Dickens and the Marshalsea Prison

I

IN the work of Dickens’ middle period — after the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit — the rebel bulks larger than the criminal.

Of all the great Victorian writers, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself. He had grown up under the Regency and George IV; had been twenty-five at the accession of Victoria. His early novels are full of breezes from an England of coaching and village taverns, where the countryside lay just outside London; of an England where every city clerk aimed to dress finely and drink freely, to give an impression of open-handedness and gallantry, of an England where jokes and songs were always in order. The young Dickens of his earliest-preserved letters, who invites his friends to partake of ‘the rosy,’ sounds not unlike Dick Swiveller. When Little Nell and her grandfather in their wanderings spend a night in an iron foundry, it is only a sort of Nibelungen interlude, rather like one of those surprise grottoes that you pass by when you take the little boat through the tunnel in the ‘Old Mill’ of an amusement park, a luridly lighted glimpse on the same level, in Dickens’ novel, with the waxworks, the performing dogs, the dwarfs and giants, the village church. From here it is impossible, as it was impossible for Dickens, to foresee the fulllength industrial town depicted in Hard Times. In that age the industrial-commercial civilization had not yet got to be the norm; it seemed a disease which had broken out in spots but which a sincere and cheerful treatment would cure. The typical reformers of the period had been Shelley and Robert Owen, the latter so logical a crank, a philanthropist so much all of a piece, that he seems to have been invented by Dickens — who insisted that his Cheeryble brothers had been taken from living originals.

But when Dickens begins writing novels again after his return from his American trip, a new kind of character appears in them, who, starting as an amusing buffoon, grows steadily more unpleasant and more formidable. On the threshold of Martin Chuzzlewit (18431845: the dates of its appearance in monthly numbers), you find Pecksniff, the provincial architect; on the threshold of Dombey and Son (1846-1848), you find Dombey, the big London merchant; and before you have gone very far in the idyllic David Copperfield (1849-1850), you find Murdstone, of Murdstone and Grimby, wine merchants. All these figures stand for the same thing; for, under the impression at first that he is pillorying abstract faults in the manner of the comedy of humors, — Selfishness in Chuzzlewit, Pride in Dombey, — Dickens has already begun an indictment against a specific society; the self-important and moralizing middle class who have been making such rapid progress in England and coming down like a damper on the fires of English life — that is, on the spontaneity and gayety, the frankness and independence, the instinctive human virtues, which Dickens admired and believed in. The new age had brought a new kind of English virtues to cover up the flourishing English vices of cold avarice and harsh exploitation; and it was these virtues that Dickens particularly hated.

The curmudgeons of the early Dickens — Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Gride, Anthony and Jonas Chuzzlewit (for Martin Chuzzlewit just marks the transition from the early to the middle Dickens) — are old-fashioned moneylenders and misers of a type that must have been serving for decades in the melodramas of the English stage. In Dickens, their whole-hearted and outspoken meanness gives them a certain cynical charm. They are the bad uncles in the Christmas pantomime who set off the jolly clowns and the good fairy, and who, as everybody knows from the beginning, are doomed to extinction in the end. But Mr. Pecksniff, in the same novel with the Chuzzlewits, already represents something different. It is to be characteristic of Pecksniff, as it is of Dombey and Murdstone, that he does evil while pretending to do good. As intent on the main chance as Jonas himself, he pretends to be a kindly father, an affectionate relative, a pious churchgoer; he is the pillar of a cathedral town. Yet Pecksniff is still something of a pantomime comic whom it will be easy enough to unmask. Mr. Dombey is a more serious problem. His virtues, as far as they go, are real: though he is stupid enough to let his business get into the hands of Carker, he does lead an exemplary life of a kind in the interests of the tradition of his business house. He makes his wife and his children miserable in his devotion to his mercantile ideal, but that ideal is at least for him serious. With Murdstone the ideal has turned sour: the respectable merchant has become detestable. Murdstone is not funny like Pecksniff; he is not merely a buffoon who masquerades: he is a hypocrite who believes in himself. And where Dombey is made to recognize his error and turn kindly and humble in the end, Mr. Murdstone and his grim sister are evidently to be allowed to persist in working mischief as a matter of duty.

