5

Dickens and Blake: Little Dorrit

I

THE indisputable but misleading proposition that the Dickensian genius is the genius of a great entertainer can be, we have seen, advanced, Hard Times being in question, to justify a blankness to the sharply focused power – that is, to the clear significance – of that highly concentrated work, and so to its distinction as creative literature; for if you can’t take the significance you will hardly see Hard Times as the patent classic it is. Little Dorrit, on the other hand, answers so obviously and abundantly to what has for so long been the prevailing notion of the essentially Dickensian that it enjoys general recognition as one of the master’s major performances. Yet that it is one of the very greatest of novels – that its omission from any brief list of the great European novels would be critically indefensible – is not a commonplace. The significance focused with a sharp economy in Hard Times – a significance the force and bearing of which can’t be too insistently impressed on an age of statistical method, social studies and the computer – is at the deep centre of Little Dorrit; but published commentary on Dickens doesn’t encourage the recognition that any book of his has a deep centre. Little Dorrit is one that has; it exhibits a unifying and controlling life such as only the greatest kind of creative writer can command.

There seems to be a pretty general conviction among us that in recent years we have achieved, in regard to the ‘art of the novel’, a critical sophistication unknown in the Victorian age. Perhaps we have. But the truly portentous effect of the changes that have transformed civilization in the hundred years since Dickens died is not that he strikes the reader as antiquated, naïve and Victorian, but that the conditions of the kind of greatness represented by Little Dorrit have disappeared from the world and a corresponding blindness results, induced by the climate of implicit assumptions and ideas that now prevails. The firmly established cult of Shakespeare generates no effective light.

I won’t offer to elaborate the parallel between Shakespeare’s development and achievement as the great popular playwright of our dramatic efflorescence and Dickens’s as the marvellously fertile, supremely successful and profoundly creative exploiter of the Victorian market for fiction. There is clearly, however, a need to insist that Dickens no more than Shakespeare started from nothing and created out of a cultural void. ‘A waif himself, he was totally disinherited’: Santayana’s observation illuminates nothing except the assumptions behind it; it is stultifyingly false. Dickens belonged as a popular writer, along with his public, to a culture in which the arts of speech were intensely alive. That was a good start. Anyone concerned to enforce the truth that he wrote out of a peculiarly rich inheritance – rich in relation to the needs of an artist of his gift and destiny – would have good reason to think first of the part of Shakespeare himself in it; Shakespeare – the point is an essential one – who then really was a national author. The most important aspect of Dickens’s notorious indebtedness to the theatre (though this is not the point usually made) is to be seen there. Not that the life and power of Shakespeare for Dickens were merely a matter of the theatre. He read immensely, with the intelligence of genius, and his inwardness with Shakespeare, the subtlety of the influence manifest, and to be divined, in his own creative originality, can’t be explained except by a reader’s close and pondering acquaintance. I will add, by way of enforcing this kind of comment on the view that the author of Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations was a Philistine, the related note that he knew the Romantic poets – one can’t, by the time one comes to Little Dorrit, fail to see it as an important enough truth to be affirmed.

He mixed freely in the cultivated company he needed: class did indeed, as his novels make us very much aware, exist in Victorian England, but class constituted no barrier that got in his way. The higher cultural world of intellect and spirit was quick to recognize his genius, and he hadn’t to form any sense of finding it difficult of access. We see these as pregnantly significant points when we ask how it was that, just as Shakespeare could be both the established favourite of the groundlings in the popular theatre and the supreme poetic mind of the Renaissance, master explorer of human experience, so Dickens, pursuing indefatigably his career as best-selling producer of popular fiction, could develop into a creative writer of the first order, the superlatively original creator of his art.

He was intensely an artist, unlike as he was either to Flaubert or to Henry James, and as he develops he becomes more and more describable as a dedicated one. Dombey and Son, in ways I have discussed, solved only partially Dickens’s problem: that of achieving the wholly significant work of art as a successful serial-writer, writing always against time and for the popular market. Bleak House again, rich and diverse as it is in the creative felicities of a great novelist and poet, doesn’t altogether solve that problem. But in Little Dorrit the thing is done. There are no large qualifications to be urged, and the whole working of the plot, down to the melodramatic dénouement, is significant – that is, serves the essential communication felicitously. When the secret of Arthur Clennam’s birth is revealed, it completes the presented significance of Mrs Clennam and the Clennam house:

… Satan entered into that Frederick Dorrit, and counselled him that he was a man of innocent and laudable tastes who did kind actions, and that here was a poor girl with a voice for singing music with. Then he is to have her taught. Then Arthur’s father, who has all along been secretly pining, in the ways of virtuous ruggedness, for those accursed snares which are called the Arts, becomes acquainted with her. And so a graceless orphan, training to be a singing girl, carries it, by that Frederick Dorrit’s agency, against me, and I am humbled and deceived.

