Little Dorrit

Summary

Little Dorrit opens in Marseilles in the 1820s, 'thirty years ago' from its writing, where travellers returning from the East are held in quarantine and a murderer named Rigaud waits in a prison cell. Among the travellers is Arthur Clennam, forty years old, home after twenty years managing his family's business in China. In London he finds his mother, a rigid Calvinist confined to a wheeled chair in a decaying house, served by the sly clerk Flintwinch and his frightened wife Affery. Arthur suspects that the family fortune hides some wrong, and his mother's interest in her quiet seamstress, Amy Dorrit, draws him to the Marshalsea debtors' prison. There Amy was born, and there her father William Dorrit has lived for more than twenty years, presiding over the inmates as their 'Father' and accepting their 'testimonials' of money while his small daughter keeps the family together. Arthur tries to help and runs into the Circumlocution Office, the government department perfected in the art of 'HOW NOT TO DO IT', staffed by the aristocratic Barnacle family. He befriends the inventor Daniel Doyce, whose invention the Office has stalled for years, and becomes his partner. He half falls in love with Pet Meagles, who marries the idle artist Henry Gowan, while Amy loves Arthur without his noticing. Pancks, the rent-collector for the benevolent-looking but grasping landlord Casby, discovers that Dorrit is heir to a great estate. Book the First, 'Poverty', ends with the family leaving the prison. In Book the Second, 'Riches', the Dorrits travel through the Alps to Venice and Rome; Mr Dorrit hires the genteel Mrs General to polish his daughters, Fanny marries the foolish Edmund Sparkler, and the family is ashamed of Amy, who misses her old usefulness. Mr Dorrit's past breaks through at a grand Roman dinner, where he welcomes the guests to the Marshalsea, and he dies soon after. Meanwhile all England has invested in the enterprises of the financier Merdle; Arthur, against Doyce's habits, does so too. Merdle kills himself, his empire proves a fraud, thousands are ruined, and Arthur is imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, where he falls into a low fever and is nursed by Amy, now herself poor again. Rigaud's blackmail forces the Clennam secret into the open: Mrs Clennam is not Arthur's mother, and she has suppressed a codicil that would have benefited Amy. She rises from her chair to beg Amy's silence, the old house collapses, and she is paralysed and speechless for the rest of her life. Doyce returns to free his partner, and Arthur and Amy are married in the church beside the prison where she was christened, going 'quietly down into the roaring streets'.

Plot or Argument

• Book the First: Poverty, Chs. 1-9 (Marseilles, the Clennam house, the Marshalsea)

  The novel opens with Rigaud and Cavalletto in a Marseilles prison and the travellers in quarantine, including the Meagles family, their maid Tattycoram and the bitter Miss Wade. Arthur returns to his mother's house, then follows Amy to the Marshalsea and learns how her father came there, how she was born in the prison, and how the 'Father of the Marshalsea' lives on courtesy and gifts.

• Book the First, Chs. 10-20 (the Circumlocution Office and Bleeding Heart Yard)

  Arthur's inquiry into Dorrit's debts sends him through the Circumlocution Office and the Barnacles. He meets Daniel Doyce, the poor families of Bleeding Heart Yard, the landlord Casby and his rent-collector Pancks, and his garrulous former sweetheart Flora Finching. Amy's party, her friendship with the simple Maggy, and her refusal of John Chivery show her quiet authority.

• Book the First, Chs. 21-36 (Society, Merdle, release)

  Fanny Dorrit, a dancer, is courted by Edmund Sparkler, stepson of Merdle, whose house in Harley Street is the centre of Society and whose vague 'complaint' puzzles his physician. Arthur, now Doyce's partner, suppresses his love for Pet Meagles, who marries Gowan. Pancks's investigations prove the Dorrits heirs to a fortune, and the family leaves the Marshalsea.

• Book the Second: Riches, Chs. 1-19 (the Grand Tour)

  The newly rich Dorrits meet the Gowans and Miss Wade's world at the Great St Bernard and settle in Venice and Rome. Mrs General teaches 'prunes and prism', Fanny marries Sparkler, and Amy writes letters to Arthur. In London the Merdle mania spreads 'like the Plague'. Returning to Rome, Mr Dorrit breaks down at Mrs Merdle's dinner and dies, and his brother Frederick dies kneeling by his bed.