In such a world of mercenary ruthlessness, always justified by rigorous morality, it is natural that the exploiter of others should wish to dissociate himself from the exploited, and to delegate the actual operation to someone else, who takes the odium of the face-to-face contacts. Karl Marx, at that time living in London, was demonstrating through these middle years of the century that this system, with its falsifying of human relations and its wholesale encouragement of cant, was one of the features of the economic structure itself. In Dickens, the Mr. Spenlow of David Copperfield, who is always blaming his mean exactions on his supposedly implacable partner, Mr. Jorkins, develops into the Casby of Little Dorrit, the benignant and white-haired patriarch who turns over the rackrenting of Bleeding Heart Yard to his bull terrier of an agent, Pancks, while he basks in the admiration of his tenants; and, in Our Mutual Friend, into Fledgeby, the moneylender who goes into society while he sends the harmless old Jew Riah to do his dirty work.

With Dickens’ mounting dislike and distrust of the top layers of that middleclass society with which he has tried to identify himself, his ideal of middle-class virtue is driven down to the lower layers. In his earlier novels, this ideal was embodied in such patrons and benefactors as Mr. Pickwick, the retired business man; the substantial and warm-hearted Mr. Brownlow, who rescued Oliver Twist; and the charming old gentleman, Mr. Garland, who took Kit Nubbles into his service. In David Copperfield, the lawyer Wickfield, who plays a rôle in relation to the hero somewhat similar to those of Brownlow and Garland, demoralized by too much port, falls a victim to Uriah Heep, the upstart Pecksniff from a lower social level. The ideal — the domestic unit which preserves the sound values of England — is located by Dickens through this period in the small middle-class household: Ruth Pinch and her brother in Martin Chuzzlewit; the bright hearths and holiday dinners of the Christmas Books; the modest home to which Florence Dombey descends from the great house near Portland Place, in happy wedlock with the nephew of Sol Gills, the ship’s-instrument dealer.

It is at the end of Dombey and Son, when the house of Dombey goes bankrupt, that Dickens for the first time expresses himself explicitly on the age that has come to stay: —

The world was very busy now, in sooth, and had a deal to say. It was an innocently credulous and a much ill-used world. It was a world in which there was no other sort of bankruptcy whatever. There were no conspicuous people in it, trading far and wide on rotten banks of religion, patriotism, virtue, honor. There was no amount worth mentioning of mere paper in circulation, on which anybody lived pretty handsomely, promising to pay great sums of goodness with no effects. There were no shortcomings anywhere, in anything but money. The world was very angry indeed; and the people especially who, in a worse world, might have been supposed to be bankrupt traders themselves in shows and pretences, were observed to be mightily indignant.

II

And now — working always through the observed interrelations between highly individualized human beings rather than through political or economic analysis — Dickens sets out to trace an anatomy of that society. Dombey was the first attempt; Bleak House (18521853) is to realize this intention to perfection; Hard Times, on a smaller scale, is to conduct the same kind of inquiry.

For this purpose he invents a new literary genre (unless the whole mass of Balzac is to be taken as something of the sort): the novel of the social group. The young Dickens had summed up, developed, and finally outgrown the two traditions in English fiction he had found: the picaresque tradition of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, and the sentimental tradition of Goldsmith and Sterne. People like George Henry Lewes have complained of Dickens’ little reading; but no artist has ever absorbed his predecessors (he had read most of them in his early boyhood) more completely than Dickens did. There is something of all these writers in Dickens, and, using them, he has gone beyond them all. In his field — from the English, at any rate — there was now nothing more for him to learn. In Barnaby Rudge — a detour in Dickens’ fiction — he had gotten all that there was in it for him from Scott. He was to profit: in Hard Times by Mrs. Gaskell’s industrial studies. But in the meantime it was Dickens’ business to create a new tradition himself.