This emphasis on art at the moment of confession – Mrs Clennam’s characteristic kind of confession – has nothing gratuitous about it. What Dickens hated in the Calvinistic commercialism of the early and middle Victorian age – the repressiveness towards children, the hard righteousness, the fear of love, the armed rigour in the face of life – he sums up now in its hatred of art. That he should do so is eloquent of the place he gave to art in human life and of the conception of art that informs his practice (it seems to be essentially Blake’s). He conveyed his criticism of Victorian civilization in a creative masterpiece, a great work of art, which it would be fatuous to suppose he achieved accidentally and unconsciously, without meaning it and without knowing it. What, at a religious depth, Dickens hated about the ethos figured by the Clennam house was the offence against life, the spontaneous, the real, the creative, and, at this moment preceding the collapse of the symbolic house, he represents the creative spirit of life by art.

For Arthur Clennam the ethos is that which oppressed his childhood, glowering on spontaneity, spirit and happiness and inculcating guilt, and which, in its institutional manifestation, appals him as the English Sunday, wrapping London in a pall of gloom on his first morning back, he being bound towards the old childhood home to see his ‘mother’ again after twenty years of exile. It is the beginning of the sustained criticism of English life that the book enacts. For Clennam himself it is the beginning of an urgently personal criticism of life in Arnold’s sense – that entailed in the inescapable and unrelenting questions: ‘What shall I do? What can I do? What are the possibilities of life – for me, and, more generally, in the very nature of life? What are the conditions of happiness? What is life for?’ Despondent, muted, earnest, with an earnestness derived from the upbringing the anti-life ethos of which he intensely rejects, he can’t but find himself with such a criticism of life as his insistent preoccupation.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years – Twenty years largely wasted …

– The resonance as of a religious concern with basic criteria and ultimate issues carried by this from its context in Four Quartets and from the opening of the Divina Commedia doesn’t make it inappropriate here – for the usual easy and confident denial of any profundity of thought to Dickens is absurd and shameful.

The inquest into contemporary civilization that he undertook in Little Dorrit might equally be called a study of the criteria implicit in an evaluative study of life. What it commits him to is an enterprise of thought; thought that it is in our time of the greatest moment to get recognized, consciously and clearly, as thought – an affair (that is) of the thinking intelligence directed to a grasp of the real. Dickens’s capacity for effective thought about life is indistinguishable from his genius as a novelist. A great novelist is addicted to contemplating and pondering life with an intensity of interest that entails – that is – the thought that asks questions, seeks answers and defines. And (whatever that last verb might seem to imply) he doesn’t need to be told that he must take a firm hold on the truth that life, for a mind truly intent on the real, is life in the concrete; that life is concretely ‘there’ only in individual lives; and that individual lives can’t be aggregated, generalized or averaged.

On the other hand, he knows that the serious and developed study of the individual life can’t but be a study of lives in relation, and of social conditions, conventions, pressures as they affect essential life. The really great novelist can’t but find himself making an evaluative inquiry into the civilization in which he finds himself – which he more and more finds himself in and of.

I might have added a couple of sentences ago that he doesn’t need to be reminded – or to remind himself – that ‘life’ is a necessary word and that the impossibility of arriving at any abstract definition acceptable to him is far from being evidence of an unreality about what the word portends: it is the opposite.

Dickens in the nature of his creative undertaking aims at communicating generally valid truths about what can’t be defined. I point here to the importance of getting it recognized that his genius as a novelist is a capacity for profound and subtle thought. His method, with all its subtleties and complexities, is a method of tackling what is in one aspect an intellectual problem: he tackles it, beyond any doubt, consciously and calculatingly.