• Book the Second, Chs. 20-26 (the self-tormentor and the crash)

  Miss Wade gives Arthur a written history of her life, a study in resentment. Merdle kills himself in a public bath, his banks fail, and Arthur, having invested Doyce and Clennam's money, accepts responsibility and is arrested for debt.

• Book the Second, Chs. 27-34 (the Marshalsea again, the Clennam secret)

  In the Marshalsea Arthur falls into a low fever and is nursed by Amy, who has lost her own fortune. Rigaud returns to sell the Clennam papers; Mrs Clennam confesses the history of Arthur's birth and the suppressed codicil, rises from her chair after twelve years, runs to the prison to beg Amy's mercy, and sees the house fall. Doyce pays Arthur's debts, and Arthur and Amy marry.

Characters

• Amy Dorrit (Little Dorrit), heroine

  Born in the Marshalsea, small and self-effacing, she supports her father and siblings by needlework while protecting her father's pride; her steadiness is the moral centre of the novel.

• Arthur Clennam, protagonist

  A middle-aged man of conscience shaped by a joyless upbringing, who calls himself 'Nobody' in matters of love and wants above all to set right whatever wrong his family has done.

• William Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea

  A debtor whose long imprisonment has turned helplessness into ceremonial pride; wealth cannot free him from the prison he carries in his mind.

• Mrs Clennam, Arthur's supposed mother

  A severe woman confined to her room, who reads her own vengeance as divine justice and keeps a guilty secret by force of will.

• Mr Merdle, financier

  The awkward, silent 'great man' of the age, revered by Society and the Treasury, whose empire is a swindle; his 'complaint' turns out to be fraud.

• Daniel Doyce, engineer and inventor

  A modest, practical man who has spent twelve years trying to get a useful invention through the Circumlocution Office.

• Rigaud (Blandois), villain

  A theatrical criminal and blackmailer who claims to be a gentleman and makes a profit from the Clennam papers.

• Flora Finching, Arthur's former sweetheart

  A comic widow whose breathless monologues are unpunctuated, but whose good nature is real; accompanied by the hostile Mr F.'s Aunt.

• Pancks, rent-collector

  A snorting, driven agent for the landlord Casby, who uncovers the Dorrit fortune and finally exposes his employer.

• Mr and Mrs Meagles; Pet; Tattycoram, a retired banker's family and their adopted maid

  A kind, slightly complacent couple, their daughter who marries Gowan, and the foundling Tattycoram, who is drawn away by Miss Wade and later returns.

• Miss Wade, self-tormentor

  A proud woman who reads every kindness as condescension and whose written history is a portrait of self-justifying resentment.

• Fanny and Tip Dorrit; Frederick Dorrit, Amy's siblings and uncle

  Fanny, ambitious and sharp; Tip, idle and repeatedly in debt; and their uncle Frederick, a broken old clarinet-player who alone defends Amy against the family's snobbery.

Lessons

• Prisons without walls

  The Marshalsea is a real prison, and Dickens knew it from childhood, but nearly every place in the novel is a cell: the Marseilles jail, the quarantine, Mrs Clennam's room, Society's houses, the convent on the Alps, the Venetian palazzo. The novel's question is how people come to love their confinement. Mr Dorrit is most imprisoned after he is released; Amy is freest inside the walls. Students can trace the image across both books and ask what, in the novel's view, finally frees a person.

  • Why does Dr Haggage call the Marshalsea 'freedom'? What is true and false in his claim?
  • What does Mr Dorrit's speech at Mrs Merdle's dinner reveal about the effect of twenty years in prison?
  • List three characters who are imprisoned by something other than walls. Which is the hardest prison to leave?

• How not to do it

  The Circumlocution Office satirises a government that exists to prevent action, run by a family that treats the nation as its estate. Dickens's preface ties it to the mismanagement exposed by the Crimean War. The satire is comic but serious: Doyce's useful invention dies of delay, and a nation's talent is wasted. Students should separate Dickens's exaggeration from his argument, and ask what makes an institution forget its purpose.

  • Why does the narrator say the Office was early in learning 'HOW NOT TO DO IT'? What does the Office actually gain by inaction?
  • Compare the Barnacles' manners with Doyce's. What virtue does Doyce have that the Office lacks?
  • Is the satire fair to public servants? What would a reformer in 1855 have wanted changed?

