickens’s part. There’s a clue to this in the chapter title: ‘Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her Dreams’—she will tell, but not yet. Dickens still has 100-odd pages to go, after all….
The chapter, dark though its subject is—and real though Arthur’s mental suffering is—is presented as farce. I’ve always been interested in the way Dickens uses comic plot elements in his most serious fiction. The forbidding description of Arthur’s thoughts as he approaches the house—he’s like a murderer condemned to look at his dead victim forever, contemplating ‘the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of’—is followed by Dickens gleefully laying almost farcical obstacles in his way. He needs to speak to his mother and Affery in private, and it’s almost impossible.
We don’t know yet that these two instalments are going to describe the hardest trials yet for Arthur, but we might guess it from his mother’s insulting, belittling response to the information Cavaletto has provided him with about Blandois’s murderous past. It’s almost a reprise of his previous visit, when Blandois had been present, except this time all the humiliation is heaped on him by her. Flintwinch is insultingly dismissive, and she shows Arthur nothing but contempt.
The farcical set-up is already in place. Arthur is trying to speak privately with his mother at her desk, never an easy matter, but Casby and Flora are there, blandly (or ludicrously) pretending not to listen. Dickens’s descriptions of Casby rise to new heights of absurdity—‘with his benevolent knobs shining as if the warm butter of the toast were exuding through the patriarchal skull’—while Flora… what? Dickens could have presented her as a tragic figure, but instead her behaviour now is ridiculous to the point of slapstick. After drawing less than a blank with his mother, Arthur desperately decides that the only way he is going to speak to Affery in private will be by getting her to accompany him and Flora on a nostalgic tour of the house. Affery tries to refuse, but Flintwinch threatens her with more violence than usual. Good, we might think, but no. Flintwinch will bring up the rear, so… etc. Will Arthur ever get in a word with Affery?
Yes, he will. In a plot device that also allows Dickens to have a lot of fun adding to Arthur’s discomfiture—Flora, persuading herself Arthur is seeking time alone with her, sentimentally leans a considerable amount of her weight on him whenever it is dark enough for them to be unseen—Flintwinch is forced to go down to talk to somebody at the door. Affery still doesn’t want to talk, Flora doesn’t want to leave him entirely to a private conversation, despite exaggeratedly leaning her upper body away from him as though they are in a pantomime… and Arthur bundles Affery into a dark closet. All the time, Affery fears Flintwinch will return—his treatment of her this evening has been bad enough for the reader to be surprised that Arthur never thinks to remonstrate with him—but Arthur can see through a window to where he is speaking outside.
And finally, finally, Affery relents. A little. ‘If ever you begin to get the better of them two clever ones your own self […] then do you get the better of ‘em afore my face; and then do you say to me, Affery tell your dreams! Maybe, then I’ll tell ‘em!’
My goodness. Dickens has turned a necessary thriller-plot element—the deferral of important information—into the darkest of comedy set pieces. And this sets the tone for the next chapter. ‘The Evening of a Long Day’ begins with the comedy discomfiture of an ill-matched couple, Mr and Mrs Sparkler, and ends up heading somewhere else entirely. The long day is Fanny’s, bored and frustrated by the constraints on what should have been her triumphant storming of London society. All this mourning is tedious, although she says she had loved her father, and sheds a tear at the appropriate moment when remembering him—but what is really driving her distracted is her condition. We discover, obliquely enough, that she is pregnant, and poor Edmund Sparkler is less than helpful, a constant heavy—very heavy—reminder of what she has taken on by marrying him. She lets him know that spending a day together like this must never, ever be allowed to happen again.
And then, on the most tenuous of pretexts, Dickens has Merdle come to their house. He brings all his little tics with him—his hiding of his hands, his nervously looking everywhere in the room except at the people in it, his hesitant dullness of speech. It gives Dickens the chance to raise the subject of William Dorrit’s will and Mrs General’s prospects—and for two more things. Merdle is evasive about why he might want to borrow Fanny’s tortoiseshell-handled pen-knife, promising that he will definitely not get ink on it…. And his departure on foot, our last sight of him alive, becomes very strange indeed. ‘Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.’ Devils. Hmm. How often, before now, has he been ranked alongside the divine in the public eye?