I have already noted how Clennam, returned after twenty years of exile, dejected and without momentum or aim, opens, out of a particular situation and the pressure of a personal history, the critique of Victorian civilization. The questioning, so largely for him a matter of self-interrogation that implicitly bears on the criteria for judgement and value – perception, starts in that reverse of theoretical way, but – or so – with great felicity. The answer implicit in Little Dorrit is given creatively by the book, and it is not one that could have been given by Clennam himself. Not only is it something that can’t be stated; the Clennam evoked for us is obviously not adequate to its depth and range and fullness, his deficiency being among the characteristics that qualify him for his part in the process by which the inclusive communication of the book is generated. Each of the other characters also plays a contributory part, inviting us to make notes on his or her distinctive ‘value’ in relation to the whole.

Nevertheless, about Dickens’s art there is nothing of the rigidly or insistently schematic. We find ourselves bringing together for significant association characters as unlike, for instance, as Miss Wade, Henry Gowan, William Dorrit and Mrs Clennam, or seeing a rightness that is other than one of piquant or pleasing complementarity in the mutual attraction that manifests itself (a fact of the narrative) between Doyce, Clennam, Pancks and Cavalletto. And when we have got as far as that we are aware of already having made a note that Gowan (for instance) associates in significant relationship with characters who form a quite different grouping from that in which I have just placed him, so that, if in our diagrammatic notation we have been representing groupings by lines linking names, the lines run across one another in an untidy and undiagrammatic mess. The diagrammatic suggestion is soon transcended as the growing complexity of lines thickens; we arrive at telling ourselves explicitly what we have been implicitly realizing in immediate perception and response: ‘This, brought before us for pondering contemplation, is life – life as it manifests itself variously in this, that and the other focusing individual (the only way in which it can).’

In the striking power with which the book achieves the effect I point to here Clennam plays an important part, one that entails the unique status he has among the characters. That he is very important doesn’t mean that he competes for inclusion among the ‘Dickens characters’, for he isn’t a character in that sense, though he decidedly exists for us – is felt (that is) as a real personal presence. He has in this respect a clear affinity with Pip of Great Expectations, who, though so centrally important in that book, is not described at all, or endowed with describable, or at any rate very distinctive, characteristics. What is required of Pip is that he shall be felt unquestionably to exist as a centre of sentience, an identity, and Dickens’s art ensures that he shall, for it ensures that the reader shall implicitly identify himself with Pip and be his sentience – while remaining, nevertheless, as the reader, another person (sufficiently another person in many cases, it seems, not to think of protesting when an authority calls Great Expectations ‘a snob’s progress’).

Little Dorrit, the equally astonishing and very different masterpiece, is very differently organized; Clennam is not ‘I’ in it, and not the ubiquitous immediate consciousness that registers and presents. Yet he too is felt as a pervasive presence, or something approaching it. He has been very early, with a subtlety of purpose and touch Dickens isn’t as a rule credited with, established as that – established as the presence of what one may very well find oneself referring to as plain unassertive normality. And what that means is that we tend to be Clennam, as we obviously don’t William Dorrit, Mr Meagles, Daniel Doyce, Henry Gowan, Pancks – or any other character in the book. He is for us a person, the decently ordinary person among the dramatis personae (‘ordinary’ here not being used in a placing or pejorative way, but reassuringly), and he has at the same time a special status, unavowed but essential to his importance; it is implicit in his being, not a queer or unpleasant case, but the immediate focal presence of representative human sentience – ours (for ours, being our own, is that; it is the immediate concrete ‘presence of life’).

Clennam’s consciousness of deprivation and disablement, avowed by him directly at the outset, in his exchange with Mr Meagles in chapter II,1 where the quarantine-freed travellers prepare to disperse, isn’t at all a contradiction that has to be reconciled with this special status, or with the suggestions of the word ‘normality’; without having suffered his childhood, we accept with ready sympathy the sense of the world represented by this earnest, intelligent and pre-eminently civilized man: we respect him as we respect ourselves. The way in which Clennam serves the effect that the intellectual-imaginative purpose of Little Dorrit requires has nothing of the diagrammatic or the logical about it; it works by imaginatively prompting suggestion, so that the reader sees and takes in immediate perception what logic, analysis and statement can’t convey. The effect is to make us realize explicitly why we are right to pick on Little Dorrit as a supreme illustration of the general truth about great creative writers, that their creative genius is a potency of thought. We tell ourselves that in presenting the large cast of diverse characters and the interplay between them Dickens is conducting a sustained, highly conscious and subtly methodical study of the human psyche; that he is concerned to arrive at and convey certain general validities of perception and judgement about life – enforcing implicitly in the process the truth that ‘life’ is a necessary word; that it is not a mere word, or a word that portends nothing more than an abstraction.