• The worship of wealth and Merdle's fall

  Merdle is admired not for anything he does but for the money people believe he has. Bishops, lawyers and lords flatter him, and Book the Second, Ch. 13 describes the speculative mania as a moral epidemic that seizes people in the soundest health. His suicide in a public bath reveals the fraud. Dickens connects the episode to real collapses of his day, including the Royal British Bank and the forger John Sadleir. The novel asks what a society worships when it honours wealth without inquiring how it was gained.

  • Why does the narrator describe the Merdle mania as an infection rather than a mistake?
  • Arthur invests against Doyce's principles. Is his ruin a punishment, a misfortune, or both? How does he respond to it?
  • What does Society's reaction to Merdle's death reveal about its earlier admiration?

• Two religions in one house

  Mrs Clennam's faith is built on wrath: she sees her own cruelty as the instrument of a God who punishes sin, and she reads her watch's motto 'Do Not Forget' as a command to remember wrongs. Little Dorrit answers her in Book the Second, Ch. 31 by pointing to Christ as 'the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead'. Dickens is contrasting not Old Testament and New Testament as such but a religion of vengeance and one of mercy. Students can test both speeches against Scripture.

  • How does Mrs Clennam justify what she has done? Which parts of Scripture does she draw on, and what does she leave out?
  • Why does Little Dorrit say her teaching has been 'very defective'? Does that weaken or strengthen her answer?
  • Mrs Clennam rises from her chair after twelve years. What does the scene suggest about the connection between her body and her will?

• Small virtue and the usefulness of humility

  Amy Dorrit is easily overlooked by her family, by Society and for most of the novel by Arthur. Her goodness is practical: work, patience, truthfulness and care for the weak. The ending sends Arthur and Amy into 'a modest life of usefulness and happiness' among the 'noisy and the eager'. The novel argues that real goodness is usually hidden, while showing the cost of Amy's self-sacrifice in the way her family uses her.

  • Is Amy's protection of her father's pride a virtue or an enabling of his vanity?
  • Why does Amy feel less useful in Venice than in the Marshalsea?
  • What does the final paragraph claim about happiness and fame?

Context

The action is set in the late 1820s, about thirty years before publication, when imprisonment for debt was still common and the Marshalsea, in Southwark, held debtors until its closure in 1842. Imprisonment for ordinary debt was largely abolished by the Debtors Act of 1869. The novel was written in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853-1856), when the administrative failures exposed by the army's sufferings, and the inquiries that followed, gave force to the Administrative Reform movement that Dickens supported; the Circumlocution Office answers that context more than the 1820s. Merdle draws on the speculative bubbles of the railway mania of the 1840s and on John Sadleir, the Irish banker and MP who poisoned himself on Hampstead Heath in 1856 after his frauds were discovered; Dickens's preface also mentions the Royal British Bank collapse of 1856. Quarantine at Marseilles for travellers from the Levant reflected anxiety about plague and cholera.

Composition

Dickens began the novel, first titled Nobody's Fault, in 1855 and published it in nineteen monthly numbers, the last a double number, from December 1855 to June 1857, with illustrations by Hablot K. Browne ('Phiz'). He settled on the title Little Dorrit before the first number appeared. The volume edition of 1857 added a preface, dated May 1857, describing his visit to the remains of the Marshalsea. His father's imprisonment there in 1824 was not publicly known until Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1872-1874).

Reception

The monthly numbers sold very well, but many reviewers found the novel gloomy and confusing; James Fitzjames Stephen attacked the Circumlocution satire as unfair to the civil service, and Dickens replied in Household Words. Later critics reversed the judgment. George Bernard Shaw called it more seditious than Das Kapital, and Lionel Trilling's 1953 introduction praised it as one of the most profound novels of the century, built on the single image of the prison. The Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990) included it in volume 47.

Comparisons

• Bleak House

  Bleak House, the novel just before Little Dorrit, makes the Court of Chancery its controlling image as Little Dorrit makes the prison; both satirise institutions that consume lives through delay, but Bleak House is driven by a mystery and a detective, while Little Dorrit's secret matters less than the inner prisons of its characters.

• Great Expectations

  Both novels put a sudden fortune at the centre and show it corrupting its recipient: Pip and Mr Dorrit each grow ashamed of those who loved them in poverty. Great Expectations tells the story from the inside in the first person; Little Dorrit watches Mr Dorrit's vanity from the outside, through his daughter's grief.

• David Copperfield

  Mr Micawber's imprisonment in the King's Bench in David Copperfield is Dickens's earlier, comic treatment of his father's debt; in Little Dorrit the same experience, twenty years longer, becomes tragic, and the debtor's dignity has curdled into ceremony.

