Phiz (Hablot Browne), “Little Dorrit’s Party” — the chapter where we accompany Amy Dorrit and Maggie who walk, sit, and sleep on the streets all night long …
I pretend to-night that I am at a party … I could never have been any use, if I had not pretended a little … Three o’clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and misery. They had shrunk past homeless people, lying coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away at full speed. Though everywhere the leader and the guide, Little Dorrit, happy for once in her youthful appearance, feigned to cling to and rely upon Maggy. And more than once some voice, from among a knot of brawling or prowling figures in their path, had called out to the rest to ‘let the woman and the child go by! … This was Little Dorrit’s party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy morning. — Bk 1, Ch 14, “Little Dorrit’s Party”
Dear friends and readers,
I must not shirk writing about my listserv group’s reading and discussion of Dickens’s magnificent masterpiece novel, Little Dorrit, which we began mid-October 2023 and have just concluded this past week, early January 2024. It is one of several such astonishing partly because so long works of art to appear in the mid- to later 19th century in Europe: they include Dickens’s own Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina; Trollope has several, Balzac, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. The type continues into the 20th century. I’m not eager to write about Dickens’s because there is a problem with it, recognized early on.
While it sold well (as did all Dickens’s novels), before the end of the century, the consensus was it was the “weakest” of Dickens’s novels! How can this be? Shaw was the first to counter and then override the condemnation by showing Dickens’s voiced view, is deep clearly articulated understanding of how society’s and gov’ts and institutions operate to keep a egregiously snobbish, greedy, lazy upper class (aristocracy and the very wealthy merchants and landowners just before) the only rich who control everyone else for the benefit of these specific individuals. We move from entities created in order to Do Nothing, to Thwart Anything Being Done, to keep Society dysfunctional for most, to the marketplaces of capitalism, from the smallest to the supposedly largest institution and ritual is laid bare before us. The epidemic disease is a fixation with getting as much money as possible and then spending it as ostentatiously as possible. Dickens’s characters are fitted into the lowest of echelons (debtor’s prison) to the upper middling (bankers) and we see how impossible it is for any one or any group of people to begin reforms until there is a change of heart among powerful so profound, they’d almost not be the same people any longer. I strongly recommend Helen Small’s edition for Penguin – her notes on everything you do need to know about London circa 1850s, explanations of the prisons, reprints of Dickens’s first drafts are essential.
When Mr Dorrit cracks, becomes confused and thinks himself back in the Marshalsea when in Venice, and quickly dies, and then Frederick out of grief and inability to carry on w/o him, is one of the book’s unbearably moving moments
“The night from which no one returns” — Phiz
What’s wrong with all this? Nothing. I loved those chapters for their content, as I did the use of imprisonment as a central trope of our lives in the book, the hatred in the book (if not quite honored in his own favorite characters) of worshipped rank, oodles of money, performative false manners, petty egotism, capitalism; I loved and bonded with the good Amy Dorrit (ever shouldering all the burdens of the lives of those she loves, exploited, berated!), the ascetically virtuous Arthur Clennam (who retreats from all forms of profit), was amused by and entertained into accepting many of the well-meaning floundering around them. I have nothing against the soul-wrenching and withering (murdering) of the bad major characters, Mrs Clennam, Mr Dorrit who, poignant as he is, he makes himself a terrific burden on others; these parents utterly ignorant their real impress on their daughter and son.
Trilling says there is too much use of cliché for shorthand, too much resort to generalization and abstraction; it won’t do to to have the narrator or story-teller to locate themselves in some non-personal will in which Dickens is seeking for and has some of his characters searching out for: Peace. Dickens explains too much, a muted despair seeps through the book. We miss the sardonic and sharp witted irony in the narrator of Bleak House, here oddly muttered of Bleak House — Sergeant George, Tulkinghorn, Inspector Bucket. The book lacks precisely what Andrew Davies claims for all Dickens novels in his prologue to his episodes: exuberance, buoyancy, crazy humor, excitement, bizarre characters, continual veins of vividness; sexual passion and violence imitated or parodied. This is what Davies introjects into the matter.
Claire Foy and Matthew MacFayden extraordinarily superb as Amy and Arthur
Why is the book so slow moving, over-wordy, dare I say indecipherable at moments, boring at others? because (I think) Dickens is himself tuning his anger to fit the melancholy and mourning of his hero and heroine; he keeps himself at a distance to provide cool appraisals. Characters like Mrs Clennam, Mrs Gowan, Mrs Merdle, Casby — from evil to abrasive to callous — are put forward for nakedly painful contemplation. There is more pity for Mr Dorrit, more poignancy in his longing in the first half of the book, and adamantine refusal in the second to be respected, not despised. Think of Frederick Dorrit’s hesitancy. There’s nothing funny here. Bleak, grim, extreme mortification (like when Amy Dorrit tries to Clennam for paying Tip’s debt so he won’t be put in the prison)
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Amy and Tim Courtney as Mr Dorrit — just pitch perfect especially in his mad phases
I’ve written (at some length) about the wonders, beauty, intimacy, “corrections” (Davies’s word) and improvements in Davies’ Little Dorrit (also Bleak house — vast worlds, and the mistakes of Edzard’s Little Dorrit) where I also tell the stories (details found most concisely at wikipedia)
In this blog I will therefore bypass most of the novel to talk of the ending where a veil is finally drawn aside to show us what was the profoundly inhumane violation that started all the action — Arthur’s 20 year separation from his family and England and his return and determination to find out what is the truth about his mother’s vile business and make reparations — for what, he finds sort of, may be finds out at book’s end.