It won’t, perhaps, be out of place to clinch this critical insistence with a comparative reference to Blake. Blake too was a creative writer whose genius was a penetrating insight into human nature and the human condition, and whose creativity was a potency of thought. The mythical works, with the complexities, ambiguities and shifting ‘symbolic’ values that defy the diagrammatizing interpreter, give us Blake’s method of grappling with the problem (‘lives’ and ‘life’) that Dickens tackles with the innovating resources of an inspired and marvellously original novelist in Little Dorrit.

II

We quite early find that we are engaged intimately and deeply in Clennam’s personal life. The book, in making the Clennam theme – the necessity-impelled battle with the challenging questions – a unifying one, gives us his éducation sentimentale. There is the shattering disillusion of Flora, the one redeeming memory (she had been) of his childhood:

It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson Crusoe’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Past as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’

There is Pet Meagles, the charming girl with whom he, at forty (inevitably, as the just-quoted passage tells us), falls in love, but whom, we can see, as Dickens clearly sees and implicitly says, he oughtn’t (even though the parents favour him – even if Pet’s assent could be won) to be allowed to marry. And there is Little Dorrit, and, finally, marriage, with the fittingness, not to be dismissed as romantic or sentimental, that makes it something quite other than a conventional conclusion.

In all this, which is done with delicacy and penetration, we can no doubt see some direct drawing on personal history; but Dickens himself, intimately presented as Clennam is, wasn’t at all like Clennam. Clennam’s past has left him discouraged in his vital spontaneity. The creative force of life in him has no confident authority; he, we can say with point, is not an artist. But in that set inquest into Victorian civilization which Little Dorrit enacts for us he is a focal agent – focal in respect of the implicit judgements and valuations and the criteria they represent. We have here, representatively manifest, the impersonalizing process of Dickens’s art: the way in which he has transmuted his personal experience into something that is not personal, but felt by us as reality and truth presented, for what with intrinsic authority they are, by impersonal intelligence. His essential social criticism doesn’t affect us as urged personally by the writer. It has the disinterestedness of spontaneous life, undetermined and undirected and uncontrolled by idea, will and self-insistent ego, the disinterestedness here being that which brings a perceived significance to full realization and completeness in art. The writer’s labour has been to present something that speaks for itself.

That Dickens’s finest work has the impersonality of great art is something I have to insist on; the fact is at the centre of my theme. Consider the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit, and the kind of emphasis that marks Edmund Wilson’s discussion of its significance – Wilson being a critic who enjoys a very high prestige. He, in his well-known essay,2 makes the significance mainly a matter of the psychological traumata suffered by Dickens in childhood, and invites us to see Dickens ‘working the prison out of his system’ in the conceiving and writing of his œuvre. But this is to ignore the nature of Dickens’s development as an artist, and the greatness of his greatest book. And it is to misdirect the attention and to put obstacles in the way of perception and understanding. No one would wish to question that the Marshalsea was an intensely charged memory for Dickens, or that it was so by reason of the well-known facts of his personal history. But there is no need to know those facts in order to appreciate Little Dorrit; they have virtually no critical relevance, and if, as we read, we occupy ourselves with a quest for the evidence of traumata, we are disastrously misdirecting our attention.

A colleague of mine some years ago hailed, as giving us the most promising kind of clue for future criticism, the discovery that Dickens was an ‘anal dandy’. I don’t expect to see anyone seriously attempting that approach, yet the ostensibly more respectable substitutes for an intelligent interest in the great novelist’s art are really no better.

The significance of the Marshalsea is the significance we take in a disinterested response to the text; and, as we go on taking it, it expands and subtilizes–the profound irony of the novel expressing itself in that process. The prison is the world of ‘the mind-forged manacles’; it is Society with a big S, as well as the society we all have to live in; it is Mrs Clennam’s will and self-deception (figured also in her arthritic immobilization and her wheeled chair); it is Henry Gowan’s ego; it is Pancks’s ‘What business have I in the present world, except to stick to business? No business’; it is for the great Merdle the Chief Butler’s eye; it is life in our civilization as Clennam – as, more inclusively, the Dickens of Little Dorrit – registers it.