The next chapter is the catastrophe we know has been coming since Dickens started referring to the ‘disease [that] will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague.’ It had been in the first Book, when Dickens first introduced him, that we had first heard of ‘Mr Merdle’s Complaint.’ He frequently sought medical advice, but his poor doctor, Dickens’s ‘Physician,’ could do nothing for him. Meanwhile, Merdle always looked as though he wanted to ‘take himself into custody’—which isn’t the same as wanting to be arrested…. The first few pages of this chapter, beginning at ‘Physician’s’ dinner party, take us through to the discovery of Merdle’s suicide.
As so often in these numbers, Dickens needs a chapter to bring about a development or two in the plot. We’ve had Affery’s promise to tell all, if circumstances allow. We’ve had the spiritual meagreness (despite its literal fecundity) of the Sparklers’ marriage, and Merdle’s cryptic hints concerning the future. And now we have the suicide. It doesn’t sound much, but the discovery of it becomes a tour de force.
We’re at Physician’s dinner party with Merdle’s chair as empty as Banquo’s—a dark conceit made droll: ‘if he had been there, he would have merely made the difference of Banquo in it, and consequently he was no loss.’ Dickens presents Physician much more roundly than previously, and we follow his point of view up to, and beyond the discovery of the dead man. Physician, this man who has seen everything—‘Few ways of life were hidden from Physician, and he was oftener in its darkest places than even Bishop’—is definitely not expecting what he is about to discover: ‘the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features. Next to him is ‘a tortoise-shell handled penknife—soiled, but not with ink.’ Dickens loves those details that confirm for the reader familiar characters’ identities a few moments after we have guessed….
On his way home, Physician passes ‘Bar’s’ house, and is troubled enough to want to talk to him about the contents of Merdle’s final short letter to him. Bar ‘could not sufficiently give utterance to his regret that he had not himself found a clue to this.’ Ah. So Physician isn’t the only one shocked by Merdle’s deceit…
…which, of course, absolutely everybody is in the final chapter of this instalment. As the news spreads, only those who hadn’t invested—mostly those who couldn’t afford to—crow that they knew it all along. Which leaves everybody else, including one particular investor. And, not for the first or last time, Arthur’s response depends at least as much on what Dickens needs for progressing the narrative as on his, Arthur’s, psychological makeup. We realise why Dickens has always made moral probity the keystone of Arthur’s sense of his own worth, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve already mentioned his decision not to accept Amy’s rescue offer in the next instalment, as though he feels he has to make himself blameless in the eyes of—of who, exactly? But in this instalment, his almost monomaniacal concern is that Doyce should be perceived as blameless.
Dickens needs Arthur to be willing not only to have all the opprobrium for the company’s losses heaped upon himself, but to seek out the quickest route. He needs Arthur not in the genteel ‘King’s Bench’ that his lawyer, the bemused Rugg, holds out to him as by far the most suitable option. Dickens needs Arthur in the Marshalsea for his own reasons, not least the symbolic, dramatic conceit of the overturning of Arthur’s fortunes and Amy’s, in the very rooms… etc. So that’s where he, Arthur, is taken, arrested on behalf of the first of many creditors to petition Doyce and Clennam for payment.
Arthur’s time in the Marshalsea, before Amy’s dramatic return, is a twelve-week longueur bookended by some more, or less, unexpected visitors. John Chivery is the first, treating him with an unaccountable mixture of great kindness and bruised resentment. He has given Arthur the room William Dorrit had, lends him furniture, and makes sure he eats. But, at last, they have a proper conversation. It takes a long time before John can confront him with the truth both of the unhappiness Arthur has caused him and what he thinks is his ungentlemanly disdain for his feelings. For page after page, Arthur is so genuinely confused that John eventually realises the truth. Arthur finally understands what he has always hidden from himself (as he later thinks of it), as John convinces him that Amy’s loving feelings for him have always been patently obvious to everybody. Oh.
The comic poignancy of the chapter—Dickens can’t resist the comedy of John Chivery’s tortured courtly romanticism—doesn’t disguise the truth. Arthur is almost literally speechless, and later reviews, from the beginning, every aspect of his relationship with Amy. She had always been his ‘child,’ his ‘Little Dorrit’—a pet name which, we realise even if he doesn’t, that she treasures for different reasons from his own. But he realises that it was his own wrong-headed decision, not anybody else’s, to define himself as too old after the floating away of Pet Meagles’s flowers, and to forbid himself any hope of future happiness. He re-reads her letters from Italy, and decides that although John is right, his own mistake can never now be put right. ‘Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point […] beyond, there was nothing but mere waste and darkened sky.’ He always did give up too easily.