His novels even through Martin Chuzzlewit had had a good deal of the looseness of the school of Gil Blas, where the episodes get their only unity from having been hung on the same hero, as well as a good deal of the mechanical combination that he had acquired from the old plays, with their multiple parallel plots — though he has been trying ever more intensively for a unity of atmosphere and feeling. But now he is to organize his stories as wholes, to plan all the characters as symbols, and to invest all the details with significance. Dombey and Son derives a new kind of coherence from the fact that the whole novel is made to centre around the big London business house: you have the family of the man who owns it, the manager and his family, the clerks, the men dependent on the ships that export its goods, down to Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle. (So Hard, Times is to get its coherence from the organism of an industrial town.)

In Bleak House, the masterpiece of this middle period, Dickens discovers a new use of plot, which makes possible a tighter organization. (And we must remember that he is always working against the difficulties, of which he often complains, of writing for monthly installment, where everything has to be planned beforehand and it is impossible, as he says, to ‘try back’ and change anything, once it has been printed.) He creates the detective story which is also a social fable. It is a genre which has lapsed since Dickons. The detective story — though Dickens’ friend Wilkie Collins preserved a certain amount of social satire — has dropped out the Dickensian social content; and the continuators of the social novel have dropped the detective story. These continuators — Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells — have of course gone further than Dickens in the realistic presentation of emotion; but from the point of view of dramatizing social issues they have hardly improved upon Bleak House. In Shaw’s case, the Marxist analysis, with which Dickens was not equipped, has helped him to the tighter organization which Dickens got from his complex plot. But in the meantime it is one of Dickens’ victories in his astonishing development as an artist that he should be able to transform his old melodramatic intrigues of stolen inheritances, lost heirs, and ruined maidens, the denunciatory confrontations involved by the unraveling of which always evoke the sound of fiddling in the orchestra, into devices of artistic dignity. Henceforth the solution of the mystery is to be also the moral of the story and the last word of Dickens’ criticism of society.

Bleak House begins in a London fog, and the whole book is permeated with fog and rain. In Dombey, the railway locomotive — when Mr. Dombey takes his trip to Leamington, and later when it pulls into the station just at the moment of Dombey’s arrival and runs over the fugitive Carker as he steps back to avoid the master he has wronged, figures as a symbol of that progress of commerce which Dombey himself represents; in Hard Times, the uncovered coalpit into which Stephen Blackpool falls is a symbol for the abyss of the industrial system, which swallows up lives in its darkness. In Bleak House, the fog stands for Chancery, and Chancery stands for the whole web of clotted antiquated institutions in which England stifles and decays. All the principal elements in the story — the young people, the proud Lady Dedlock, the philanthropic gentleman John Jarndyce, and Tom-all-Alone’s, the rotting London slum — are involved in the nonsensical Chancery suit, which, with the fog-bank of precedent looming behind it like the Great Boyg in Peer Gynt, obscures and impedes at every point the attempts of men and women to live natural lives. Old Krook, with his legal junkshop, is Dickens’ symbol for the Lord Chancellor himself; the cat that sits on his shoulder watches like the Chancery lawyers the caged birds in Miss Flite’s lodging; Krook’s death by spontaneous combustion is Dickens’ prophecy of the fate of Chancery and all that it represents.

I go over the old ground of the symbolism, up to this point perfectly obvious, of a book which must be still, by the general public, one of the most read of Dickens’ novels, because the people who like to talk about the symbolism of Kafka and Mann and Joyce have been discouraged from looking for anything of the kind in Dickens, and usually have not read him, at least with mature minds. But even when we think we do know Dickens, we may be surprised to return to him and find in him a symbolism of more complicated reference and deeper implication than these metaphors of the surface. The Russians themselves, in this respect, seem to have learned from Dickens; he had little to learn from them.