When towards the end Clennam finds himself literally imprisoned in the Marshalsea and lapses into accidie, we have no need to ponder symbolic values: the focused charge has its immediate effect. The Blakean indeterminateness of what the Marshalsea ‘stands for’ is a condition, in fact, of the major part the ‘symbol’ plays in the whole wonderfully close organic unity. In the shifting metaphorical suggestiveness there is a unifying constant; it is the implicitly evoked contrasting opposite – opposite of what the stale and squalid prison, closed in upon by the city ‘where the charter’d Thames does flow’, evokes directly. When we say that for Dickens, and for us, it is ego-free love, creative spontaneity, Little Dorrit’s bouquet, Flora Casby, the erupting Pancks, Doyce, Cavalletto and Dickens himself, we don’t unsay ‘unifying constant’. And to say that the book, the created whole, justifies this last sentence seems a good way of pointing to the nature of Dickens’s triumphant success.

The problem (‘social problem’) with which Dickens’s book challenges us in the Marshalsea isn’t of a kind to which discussions of Dickens’s part (or the absence of it) in the abolition of imprisonment for debt has any relevance. That isn’t to say that Dickens didn’t in his innermost being cry out against the very idea of imprisonment for debt. The book does that. The fact that imprisonment for debt had been abolished before he wrote Little Dorrit only serves to make the spirit of his use of the Marshalsea the more unambiguous. All his early readers would know of the not distant actuality, and no one would for a moment suppose him ignorant of the abolition.3 There has been no excuse at any time for any reader not to realize the nature and take the force of this ‘social criticism’ as the book makes it. They are those exemplified in the passage (Book the First, chapter XXXV) in which Little Dorrit, her father’s release being imminent, makes her protest against the conditions of it – though obviously her essential protest comes to more than that:

‘Mr Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?’

‘No doubt. All.’

‘All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life, and longer?’

‘No doubt.’

There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look; something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it, and said:

‘You are glad that he should do so?’

‘Are you?’

‘Am I? Most heartily glad.’

‘Then I know I ought to be.’

‘And are you not?’

‘It seems to me hard,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that he should have lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both.’

‘My dear child –,’ Clennam was beginning.

‘Yes, I know I am wrong,’ she pleaded timidly, ‘don’t think any the worse of me; it has grown up with me here.’

The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered, as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father: it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

The speck, of course, is upon Clennam. I say ‘of course’, but I know from questions and discussion – and there is the (to me) astonishing commentary in A. O. J. Cockshut’s book4 on ‘this slight taint of irresponsibility’ (‘It is beyond her imagination that the creditor also might have suffered hardship through unpaid debts’) – I know that the irony can be missed. Yet who, on reflection, can conceive Dickens to have meant any but that judgement which is conveyed by Little Dorrit? Besides the cruelty, the offence against life, of imprisonment for debt (and it was society that had entailed indebtedness on the essentially innocent William Dorrit), there is the stultifying irrationality: the debtor in prison is debarred from setting about earning the means of repayment. The imprisoning him represents starkly the most indefensible idea of retribution. And life against money! – it is the blasphemous iniquity of that, legally and righteously enforced, that Little Dorrit can’t swallow: who can suppose that it’s the money she cares about? Her protest is against the whole code, and the unspeakable her father has suffered. The taint is what clings to Clennam, clings still from his upbringing; the taint of the Calvinistic commercial ethos (prison), and it manifests itself in his taking her as he does, and reproving her with that firm forbearing look. If we take Dickens’s irony, we don’t assume that look or that tone; we leave them to Clennam, and it’s not for Little Dorrit that we make allowances.

It seems to me that not to be sure of this is to have missed the creative arch-intuition in Dickens, the deep imperative preoccupation that organizes the immense range of evoked life, the wealth of diverse interest, into significance – for everything in the book is significant in terms of the whole. Dickens’s art in that brief exchange between Little Dorrit and Clennam is making the same affirmation it makes in the tête-à-tête between Louisa and her father about Bounderby’s proposal of marriage. The affirmation is of life, which – this is the insistence – doesn’t belong to the quantitative order, can’t be averaged, gives no hold for statistics and can’t be weighed against money. Little Dorrit is profoundly modest and not a person of intellectual force, and Clennam, she knows, is good, so she defers to him; but she has seen – for her feeling is perception – that to acquiesce in the suggestion that life can be weighed against money is a sin against life. Not crime, but sin; it is a word one has to use, even though Dickens (Cockshut’s judgement) knows nothing about sanctity, and is charged with shallowness, or philistinism, in matters of religion.