Those twelve weeks pass, Arthur shunning everybody and everything. No surprise there. But then, Arthur’s room becomes a stage for one character after another to tell him things. First comes the jaunty Frederick Barnacle, the only one in his family who can speak openly about anything. He seems to be there for no other reason than to tie off one plot thread, convincing Arthur that he must give up his battle with the Circumlocution Office because he will never, ever get approval for Doyce’s invention. Then comes Rugg, to tell him that nobody knows why Arthur is spending his time in the Marshalsea. Arthur tells him it’s what he wants, and that Rugg should stop trying to change his mind. But this scene runs straight into another—we can almost feel Dickens putting his foot on the accelerator—as Rugg tells him of a ‘gentleman’ waiting to see him. Who could it be, with only a few chapters of the novel remaining?
It’s Blandois, of course, from now on always referred to in the narrative as Rigaud. He explains where he has been for months—nowhere in particular, it seems, having hidden himself simply to bring about confusion and anxiety. Cavaletto had been searching all that time, had found him, and now brings him to Arthur as he promised all those months ago. Pancks is there too, still looking dispirited but now as helpful as he had ever been… but this isn’t quite the band of conspirators he’d been able to assemble in the first Book. He and Cavaletto are working for a man who can go nowhere, as Rigaud likes to keep pointing out to Arthur. His mask is off, and so are the gloves—he holds all the cards, and treats his adversaries with open contempt.
Am I the only one who feels that Dickens might be spinning out this scene longer than necessary? He clearly wants to save any revelations for the final double instalment, so all Rigaud is going to tell Arthur for now is that yes, he really does have something Mrs Clennam wants to buy from him, and he tells Arthur that his impatience has made him bring forward his demand for payment. It must be paid in one week’s time. He writes an ultimatum to Mrs Clennam to this effect, carried by Pancks, that brings Flintwinch to the Marshalsea to gloat and chide about sleeping dogs…. But Flintwinch has no choice but to agree to Rigaud’s demand of an expenses-paid hotel, with Cavaletto—‘Pig!’—as his servant. Cavaletto was going anyway, as Rigaud knows, because he never lets him out of his sight for a moment.
So, everything is set up for that final double instalment. Except… except for that last little bit of unfinished business regarding Arthur and Little Dorrit. Have I said enough about it? He is almost in a stupor when she arrives, and all he perceives of her in his room is the scent—poignant memory alert—of a beautiful bunch of fresh flowers. For him, from the one woman who has always—etc. Nothing at all has changed. She tends to his needs as well as she ever did for her father, he still (according to the narrative) treats her as he would a daughter—and she insists he use the name for her that he always has.
I’ll just quote a couple of lines from the key moment, perhaps the most maddening in the novel. She knows that he knows she loves him, because he tells her that everything would have been different if only he had recognised his true feelings before their circumstances were so changed. And, really, we know what he’s going to say. She ends her plea: ‘Pray, pray, pray, I beg you and implore you with all my grieving heart, my friend—my dear!—take all I have, and make it a Blessing to me!’ And he is obdurate. Of course he is. ‘No, darling Little Dorrit. No, my child. I must not hear of such a sacrifice. Liberty and hope would be so dear, bought at such a price, that I could never support their weight, never bear the reproach of possessing them. But with what ardent thankfulness and love I say this, I may call Heaven to witness!’ Idiot. She doesn’t want the blessing of heaven. She wants him…
But he sends her away with only the hapless John Chivery to see her to her hotel. Poor John.
The final double instalment—Book 2, Chapters 30-34
It feels as though Dickens has reverse-engineered the plot from this final number—which might account for those times during the previous numbers (how many?) when the delaying tactics seem overdone. Sometimes, he as good as gives a signal that, yes, there will be a final big reveal, but only when he’s finished lining everything up just so. The revelations, when they come, and the subsequent unfolding of the plot, are full of outlandish connections and coincidences. But these numbers, and especially the long Chapter 30, are about far more than a hidden back-story.