Thus it is not at first that we recognize all the meaning of the people that thrive or survive in the dense atmosphere of Bleak House — an atmosphere so opaque that the somnolent ease at the top cannot see down to the filth at the bottom. And it is an atmosphere where nobody secs clearly what kind of race of beings is flourishing between the bottom and the top. Among the middle ranks of this society we find persons who appear with the pretension of representing Law or Art, Social Elegance, Philanthropy, or Religion — Mr. Kenge and Mr. Vholes, Harold Skimpole, Mr. Turveydrop, Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby and Mr. and Mrs. Chadband side by side with such a sordid nest, of goblins as the family of the moneylender Smallweed. But presently we see that all these people are as single-mindedly intent on selfish interests as Grandfather Smallweed himself. This gallery is one of the best things in Dickens. The Smallweeds themselves are artistically an improvement on the similar characters in the early Dickens: they represent, not a theatrical convention, but a real study of the stunted and degraded products of the underworld of commercial London. And the two opposite types of philanthropist: the moony Mrs. Jellyby, who miserably neglects her children in order to dream of doing good in Africa, and Mrs. Pardiggle, who bullies both her children and the poor in order to give herself a sense of power; Harold Skimpole, with the graceful fancy and the talk about music and art that ripples a shimmering veil over his systematic sponging; and Turveydrop, the Master of Deportment, that parody of the magnificence of the Regency, behind his rouge and his padded coat and his gallantry as cold and as inconsiderate as the Chadbands, behind their gaseous preachments. Friedrich Engels, visiting London in the early forties, had written of the people in the streets that they seemed to ‘crowd past one another as if they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and as if their only agreement were the tacit one that each shall keep to his own side of the pavement, in order not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it never occurs to anyone to honor his fellow with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent the more these individuals are herded together in a limited space.’ This is the world that Dickens is describing.

Here he makes but one important exception: Mr. Rouncewell, the ironmaster. Mr. Rouncewell is an ambitious son of the housekeeper at Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester Dedlock’s country house, who has made himself a place in the world which Sir Leicester regards as beyond his station. One of the remarkable scenes of the novel is that in which Rouncewell comes back, quietly compels Sir Leicester to receive him like a gentleman, and asks him to release one of the maids from his service in order that she may marry Rouncewell’s son, a young man whom he has christened Watt. When it is indicated by Lady Dedlock that she desires to keep the maid, Rouncewell respectfully abandons the project, but goes away and has the temerity to run against Sir Leicester’s candidate in the next parliamentary election. (This theme of the intervention of the industrial revolution in the relations between master and servant has already appeared in Dombey and Son in the admirable interview between Dombey and Polly Toodles, whom he is employing as a wet nurse for his motherless child. Polly’s husband, who is present, is a locomotive stoker and already represents something anomalous in the hierarchy of British society. When the Dombeys, who cannot accept her real name, suggest calling Polly ‘Richards,’ she replies that if she is to be called out of her name she ought to be paid extra. Later, when Dombey makes his journey, he finds Polly’s husband working on the engine, and resents being addressed by the man and engaged in conversation: he feels that Toodles is somehow intruding outside his own class.)

But in general the magnanimous, the simple of heart, the amiable, the loving, and the honest are frustrated, subdued, or destroyed. At the bottom of the whole gloomy edifice is the body of Lady Dedlock’s lover and Esther Summerson’s father, Captain Hawdon, the reckless soldier, adored by his men, beloved by women, the image of the old life-loving England, whose epitaph Dickens is now writing. Captain Hawdon has failed in that world, has perished as a friendless and a penniless man, and has been buried in the pauper’s graveyard in one of the foulest quarters of London, but the loyalties felt for him by the living will prove so strong that they will pull that world apart after his death. Esther Summerson has been frightened and rendered submissive by being treated as the respectable middle class thought it proper to treat an illegitimate child, by one of those Puritanical females whom Dickens so roundly detests. Richard Carstone has been demoralized and ruined; Miss Flite has gone insane. George Rouncewell, who from Sir Leicester’s service has become a soldier instead of a manufacturer and who shares in Dickens’ sympathy for most of his military and nautical characters as men who are doing the hard work of the Empire, is helpless in the hands of moneylenders and lawyers. Caddy Jellyby and her husband, young Turveydrop, who have struggled for a decent life in a poverty partly imposed by the necessity of keeping up old Turveydrop’s pretenses, in that society where nature is so mutilated and thwarted, can only produce a defective child. Mr. Jarndyce himself, the wise and generous, who plays in Bleak House a rôle similar to that of Captain Shotover in Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (which evidently owes a good deal to Bleak House), is an eccentric at odds with his environment, who, in his efforts to help the unfortunate, falls a prey to the harpies of philanthropy.