‘Life’, it may be commented, is a large word. Certainly it is a word we can’t do without and unquestionably an important one, and the importance is of a nature that makes it obviously futile to try to define abstractly, by way of achieving precision, the force or value it has as I have just used it. We feel the futility the more intensely in that, as we consider Dickens’s art in Little Dorrit, we see very potently at work a process that it seems proper to call definition by creative means. There are other important words, so closely associated – as, prompted by Little Dorrit, we find we have to invoke them – with ‘life’ that we judge them to be equally unsusceptible of what is ordinarily meant by definition; and these we unmistakably see getting a potent definition in the concrete. And as, with reassuring effect, we inquire into the justification of this last phrase, we recognize  that what the prompted words in association portend gets its definition as the creative work builds up. Dickens’s essential ‘social criticism’, his inquest into Victorian civilization, is inseparable from this process. It is plain that neither the process (which is Dickens’s art) nor the significance has been, or can be, appreciated by critics, scholarly or otherwise, who can tell us – with forbearance and counter-concessions – that Dickens never grew up intellectually, and that there is no reason to suppose that he could have made much of Bentham.

The points I have made about the nature and significance of Little Dorrit can be enforced by illustration abundantly and in many ways, as any responsive reader will easily exemplify; for the book has the aboundingness and the inexhaustible subtlety of the greatest art. My obvious next move is to record some of the notes that one finds oneself jotting down, as one reads, regarding the criteria implicit in Dickens’s critique of civilized England. When one has noted the set of indicative, or focal, words one is prompted to seize on, the words to which I have just referred, and made the essential commentary on them, one has at the same time done a lot to explain the force of calling Little Dorrit an ‘affirmation of life’. But to say that is to point to the difficulty; the words are focal, and the aboundingness, whatever Henry James might have thought, was not redundant. So I must make it plain at once that there can be no neat and systematic exposition, and avow that I find the directness of approach I may have seemed to promise out of place.

I will start with some reflections on the character whose name gives the book its title. Little Dorrit, the heroine (if that is not too incongruous a word), has a large and very important part in the complex whole, and unmistakably represents human qualities on which Dickens sets a high value. Of her the first thing it seems natural to say is that she is good – which is not one of the ‘focal words’ in my own list. But if one says she is good it must be to add that she is utterly unlike Little Nell. I have found myself insisting on this obvious enough truth because, as I know from much arguing about Dickens, that people nowadays are apt to shy away from goodness as Little Dorrit evokes it, and, when challenged, to reply by associating her with Little Nell. They may have been shifted out of House’s kind of injustice, by which Dickens’s ‘social doctrine’ is reduced to a Cheeryble benevolence, but they still baulk at taking feminine goodness seriously.

Of course, to suggest taking Little Nell seriously would be absurd: there’s nothing there. She doesn’t derive from any perception of the real; she’s a contrived unreality, the function of which is to facilitate in the reader a gross and virtuous self-indulgence. But the Little Dorrit we know, if we read and see and respond, emerges for us out of the situation and the routine of daily life that produced her – I mean, conditioned just that manifestation of what she spontaneously was, in the living individuality that started its unfolding when she was born in the Marshalsea. Her genius is to be always beyond question genuine – real. She is indefectibly real, and the test of reality for the others. That is a proposition to which the dramatic poem gives the clearest meaning. The characteristic manifests itself in her power to be, for her father and brother and sister, the never-failing providence, the vital core of sincerity, the conscience, the courage of moral percipience, the saving realism, that preserves for them the necessary bare minimum of the real beneath the fantastic play of snobberies, pretences and self-deceptions that constitutes genteel life in the Marshalsea. It is done, not merely told us, with inexhaustible fullness, diversity and power.

Little Dorrit is unquestionable ‘there’ for us. Dickens’s creativity in achieving this is a matter of appealing to our experience. We recognize in her a profoundly important human possibility – one that has a normative bearing. There seems to me point in recalling here the parallel provided by James in his Maisie. I think of James because, having once suggested, with good reason, that the prompting to that masterpiece, What Maisie Knew, had been a memory of little David Copperfield’s situation in the Micawber household,5 it has struck me that Little Dorrit, a child and the family’s unfaltering stay, had certainly no less a part in the prompting. Incorruptibly innocent and sincere, what does she know – really know? To know would be to recognize and to judge: she judges and doesn’t judge. She understands enough to be infallible in response.