To summarise. Forty-odd years ago, before Arthur was born, Gilbert Clennam, the overbearing uncle of the browbeaten young man who would become Arthur’s father, decided it would be good for him to marry. He had brought up his nephew very strictly, and his wife was to be a woman with a similar upbringing. Soon after the marriage, she discovers that her new husband has had an affair with a young dancer, who has had a son. The new Mrs Clennam takes away the boy to bring him up as her own son, Arthur. Her professed motive is that the sins of its parents could be atoned for if their issue could be raised as strictly as she and his father. The child’s real mother grieves, never gets over the loss, and is given care by her dancing teacher until her death a few years later. Gilbert Clennam discovers this, and in a codicil to his will, stipulates that should the dancing teacher ever have children, his second daughter should receive £1000. If he doesn’t, then his brother’s second daughter should be the beneficiary. (I’m not making this up.)
Mrs Clennam keeps the codicil a secret, and hides it. Only Flintwinch knows of it, and often advises her to destroy it. But she decides not to, claiming that she intends to present if the right circumstances were ever to arise. (This is clearly a lie, because she tells Amy nothing about it when she discovers who Amy is.) Only when Arthur returns from China does Flintwinch persuade her to burn it, in case Arthur should find it when looking through her papers. But he only pretends to burn it in front of her. His twin brother is in town, and he gives it to him to keep safe instead. He, the twin, lives abroad and, by chance, later tells Rigaud all about it. When the twin dies, Rigaud steals the codicil, among other as yet unnamed items. This is what he threatens to give to Amy Dorrit—reader, she’s the second niece of the dancing teacher, Frederick Dorrit—and, during their second meeting, Mrs Clennam tells him she can’t easily find the money he demands. In their third and final meeting, there’s a crisis. Rigaud has doubled his demand, and she tells him she will never be able to afford it.
This is the secret history, and a summary conveys nothing of how Chapter 30 actually unfolds. Dickens is in impresario mode, having gathered four different characters together who can each tell their part of the story. Some know more than others, and Dickens turns it into an extraordinary set piece. He frees all the characters of any restraints, as though he wants to confirm who these people really are. Rigaud and Flintwinch present few surprises. The masks are off, that’s all—so we see Rigaud’s villainy undiluted by his pantomime gentility, whilst we see all of Flintwinch’s violence, insolence and venality.
With the women it’s different. Affery has always seemed a wreck, cowed into inescapable submission by the clever ones. But no. From under her apron, or just outside the door, or unobtrusively in a corner, she has noticed everything, and she remembers every detail. She will die before letting Flintwinch prevent her from saying all she knows, threatening either to throw herself from the window or shout to be heard at St Pauls. Affery knows: ‘if ever you said a true word in your life, it’s when you call me a heap of confusion, for you two clever ones have done your most to make me such.’
But the unexpectedly volatile centre of the scene, and the most interesting, is Mrs Clennam. At the start of the chapter, she is suppressing her feelings through an extraordinary effort of will. The mask is in place, so that only somebody who doesn’t know her would fail to see the overtightened self-control. Rigaud has his work cut out, but he’s up for it. Now, not for the first time in this novel, Dickens has one of his characters in charge of the exposition. It’s Rigaud’s own brand of unvarnished truth, delivered in his own way—he’s even checking her pulse during one of his biggest reveals—and his insolent audacity gradually breaks down her defences. He makes Affery his unwilling ally, gleefully seizing on what she remembers about Mrs Clennam stopping Flintwinch saying something…. ‘I know already, but I want a little confidence from you. How, then? You are not what?’
That’s it for Mrs Clennam. ‘Not Arthur’s mother!’ she has her own reasons for taking up the narrative: ‘I will tell it myself! I will not hear it from your lips, and with the taint of your wickedness upon it. Since it must be seen, I will have it seen by the light I stood in.’ She’s on the side of the angels, the ‘light’ shining on her overpowering the wicked ‘taint’ he brings. She wants control over how she is to be perceived, even judged, and this is what defines her for the rest of the novel. Rigaud, she realises, knows how she punished her husband’s mistress (or bigamous wife?). The mother never recovered from her loss, but that doesn’t matter to Mrs Clennam. She is determined to forestall any accusation that she did it through pride and vindictiveness, through self-serving rhetorical questions: ‘was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the discovery, and that it was appointed to me to lay the hand of punishment upon that creature of perdition? Was I to dismiss in a moment—not my own wrongs—what was I! but all the rejection of sin, and all the war against it, in which I had been bred?’