At the core of this book remains an unnamed destroyed young woman, Arthur’s mother, whom Arthur’s father, Mr Clennam, married in some clandestine way (perhaps the ancient handfast vows) who Arthur’s uncle cast aside to override with a marriage to the religiously crazed and vindictive second Mrs Clennam (we never learn her first name). The unnamed woman ends up imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, tortured by burning and freezing techniques, and (what else could she do) dies. We are told a ghost haunts the nightmare Clennam house. Arthur was brought up in a continual round of punishment so he should not become like his mother …
Something similar happens in other Victorian novels: for example, Scott’s Heart of Mid-lothian. How many people talk about it as the story of a young woman, Effie, whose illegitimate baby died being born or was still born and is now accused or infanticide and about to be murdered by the state. No, it’s the story of Jeannie Deans and her heroic walk to save Effie, and Effie is presented as shallow, narrow, vain, almost deserving what happened to her because she did have sex outside marriage.
Sue Johnston is a central witness to what happens in Mrs Clennam’s house, especially the machinations about a will where money was left by the uncle who ended the first clandestine marriage of Arthur’s mother and Mr Clennam and overrode it with the second firmly legal marriage of Mrs Clennam to him. This uncle most improbably leaves a legacy to Amy’s uncle, Frederick, because he played such beautiful music to the unnamed woman at some point; this money is upon Frederick’s death to go to his brother’s youngest daughter. (Tus does Dickens’s go into convolutions to make his plot-design come to a compromised end). This is of course Amy — one of the witnesses is Affery, who all novel long is subject to the painful physical abuse of her husband Flintwinch and lives in terror of him. She is so browbeaten she has learned to think what she sees with her own eyes is a dream. Sue Johnston plays the part with just the frenetic anxiety and loss of selfhood such a person might evince:
But this makes no real sense. If Frederick had inherited money, why did he not share it with Mr Dorrit; why does he not tell Amy? It’s these kinds of utter contradictions that point to the book’s story weaknesses. What the point in Dickens’ mind seems to have been is to show this abused woman, this terrified good soul.
Another abused woman is Tattycoram, a mulatto orphan whom Mr and Meagles rescue from an institution, but cannot be made to understand they should treat her with consideration and respect, not make her work at the beck and call of their “Pet” daughter, give her the dignity of a human name (Tatty is a nickname one might give a cat). St the close of the book she must return all apologies and abjection to be taken back. Miss Wade who has a similar story of alienation from family but has become distrustful, embittered because of rejection, mistreats Tatty out of her own distorted nature. Little understanding is accorded Miss Wade.
A single scene between these fine actresses, Freema Agyeman as Harriet, Maxine Peake as Miss Wade, suggests more of their inner lives than Dickens can
Why did Dickens bring them up — in order to castigate them? This resembles the unnamed woman who is never done any justice to but at the end of the novel has her story covered up for the “good” of Arthur, his peace of mind. What?
A whole continuum of women deprived are slid over: the breathless agonizingly desperate (for something to do) Flora, not acceptable to Dickens as fat (like the wife he deserted), mentally child-like Maggie, who follows Amy about everywhere … Standing up for herself — by taking on the world’s values, we have Amy’s sister, Fanny, whose power is limited to what she can earn as a dancing girl unless attached to a male with money. I omit the villainesses. The only (inexplicably) jolly woman in the book is Mrs Plornish with her kindly husband also of limited power. The corresponding tender-hearted men include John Chivery, his father, Pancks (the rent collector who like Affery turns on his oppressor at book’s and movie’s end).
None of these characters drive the plot-design, where nothing much happens. For examples: the Dorrits are broke; the Dorrits are super-rich; the Dorrits are broke again. Pet (or Minnie), an apparently mindless child-woman brought up by the emotionally incompetent Meagles marries a petty sadist, Gowan himself, whose mother spends the book looking down on the unfortunate girl. Mrs Merdle with her large bosom covered with jewels goes bankrupt after her husband kills himself rather than be exposed as a fraud, embezzler, forger; she snubbed Fanny, Amy’s sister, now Fanny snubs her. Clennam rescues the inventor Doyce to set up a business for him, and then Doyce rescues Clennnam from imprisonment for going bankrupt. Pancks collects and then refuses to collect rent. Tatty leaves the Meagles for Miss Wade; Tatty leaves Miss Wade for the Meagles. Chivery’s heart is broken when Amy prefers Clennam. At least there is no reversal as if it were a fictional story. Have I omitted anything? Humor from the terror Cavaletto fears of Rigaud, a blackmailer and murderer — the great knot in the money angle of the book is Rigaud’s blackmail of Mrs Clennam. The book itself feels like a backdrop or nightmare apart and is still. You are entertained by moments of encounter and reversals.
Anton Lesser as Merdle (equivalent of Trollope’s Melmotte) meeting Emma Pierson as Fanny Dorrit holding her own
This is part of the book’s “problems”: it lacks a driving forward force.
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The book will teach you about the political and economic and social worlds around us today — anatomize or disclose the stupid heartlessness, and socially dysfunctional social systems we must live in today. Sudden insights into terrible aspects of the human character in much variety. Ditto — conveyed by dialogue as much as direct invective. There are extraordinary descriptions of all sorts — from prisons to the Alps, aching beauty caughtm then real streets, buildings, countryside A sudden cascading of characters’ activities which tells us where everyone is. The very ending is transcendent.
They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.
Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
— the marriage at novel’s end
The book is also filled with unsolved problems — Dickens can carry on at such length only when he has an external plot-design based on outward suspense that truly interests us, e.g., Bleak House. He has not confronted his own buying into central mechanisms for keeping some groups in society miserable, especially women.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 