Little Dorrit (1857) is later Dickens, in between Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. In scale it’s close to Bleak House or Dombey & Son, the longest of the novels. In his introduction for an Oxford University Press edition, American critic Lionel Trilling wrote that it is “more about society than any of the other novels” in its depiction of not only debtor’s prisons, government bureaucracies, and the class system, but also of people ruled by “the social will, the will to status.” The story begins in Marseilles thirty years before the time of the novel’s publication, with two prisoners who share a cell, Rigaud and John Baptiste Cavalletto. Rigaud, a murderer with much “swagger and challenge” is freed. In Chapter II, the pleasant Meagles family are introduced in quarantine in Marseilles, along with Arthur Clennam, a businessman who is returning to London after twenty years in China. Clennam’s father has recently died; in London, he visits his invalid mother and tells her he is leaving the family business. Not far from the Clennam house is the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, where resides William Dorrit, who was put there twenty years ago. His wife has passed, and he has three children: Edward, also a prisoner, Fanny who works nearby as a dancing girl, and Amy, who sews to support the family, and spends much of her time caring for him. Clennam’s mother employs Amy as a seamstress, and Arthur, curious about the little girl, resolves to help her and her family, believing his family somehow responsible for their condition. He will take to calling her Little Dorrit.
The novel in is two books of over thirty chapters each, the first titled “Poverty” and the second “Riches” in reference to the Dorrits’ financial status. Debt imprisoned William Dorrit, and capital liberates him; at the end of Book the First, having inherited a fortune, he departs the Marshalsea, and Book the Second begins with the Dorrits on an expensive tour of Europe. Beyond the scheme given by this emphatic cleft, Little Dorrit is looser and less ingeniously shaped than most of Dickens’ later novels. Dickens invents a grand Circumlocution Office, a satire of fussy and ineffective government, and has Arthur apply there to learn about William Dorrit’s case, but the apparently very important institution falls away in the second book. It is then in some fashion replaced by the saga of a financier named Merdle, with a change in theme from from red tape and aversion to progress to sheer cupidity and foolish speculation. Some of relationship between inner drama and its relation to the whole novel has not been worked out quite right. William Dorrit hires a widowed Mrs. General to teach his daughters genteel disposition and manners, and after Fanny’s marriage, decides to marry her. With his fantasies of his own marriage plans he is building a “castle in the air”, with its towers, walls, defences, and ornamental touches, and then in his final illness the “lines of the plan of the great Castle melted”. All of this happens rather too quickly, within thirty pages. The notion of the phantasmic castle needed longer to develop, as Dickens’ other conceits do, and well it could have as Mrs. General had already been around for two hundred pages. In contrast Dickens writes with irony that Arthur has decided not to fall in love with Pet, the Meagles daughter, and then considers at length what he would feel had he not made that decision, all through run-ins with her suitor and eventual husband Henry Gowan, mentions of her name, and the occasional private moment with the lady: “She was so beautiful, that it was well for his peace—or ill for his peace, he did not quite know which—that he had made that vigorous resolution.” The irony is worked for the length of the subplot, that of a short novel.
There are many monsters in Dickens, but Little Dorrit’s Rigaud is more like the devil. With his great cloak and his pale hand he seems a stage villain (pantomime, even) imported into a novel, although the often claustrophobic and sometimes prison settings of the novel do already feel a little stagey. Going by the name Blandois when he reappears, he shows a “diabolical persistency” in his attentions to both Little Dorrit and the newly married Pet Gowan. He kills a dog, maybe for biting him or maybe just out of cruelty. His main motivation may be money, not evil for its own sake, but his wrongness is not as particular as Miss Havisham’s resentment and sadism, Mr. Murdstone’s cruel tyranny, or Silas Wegg’s parasitic wriggling. His villainous tic, a lowering of his nose down and over his moustache and a raising of his moustache up and under his nose, is more frequent even than Mr. Pancks’ puffing and snorting (here in Little Dorrit), or catchphrases like Mr. Micawber’s “something will turn up”, or Mrs. Gummidge’s “I am a lone lorn creetur’.” Each occurrence is some version of the same formula, e.g. “the fall of his nose and the rise of the moustache”, or “and his nose came down over his moustache and his moustache went up under his nose”, so that Dickens has his own refrain, his own catchphrase like one of his most stunted creatures. Such is his response to a character who cannot, like his other villains, be held in contempt or pitied, one who provokes only fear and revulsion. Outside the dilapidated Clennam house at night, Rigaud’s nature is given better illustration in tableau than it can by any of his grubbing or mischievous acts.
Some of the many vagrant cats who were always prowling about there by night, and who had taken fright at him, appeared to have stopped when he had stopped, and were looking at him with eyes by no means unlike his own from tops of walls and porches, and other safe points of pause.
Rigaud is surely not the product of a bad system, someone or something that can be apologized for. He is foreign, and indeed he is pushed further out to the extremes of evil, beyond the influence of any Victorian institution or convention that Dickens might wish to indict. In comparison with Bleak House or David Copperfield, Little Dorrit goes further for its own contrasts. Amy Dorrit is perhaps no more conspicuously goodly than Agnes Wickfield or Esther Summerson, but her trials are more extreme: she is the angel in the prison before she can be the angel in the house. The familiar theme of greed is made grotesque as Merdle, himself passive and without qualities, is not only a dubious role model, but Mammon himself.
All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul.
In keeping with a story involving devils and idols, with a saint in the center, Little Dorrit has its sublime passages. Added to the loving, self-abnegating effusions of Arthur and Amy, reunited late in the novel at Marshalsea, there is the vision of the Dorrit brothers’ double death: “The two brothers were before their Father; far beyond the twilight judgments of this world; high above its mists and obscurities.” (It could be noted that Frederick Dorrit, Amy’s uncle, is here suddenly treated as a more important character than he has previously seemed, as Dickens was having more problems with developments leading to William Dorrit’s death). With Rigaud’s secrets and designs exposed, and just before the final reckoning and wreckage, there is a sign from on high. Dickens’ London is looking much finer than usual, as the “vista of street and bridge was plain to see, and the sky was serene and beautiful.” Church steeples are clearly pronounced among the “beauties of the sunset”. Then, “great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that change the crown of thorns into a glory.” Trilling reports, surely from memory rather than from consultation of the passage, that “the heavens open over London to show a crown of thorns”. It might be only quibbling to say that Dickens uses a simile that leads to the crown, rather than simply painting it in the sky. An exhortation to imagine, rather than just telling us what we’re looking at.