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'.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Book the Second, Ch. 13

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Book the Second, Chs. 29-34

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