I mean with these three last sentences merely to justify my ‘parallel’: to think of elaborating a comparison between the two works would be absurd. James’s intention, perfectly executed, is, in the characteristic Jamesian way, strictly and narrowly limited, and his book is really a nouvelle. That the unrecognized memory could play so essential a part in the imaginative conception (my suggestion is a convinced one) can be seen as an implicit tribute to Dickens on James’s part, the recall of which is immediately very much in place. He translated the Little Dorrit situation, the poignant human truth and the irony of which had clearly made a deep impression on him, into terms of a social world (or, rather, stratum) he had observed closely – and with revulsion. In saying that James’s intention in his nouvelle is severely limiting (I put it this way now), I don’t mean merely that there are many more things in Dickens’s book than the ‘Little Dorrit situation’ that James responded to creatively. My point is (and in making it I challenge the Jamesian critical attitude towards Dickens) that that situation as Dickens presents it involves the whole of the book he called Little Dorrit, and can be appreciated for what it is only by those who are open to the force of that truth. James’s assured critical bent is that of the decidedly less great artist. – My concern is not to depreciate James, but to vindicate the genius of Dickens.

Immediately it is with the inquiry into ‘criteria’ and ‘values’ as it centres upon Little Dorrit herself. The affinity between her and Maisie is that they both so obviously prompt the characterizing notes, ‘ego-free love’, ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘innocence’. There is no compelling reason why the admirer of What Maisie Knew should feel that such notes ought to be developed further; he wouldn’t, in the nature of the case, be engaged in the kind of inquiry I have avowed as my own concern – an inquiry into the criteria implicit in a critique of a civilization. It is only as involved – through all kinds of personal relations, contacts and implicit cross-references – in that civilization that Little Dorrit exists to be studied as a focus of significance, and she is a very important one.

Dickens’s abundance, range and intense freedom are the conditions, not only of an inexhaustibly subtle relatedness,6 but of depth. I will pick up at this point the side-references I have thrown out to Blake. It has long seemed to me that there is the closest essential affinity between Dickens and the author of ‘London’. It was in relation to the question of ‘criteria’ and ‘values’ that the affinity was borne in on me: I found that in reading Dickens I was jotting down the same words and phrases as those prompted by Blake. As for the nature of the affinity, I will quote what I have written elsewhere.7

But, of course it will be asked: what influence can Blake, who was far from being a current author in his time and didn’t come in with the Romantic poets, be supposed to have had? A study of the evidence may some day be written showing that Blake, his poetry and his thought were well enough known to make him an ‘influence’ of certainly not less importance on the literature of the Victorian age than Wordsworth; for Little Dorrit, where the characteristics that make one think of Blake belong to the essential organic structure of the dramatic poem, is a much greater creative work than any in which Wordsworth may be seen as counting in a major way, and it is representative of the art that puts Dickens among the very greatest creative writers.

But I am not intending to commit myself to the belief that Dickens had read Blake. What is plain beyond question is that he was familiar with Wordsworth and with Romantic poetry in general, and that his interest and responsiveness were those of an originating genius who was equipped by nature to be himself a great poet. Further, a man of wonderfully quick intelligence, he mixed with the élite that shared the finest culture of the age and, when first frequented by him, was like himself pre-Victorian. One can say that his genius, entailing a completeness of interest in human life (Dickens was not ‘a solemn and unsexual man’), cities and civilization that it was Wordsworth’s genius not to have, spontaneously took those promptings of the complex romantic heritage which confirmed his response to early Victorian England; confirmed the intuitions and affirmations that, present organically in the structure and significance of Hard Times and Little Dorrit, make one think of Blake.

I have in mind, of course, the way in which the irrelevance of the Benthamite calculus is exposed; the insistence that life is spontaneous and creative, so that the appeal to self-interest as the essential motive is life-defeating; the vindication, in terms of childhood, of spontaneity, disinterestedness, love and wonder; and the significant place given to Art – a place entailing a conception of Art that is pure Blake.