Her self-justification is all nonsense, of course, as both Rigaud and Flintwinch are quick to tell her. Try as she might, she can’t stop the narrative running out of her control—everybody in the room knows what she is guilty of in this respect—and, through one of the most explicit authorial interventions in the novel, Dickens confirms that she knows it too: ‘More than forty years of strife and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she called her vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years, and come this Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided by her old impiety—still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own breath into a clay image of her Creator.’
And it gets better. However dreadful we might find Mrs Clennam’s lying justification of her own cruelty, it is even more difficult for her to try and justify that secret decision of hers to suppress Gilbert Clennam’s will. By doing so, she has deprived Amy of her inheritance, and there is nowhere for her to hide, try as she might. Sitting in judgment as she has always done, she pronounces that it was much better for Amy’s soul for her to live in the way she did, struggling with poverty. And it’s Flintwinch’s turn to confront her with the unvarnished truth.
‘Why didn’t you destroy the paper when you first laid hands upon it? I advised you to; but no, it’s not your way to take advice. You must keep it forsooth. Perhaps you may carry it out at some other time, forsooth. As if I didn’t know better than that! I think I see your pride carrying it out, with a chance of being suspected of having kept it by you. But that’s the way you cheat yourself. Just as you cheat yourself into making out that you didn’t do all this business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and spite, and power, and unforgiveness, but because you were a servant and a minister, and were appointed to do it. Who are you, that you should be appointed to do it?’
She keeps on justifying herself, even going so far as to explain away the ‘Do not forget’ message in the watch-case. Her husband, on the other side of the world, clearly meant it to mean that she should not forget her duty to the Dorrits. Her interpretation is self-serving, as ever. ‘He died, and sent this watch back to me, with its Do not forget. I do not forget, though I do not read it as he did. I read in it, that I was appointed to do these things.’ Arthur had always guessed something like this, although never knowing the nature of the debt. She had been evasive when he asked her, as Flintwinch now takes her through that conversation again. ‘You know very well that the Do Not Forget, at the time when his father sent that watch to you, could only mean, the rest of the story being then all dead and over, Do Not Forget the suppression. Make restitution! Arthur’s ways have frightened you a bit, and the paper shall be burnt after all.’
There are other complications. Flintwinch’s brother had kept an asylum, no doubt about as well as Squeers keeps Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby. He had got into difficulties for ‘over-roasting a patient to bring him to reason,’ but before this he had come across Arthur’s birth-mother, a patient, who had told him all about her loss. Worse, she had spent her time before she died writing letters to Mrs Clennam—never sent—asking for forgiveness and which, with the other incriminating documents, are in a box now in the possession of Rigaud. In other words, between them Flintwinch and Rigaud know almost everything, and it’s all now in a box that Rigaud took when the twin died. Everything incriminating is in there.
But the last straw for Mrs Clennam is the knowledge that Rigaud has left a sealed copy of the codicil with Amy, with an accompanying letter to Arthur, still lying sick in the Marshalsea. These are to be opened after the locking of the gates that night unless otherwise instructed. For some time during this meeting, as the truth about her emerges, Mrs Clennam’s physical movements have gradually become more fluid. Perhaps, we might think, her supposed incapacity was never any such thing, another wrong-headed attempt at atonement—and something else that Arthur understood almost as soon as he saw it. She is suddenly able to move, to stand—and then, almost shockingly, to walk.
There’s an extraordinary, twisted logic in what happens next, so twisted that it makes Mrs Clennam appear like a madwoman to the people who see her. She walks across London to the Marshalsea, closely followed by Affery. She is reduced to no more than ‘a figure,’ an ‘it,’ her obsessive, proud determination stripping her of any humanity: ‘ascending from the river by the crooked ways that led to London Bridge, and passing into the great main road, it became surrounded by astonishment. Resolute and wild of look, rapid of foot and yet weak and uncertain, conspicuously dressed in its black garments and with its hurried head-covering, gaunt and of an unearthly paleness, it pressed forward….’ She is only saved from the crowd’s further attention by the kindly John Chivery.