With this indifference and egoism of the middle class, the social structure must buckle in the end. The infection from the poverty of Tom-all-Alone’s will ravage the homes of country gentlemen. Lady Dedlock will inevitably be dragged down from her niche of aristocratic idleness to the graveyard in the slum where her lover lies. The idea that the highest and the lowest in that English society of shocking contrasts are inextricably tied together has already appeared in the early Dickens — in Ralph Nickleby and Smike, for example, and in Sir John Chester and Hugh — as a sort of submerged motif which is never given its full expression. Here it has been chosen deliberately and is handled with immense skill so as to provide the main moral of the fable. And bound up with it is another motif which has already emerged sharply in Dickens. In the course of his astonishing rise in the world, Dickens had evidently found himself up against the blank and chilling loftiness — what the French call la morgue anglaise — of the English upper classes; as we shall see, he developed a pride of his own, with which he opposed it up to his dying day. Pride was to have been the theme of Dombey: the pride of Edith Dombey outdoes the pride of Dombey and levels him to the ground. But in Bleak House the pride of Lady Dedlock, who has married Sir Leicester Dedlock for position, ultimately rebounds on herself. Her behavior toward the French maid Hortense is the cause of her own debasement. For where it is a question of pride, a hightempered maid from the South of France can outdo Lady Dedlock: Hortense will not stop at the murder which is the logical upshot of the course of action dictated by her wounded feelings. Dickens is criticizing here one of the most sacrosanct moral props of the English hierarchical system.

III

With Little Dorrit (1855-1857), Dickens’ next novel after Bleak House and Hard Times, we enter a new phase of his work. To understand it, we must go back to his life.

Dickens at forty had won everything that a writer could expect to get through his writings: his genius was universally recognized; he was fêted wherever he went; his books were immensely popular; and they had made him sufficiently rich to have anything that money can supply. He had partly made up for the education he had missed by traveling and living on the Continent and by learning to speak Italian and French. (Dickens’ commentary on the Continental countries is usually not remarkably penetrating; but he did profit very much from his travels abroad in his criticism of things in England. Perhaps no other of the great Victorian writers had so much the consciousness that the phenomena he was describing were of a character distinctively English.) Yet from the time of his first summer at Boulogne in 1853, he had shown signs of profound discontent and unappeasable restlessness; he suffered severely from insomnia, and for the first time in his life, apparently, began to worry about his work. He began to fear that his vein was drying up.

I believe that Forster’s diagnosis — though it may not go to the root of the trouble — must here be accepted as correct. There were, he intimates, two things wrong with Dickens: a marriage which exasperated and cramped him and from which he had not been able to find relief, and a social maladjustment which his success had never straightened out.

The opportunities of the young Dickens to meet eligible young women were evidently rather limited. That he was impatient to get married, nevertheless, is proved by his announcing his serious intentions to three girls in close succession. The second of these was Maria Beadnell, the original of Dora in DavidCopperfield and, one supposes, of Dolly Varden, too, with whom he fell furiously in love, when he was eighteen and she nineteen. Her father worked in a bank and regarded Charles Dickens, the stenographer, as a young man of shabby background and doubtful prospects; Maria, who seems to have been rather frivolous and silly, was persuaded to drop her suitor — with the result for him which may be read in the letters, painful in their wounded pride and their backfiring of a thwarted will, which he wrote her after the break. It was one of the great humiliations of Dickens’ early life (he was at that time twenty-one), and, even after he had liquidated it in a sense by depicting the futilities of David’s marriage with Dora, the disappointment still seems to have troubled him and Maria to have remained at the back of His mind as the Ideal of which he had been cheated.

