A Dorrit miscellaney, with rambling, backtracking, and a well-marked and necessary spoiler alert

1.  I have been coming at Little Dorrit from a funny angle, worrying about characters and gentlemen, when the great thing about this novel, I mean aside from the usual virtues of Dickens, is the language, the intense and complex pattern of imagery that he creates and sustains.  The first chapter is titled “Sun and Shadow;” it is set, once we wander past a bird’s-eye view of Marseilles, in the cell of a “villainous prison.”  Sun, shadow, prison – these three basic concepts, in the right hands, turn out to be almost sufficient to carry an 800 page novel.  The combinations of the ideas are complex, more than the ideas themselves.

2.  A couple of years ago I was startled by the number of prisons and prisoners I was encountering in French literature, and I wondered about their absence from English literature.  Absence outside of Dickens, that is, and, curiously, the poetry of Emily Brontë.  Little Dorrit is full of prisons: literal prisons, for crimes and debts, a parrot cage, prison-like non-prisons (a Swiss monastery), and figurative prisons: poverty, or senility, or being an invalid, confined in bed, for example.  Innumerable creative variations on the theme.

Bleak House is constructed like this, too (with a different pack of images and rhetoric), in its omnisciently narrated sections at least, and I expect Our Mutual Friend to be built of similar stuff.  These novels are superb handmade objects.

3.  So why do I dwell, in what I write, on the weaknesses of Dickens, or on the problems he is trying to solve?  Because I simply assume that he is the world’s greatest novelist.  I am creating a vague mental weighted index of social reach, human insight, complexity of pattern, linguistic daring, humor, and so on – breadth, depth, scope, reach.  All the good stuff fiction writers do.  Balzac’s social acuity is comparable, and any number of novelists are sharper thinkers than Dickens.  He has few rivals in rhetorical range – just Victor Hugo, perhaps – or in the ability to define characters (the minor characters) so quickly and permanently.  A reader who gives far more weight than I do to, for example, depth of thought will calculate the index rather differently.

4.  Lionel Trilling, in his 1952 introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of Little Dorrit, wonders why “of the three [big late novels] it is perhaps the least established with modern readers” (v).  I like that neutral word: not least “liked” but least “established.”  Perhaps that is the other reason I have been poking at the deceptively gray central characters.  Why does nobody care about Little Dorrit? Or care enough, or care about it relative to Bleak House or Great Expectations.

Now that I have read the book, I care a lot about how it was put together, why certain passages work so well, and even how Dickens uses the characters and rhetoric to achieve emotional effects that still work, even with all of my distance.  I do not think there is as uplifting a moment in Dickens, no, in all of English literature, as when, on the last page of the book, (spoiler alert!) our heroine takes the initial steps of her new life as the first and greatest of all Victorian lady travelers, Dorrit the Explorrit.