• Hard Times

  Written immediately before Little Dorrit, Hard Times attacks utilitarian schooling and industrial life in a short novel; Little Dorrit widens the attack to government and finance, and replaces Gradgrind's facts with Mrs Clennam's theology as the cold system that cripples a child.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Little Dorrit is not a medical novel, but illness and medical language run through it. It opens in quarantine at Marseilles, and its prisons are described as places of tainted air. Amy is delivered in the Marshalsea by the drunken Dr Haggage. Merdle's undiagnosed 'complaint' is a running joke in which the Physician, Bar and Bishop guess at nervous strain, depression and dyspepsia; the truth is guilt and fraud, and he kills himself with a penknife after taking laudanum. The speculative mania of Book II is described as a moral epidemic. Mr Dorrit's collapse at Mrs Merdle's dinner, in which his mind returns to the prison, may be read as a stroke or sudden dementia, but the novel gives it no diagnosis. Mrs Clennam's twelve-year paralysis, which she attributes to 'rheumatic affection' and 'nervous weakness', vanishes when she must act and returns permanently after the shock of the house's fall; modern readers have called this psychosomatic, which is a reading rather than the text's claim. Arthur's low fever in prison and Amy's nursing close the book. Dickens's physician is a sympathetic figure, one of the few professionals in the novel who sees through Society.

• Book the First, Chs. 1-2

  Rigaud's cell, with its tainted, imprisoned air, and the travellers from the East detained in quarantine at Marseilles.

  Public Health Sanitation Plague Epidemic
• Book the First, Ch. 6

  Amy's birth in the Marshalsea, attended by Mrs Bangham and the drunken debtor-doctor Haggage, who sends for brandy and praises the prison's quiet.

  Childbirth Maternal Physicians Doctors
• Book the First, Ch. 3; Book the Second, Chs. 30-31

  Mrs Clennam describes losing the use of her limbs through rheumatic affection and nervous weakness; she rises and runs to the Marshalsea when her secret is exposed, then collapses into lifelong paralysis and silence after the house falls.

  Disability Deformity Mind Body
• Book the First, Ch. 21

  Merdle's mysterious complaint: the Physician finds nothing, while Bar suggests mental strain and the Bishop prescribes egg beaten with sherry.

  Physicians Doctors Melancholia Depression
• Book the Second, Ch. 13

  The narrator likens the spread of speculative investment to the Plague, a moral infection that seizes the soundest constitutions.

  Plague Epidemic
• Book the Second, Ch. 19

  Mr Dorrit's breakdown at the Roman dinner, when he welcomes the company to the Marshalsea; his decline and death follow.

  Dementia Memory Death Dying
• Book the Second, Ch. 25

  The Physician is called to a public bath where Merdle lies dead with a severed jugular vein beside a laudanum bottle and penknife, and carries the news to Society.

  Suicide Opium Laudanum Physicians Doctors
• Book the Second, Chs. 29-34

  Arthur's prostration and low, slow fever in the Marshalsea, and his recovery under Amy's care.

  Fever Infection Nursing Caregiving

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the scene in which twelve-year-old Amy first walks alone through the Marshalsea gate into the city, using the details of Book the First, Ch. 7.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Daniel Doyce and a junior Barnacle in which each tries to explain to the other what an office is for.

• Essay

  The novel was first called Nobody's Fault. Argue whether that title or Little Dorrit better describes the book, using Merdle, the Circumlocution Office and Mrs Clennam.

• Classroom

  Read aloud Mrs Clennam's justification and Little Dorrit's reply in Book the Second, Ch. 31. In groups, find the Scripture passages each seems to draw on and discuss which reading of God's justice the novel supports.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem in the voice of the Marshalsea itself, after it 'becomes an orphan' when the Dorrits leave.

Further Reading

• The Life of Charles Dickens, John Forster

  Forster's biography (1872-1874) first revealed John Dickens's imprisonment in the Marshalsea and the blacking-warehouse episode.

• The Opposing Self, Lionel Trilling

  Includes Trilling's essay on Little Dorrit, which reads the prison as the novel's governing image.

• Bleak House, Charles Dickens

  The preceding novel, with a comparable institutional satire of the Court of Chancery.

• Dickens and the Invisible World, Harry Stone

  On fairy tale, fantasy and religious imagery in Dickens's novels, including Little Dorrit.