He lost very little time, however, in getting himself a wife. Two years after his rejection by Maria Beadnell, he was engaged to the daughter of George Hogarth, a Scotchman, who, as the law agent of Walter Scott and from having been mentioned in the Noctes Ambrosianae, was invested with the prestige of having figured on the fringes of the Edinburgh literary world. He asked Dickens to write for the newspaper which he was editing at that time in London, and invited the young man to his house. There Dickens found two attractive daughters, and he married the elder, Catherine, who was twenty. But the other daughter, Mary, though too young for him to marry — she was only fifteen when he met her — had a strange hold on Dickens’ emotions. When, after living with the Dickenses for a year after their marriage, she suddenly died in Dickens’ arms, he was so overcome by grief that he stopped writing Pickwick for two months and insisted in an obsessed and morbid way on his desire to be buried beside her: ‘I can’t think there ever was love like I bear her. . . . I have never had her ring off my finger day or night, except for an instant at a time, to wash my hands, since she died. I have never had her sweetness and excellence absent from my mind so long.’ In The Old Curiosity Shop, he apotheosized her as Little Nell. What basis this emotion may have had in the fashionable romanticism of the period or in some peculiar psychological pattern of Dickens’, it is impossible on the evidence to say. But this passion for an innocent young girl is to recur in Dickens’ life; and in the meantime his feeling for Mary Hogarth seems to indicate pretty clearly that even during the early years of his marriage he did not identify the Ideal with Catherine.

Catherine had big blue eyes, a rather receding chin, and a sleepy and languorous look. Beyond this, it is rather difficult to get a definite impression of her. Dickens’ terrible gallery of shrews who browbeat their amiable husbands suggests that she may have been a scold; but surely Dickens himself was no Joe Gargery or Gabriel Varden. We do not know much about Dickens’ marriage. We know that, with the exception of his sister-in-law Georgina, Dickens grew to loathe the Hogarths, who lived on him to a considerable extent; and we must assume that poor Catherine, in both intellect and energy, was a good deal inferior to him. He lived with her, however, twenty years, and, although it becomes clear toward the end that they are no longer particularly welcome, he gave her during that time ten children.

And if Dickens was lonely in his household, he was lonely in society, also. He had, as Forster indicates, attained a pinnacle of affluence and fame which made him one of the most admired and most sought-after persons in Europe without his really ever having created for himself a social position in England, that society par excellence where everybody had to have a definite one and where there was no rank reserved for the artist. He had gone straight, at the very first throw, from the poor tenement, the prison, the press table, to the supremacy of an emperor over the imaginations of practically the whole literate world; but in his personal associations he cultivated the companionship of inferiors rather than — save, perhaps, for Carlyle — of intellectual equals. His behavior toward society (in the capitalized sense) was rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to learn its patter and its manners; and his satire on the fashionable world comes to figure more and more prominently in his novels. Dickens is one of the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity has been offered to be taken up by the governing class, who have actually declined that honor. Instead of allowing himself to be conciliated and absorbed, he was becoming, if anything, more antagonistic.

To be caught between two social classes in a society of strict stratifications — like being caught between two civilizations, as James was, or between two racial groups like Proust — is an excellent thing for a novelist from the point of view of his art, because it enables him to dramatize contrasts and to study interrelations which the dweller in one world does not know. Perhaps something of the sort was true even of Shakespeare, between the provincial bourgeoisie and the Court. Dostoevsky, who had a good deal in common with Dickens and whose career somewhat parallels his, is a conspicuous example of the novelist stimulated by a social maladjustment. The elder Dostoevsky, a doctor of obscure origins at a time when the professional middle class in a Russia still predominantly feudal was held of little account, had aspired to the status of landowning gentry. He bought an estate and sent his sons to a school for the children of the nobility; then took to drink, became completely demoralized, and was murdered for his cruelty by his serfs, leaving his children with very little to live on. Dickens’ case had been equally anomalous: he had grown up in an uncomfortable position between the upper and the lower middle class, with a dip into the proletariat and a glimpse of the aristocracy through their trusted upper servants. But this position, which had been useful to him as a writer, was to leave him rather isolated in English society. In a sense, there was no place for him to go and belong; he had to have people come to him.