The reason for Mrs Clennam’s epic journey is not to stop Amy reading the letters, but to let her read them and ask her to keep the secret from Arthur. Her obsessive insistence on her own narrative is what has brought her here—Arthur must never know what everybody, including Amy herself, now knows about her. She pleads with Amy to keep up with the lie, at least until after her death. Amy wants to protect Arthur, and assures Mrs Clennam she will tell him nothing.
But these are chapters full of complications, twists and new revelations. First, Rigaud needs to be got out of the way, and Dickens chooses both an outlandish event and an outlandish death. By a lucky chance, while all its usual occupants are out of the house—tell you later—it collapses. The beam above Rigaud’s head, the one he had been looking at as he smokes while casually resting on the window, has its own role to play. Rescuers digging through the rubble ‘found the dirty heap of rubbish that had been the foreigner before his head had been shivered to atoms, like so much glass, by the great beam that lay upon him, crushing him.’
But Amy can only be sure that the family’s secrets are safe by finding the box with the incriminating documents. She tells Mr Meagles, who had planned to visit Arthur, to follow the now dead Rigaud’s trail through Europe. It leads to Miss Wade, still in Calais, who is happy to tell him she has never seen any box. He doesn’t know she is lying, and he travels straight back to England and the Marshalsea. But here’s a surprise. Harriet/Tattycoram has heard Miss Wade’s lie, and has followed him—, for no reason I can think of beyond being able to make her surprise entrance—bringing the box with her.
She asks for forgiveness, hoping he and Mrs Meagles will take her back. Her penitence is awful to watch, and so is the little lecture Meagles can’t resist. She should aspire to be like Amy Dorrit and always try to be dutiful. Whatever, she will now be the only child in the house as Pet is married to Henry Gowan—who, in a loose-end-tying move, has suggested to the Meagles that since they do not really get on that they should avoid seeing each other. They will still be able to see their daughter and grandchild, and Gowan comes out of it all perfectly content. Meagles is going to increase the money he gives his daughter…. (Flintwinch is another to benefit undeservedly. He has cashed some bonds and now lives abroad. Affery is disgusted, which is as far as Dickens takes her story.)
So, all done? Hardly, because anyone on the side of the angels needs looking after. So Dickens does it, as we knew he would, occasionally letting us in on some less angelic types having a bad time. Cue Pancks, on a hot and unrewarding Saturday evening, being given no credit for all his hard work by the grasping Casby. He surprises Casby at Bleeding Heart Yard, doing his saintly Patriarch act. He tells him, and the residents, how Casby is the one who benefits from his, Pancks’s, squeezing, and tells him he will have no more of it. He takes out a pair of shears and snips off the ‘sacred locks’ before reducing Casby’s hat to a brimless bowl and pushing it down on his head. Casby is suddenly an absurd, ‘bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big-headed lumbering personage.’ He will never again be able to pretend to the Bleeding Hearts that he’s anything but the penny-pinching landlord he really is.
Meanwhile Meagles has gone to find Daniel Doyce to prove to Clennam that he bears him no ill will for his speculating with the firm’s funds. In fact, Doyce has been able to build on the faith in his invention in other countries, and is prospering. This sorts everybody out—it’s that Doyce ex machina moment I’d been expecting. Clennam has a job with him as a real business partner, going well beyond mere accountancy. Pancks will be the clerk, and… also as we guessed, Arthur can marry Amy because her father had invested his money in Merdle’s scam and she’s now poor. (I’ll ignore the fact that the modern reader finds it absurd that Arthur had been so squeamish about marrying her when she was rich. What did I say at the time? Idiot.)
The book finishes with the quiet wedding of Amy and Arthur. They won’t have an easy life, but they’ll have plenty of hard work and duty to keep them busy, including having the now invalid and slightly pathetic Tip to look after…. And they won’t only be busy with their own children, but Fanny’s as well. She and Mrs Merdle, poor but not ostracised by Society, knock lumps out of each other in the inconvenient house Sparkler’s salary just about pays for. But the novel closes in the church of St George where Amy’s birth was registered in one volume, where she found shelter and rested her head on another on the night of her ‘party’, and where her marriage has now been registered in a third. They are not surrounded by real families, but have a substitute family of friends, including Flora Finching in the gallery.
Money? Who needs it when you can look forward to a ‘modest life of usefulness and happiness’?
We can read it for you wholesale 