[Spoiler alert! In this commentary, I’m writing about everything that happens in this 1857 novel, two instalments at a time. After having read two, I write about them before reading on. There are twenty instalments in all, and so far I have written about the first ten, i.e. ‘Book the First.’]
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.
We can read it for you wholesale 