And in the long run all that he had achieved could not make up for what he lacked. Little Dorrit and Great Expectations (1860-1861), which follows it after A Tale of Two Cities, are full of the disillusion and discomfort of this period of Dickens’ life. The treatment both of social situations and of the psychology of the individual character has taken a turn distinctly new.

Dickens now tackles the Marshalsea again, but on a larger scale and in a more serious way. It is as if he were determined once for all to get the prison out of his system. The figure of his father hitherto has always haunted Dickens’ novels, but he has never known quite how to handle it. In Micawber, he made him comic and lovable; in Skimpole, he made him comic and unpleasant — for, after all, the vagaries of Micawber always left somebody out of pocket, and there is another aspect of Micawber — the aspect he presented to his creditors. But what kind of person, really, had John Dickens been in himself? How had the father of Charles Dickens come to be what he was? Even after it had become possible for Charles to provide for his father, the old man continued to be a problem up to his death in 1851. He got himself arrested again, as the result of running up a wine bill; and he would try to get money out of his son’s publishers without the knowledge of Charles. Yet Dickens said to Forster, after his father’s death: ‘The longer I live, the better man I think him’; and Little Dorrit is something in the nature of a justification of John.

Mr. Dorrit is ‘a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman . . . a shy, retiring man, well-looking, though in an effeminate style, with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands — rings upon the fingers in those days — which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail.’ The arrival of the Dorrit family in prison and their gradual habituation to it are done with a restraint and sobriety never exhibited by Dickens up to now. The incident in which Mr. Dorrit, after getting used to accepting tips in his rôle of the Father of the Marshalsea, suddenly becomes insulted when he is offered copper halfpence by a plasterer, has a delicacy which makes up in these later books for the ebb of Dickens’ bursting exuberance. If it is complained that the comic characters in these books, the specifically ‘Dickens characters,’ are sometimes mechanical and boring, this is partly, perhaps, for the reason that they stick out in an unnatural relief from a surface that is more quietly realistic. There are moments when one feels that Dickens might be willing to abandon the ‘Dickens character’ altogether if it were not what the public expected of him. In any case, the story of Dorrit is a closer and more thoughtful study than any that has gone before of what bad institutions make of men.

Yet already there is in Little Dorrit something beyond social criticism, beyond the anatomy of the social organism. The main symbol here is the prison; but this symbol is developed in a way that takes it beyond the satirical application of the symbol of the fog in Bleak House and gives it a significance more subjective. In the opening chapter, we are introduced, not to the debtors’ prison, but to an ordinary jail for criminals, which, in the case of Rigaud and Cavalletto, will not make the bad man any better or the good man any worse. A little later, we are shown an English business man who has come back from many years in China and who finds himself in a London — the shut-up London of Sunday evening — more frightening, because more oppressive, than the thieves’ London of Oliver Twist. ‘“Heaven forgive me,” said he, “and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!” There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him, in its title, why he was going to Perdition?’ At last he gets himself to the point of going to see his mother, whom he finds as lacking in affection and as gloomy as he could have expected. She lives in a dark and funereal house with the old offices on the bottom floor, one of the strongholds of that harsh Calvinism plus hard business that made one of the mainstays of the Victorian age; she lies paralyzed on ‘a black bier-like sofa,’ punishing herself and everyone else for some guilt of which he cannot discover the cause. The Clennam house is a jail, and they are in prison, too. So are the people in Bleeding Heart Yard, small tenement-dwelling shopkeepers and artisans, rackrented by the patriarchal Casby; so is Merdle, the great swindler-financier, imprisoned, like Kreuger or Insull, in the vast scaffolding of fraud he has contrived, who wanders about in his expensive house — itself, for all its crimson and gold, as suffocating and dark as the Clennams’, — afraid of his servants, unloved by his wife, entirely unknown to his guests, till on the eve of the collapse of the edifice he quietly opens his veins in a bath.

At last, after twenty-five years of jail, Mr. Dorrit inherits a fortune and is able to get out of the Marshalsea. He is rich enough to go into society; but all the Dorrits, with the exception of the youngest, known as ‘Little Dorrit,’ who has been born in the Marshalsea itself and has never made any pretensions, have been demoralized or distorted by the effort to remain genteel while tied to the ignominy of the prison. They cannot behave like the people outside. And yet that outside world is itself insecure. It is dominated by Mr. Merdle, who, as the book goes on, comes to be universally admired and believed in — is taken up by the governing class, sent to parliament, courted by lords. The Dorrits, accepted by Society, still find themselves in prison. The moral is driven home when old Dorrit, at a fashionable dinner, loses control of his wits and slips back into his character at the Marshalsea: ‘“Born here,” he repeated, shedding tears. “Bred here. Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter. Child of an unfortunate father, but — ha — always a gentleman. Poor, no doubt, but — hum — proud.”’ He asks the company for ‘Testimonials,’ which had been what he used to call his tips. (Dr. Manette, in A Tale of Two Cities, repeats this pattern with his amnesiac relapses into the shoemaking he has learned in prison.) Arthur Clennam, ruined by the failure of Merdle, finally goes to the Marshalsea himself; and there at last he and Little Dorrit arrive at an understanding. The implication is that, prison for prison, a simple incarceration is an excellent school of character compared to the dungeons of Puritan theology, of modern business, of money-minded Society, or of the poor people of Bleeding Heart Yard who are bled and swindled by all of these.

The whole book is much gloomier than Bleak House, where the fog merely represents the obfuscatory elements of the past. The murk of Little Dorrit permeates the souls of the characters, of which we see more than we do in Bleak House. Arthur Clennam, with his broodings on his unloving mother, who turns out not to be his real mother (she, a poor doomed child of natural impulse, like Lady Dedlock’s lover), is both more real and more depressing than Lady Dedlock. Old Dorrit has been spoiled beyond repair: he can never be rehabilitated like Micawber. There is not even a villain like Tulkinghorn to throw the odium on a predatory class: the official villain Blandois carries out one of the themes of the book as a caricature of social pretense, and the illustrations suggest that he is intended as a satire on Napoleon III — so that his hold over Mrs. Clennam would be a symbol for the intimate relationship between two outwardly quite opposite aspects of the exploiting bourgeoisie. But his connection with the plot depends on a mere contrivance. The rôle of the Court of Chancery is more or less played by the Circumlocution Office and the governingclass family of Barnacles — perhaps the most brilliant thing of its kind in Dickens: that great satire on all aristocratic bureaucracies, and indeed on all bureaucracies, with its repertoire of the variations possible within the bureaucratic type and its desolating picture of the emotions of a man being sent from one door to another. But the Circumlocution Office, after all, only influences the action in a negative way.

The important thing to note in Little Dorrit — which was originally to have been called Nobody’s Fault — is that the fable is here presented from the point of view of imprisoning states of mind as much as from that of oppressive institutions. This is illustrated in a startling way by ‘The History of a Self-Tormentor,’ which we find toward the end of the book. Here Dickens, with a remarkable pre-Freudian insight, gives a sort of case history of a woman imprisoned in a neurosis, which has condemned her to the delusion that she can never be loved. There is still, to be sure, the social implication that her orphaned childhood and her sense of being slighted have been imposed on her by the Victorian attitude toward her illegitimate birth. But her handicap is now simply a thoughtpattern, and from that thought-pattern she is never to be liberated. Already, in Little Dorrit, the Marshalsea, destroyed in actuality, is making itself felt as a permanent mould that confines Charles Dickens’ spirit.