In Hard Times, with its comparative simplicity as a damning critique of the hard ethos and the life-oppressing civilization, the identity of the affirmatives, or evoked and related manifestations of life and health and human normality, by which he condemns, with those of Blake is clear. Little Dorrit is immensely more complex, and offers something like a comprehensive report on Victorian England – what is life, what are the possibilities of life, in this society and civilization, and what could life, in a better society, be? To elicit the convinced assent to the proposition that here too the underlying structure of value-affirmations (implicit, spontaneous, inevitable) upon which the form and significance depend is Blakean, is not so easy. But the structure is there; for the book has organic form and essential economy; it is all significant.

– The entailed immediate emphasis for me is that, if one’s commentary is to be effective in the required way, one will be conscious of facing a challenge to one’s tactical skill. And, with ‘disinterestedness’, ‘ego-free love’ and Little Dorrit in mind, I think that my best move is to adduce Blake’s distinction between the ‘identity’ and the ‘selfhood’. ‘Identity’ is the word with which he insists, in the face of the ethos of ‘Locke and Newton’, that what matters is life, that only in the individual is life ‘there’, and that the individual is unique. With the distinction he insists also that the individual is a centre of responsibility towards something that is not him- (or her-)self. The distinction points to a basic truth – and not the less because there are perhaps difficulties in the way of seeing the distinction as absolute; a truth that is made to manifest itself concretely, its force brought home to us, by the great novelist’s art. In fact I know of no better way of developing an account of Blake’s thought than by turning, as I do now, to Little Dorrit, my theme being the thought – the insight and intelligence – of Dickens.

III

What Little Dorrit herself is as a person is established for us, i.e. ‘created’, by the dramatic interplay with others in which the narrative presents her; the significance we see in her is developed by a complex implicit play of contrasts and affinities that involves all the characters in the cast. Her great opposite is Mrs Clennam, the righteously unforgiving, who in the dénouement asks her forgiveness. Immediately after the confrontation with the blackmailing Rigaud,8 and its sequel, the nightmare passage through the streets to the Marshalsea, we are told of the proud tormented woman, as she waits for Little Dorrit to come to her:9 ‘She stood at the window, bewildered, looking down into the prison out of her own different prison, when a soft word or two of surprise made her start, and Little Dorrit stood before her’. Little Dorrit, it comes to her, is the offered – the sought – opening of escape, and she takes it. The prison out of which she looks is the selfhood: Urizen, one has found oneself calling it – as one had found oneself calling the other too. Having achieved, in appeal and confession, a measure of release from her solitary confinement, she rushes with Little Dorrit out of the Marshalsea, and arrives at the grim and stale old house just as it splits and crumbles in dust and thunder before their eyes and subsides into rubble.

Mrs Clennam too sank to the ground; from that hour she never recovered the ability ‘to lift a finger or speak a word’; ‘reclined in her wheeled chair … she lived and died a statue’. The mechanism of will, idea and ego had stopped; but, after the years during which the spontaneous upflow had been jealously and righteously excluded, there was nothing that could take over; only a sad ghost of identity for a while remained, wholly impotent. She couldn’t now, in the manner of those days of Urizenic domination, drive her wheeled chair with a thrust of her foot from one place to another in her enclosing room.10

The selfhood encloses; it insulates; the closure against the creative flow from below is at the same time a closure against surrounding lives and life. In Mrs Clennam and Miss Wade and Henry Gowan the identity has become the selfhood: the thing is achieved. The word ‘responsibility’ I used gives some clue to the way in which this happens – some clue to the nature and significance of the process. ‘Disinterestedness’, and ‘ego-free love’ are easily said; but the responsibility in question hasn’t – the effect of the whole complex work is to bring that out – its complete representation, its full comprehensive paradigm, in Little Dorrit, whose goodness is innocence. The presence of Daniel Doyce, who is both short and sharp about Henry Gowan, makes that plain. Doyces are rare, but what Doyce represents in so unqualified a way can’t be dispensed with. One learns, however, to expect, in general, varying degrees of qualification; the life-thwarting potentialities in the psyche being uneliminable and insidious. Doyce’s indefeasible ‘responsibility towards something other than himself’ entails, to be effective, his being strongly conscious of it. Such a consciousness can hardly not entail a sense of one’s identity’s being important; one’s identity is oneself, and, as the habit of this last word in free use intimates, the shift to a dominating sense of one’s unique and unshared selfhood as the important thing is insidiously easy.

Mrs Clennam’s Calvinistic religion enables her to transmute the service of her will – of her possessiveness, pride, jealousy, vengefulness and life-hatred – into the service of God, and this gives a poised, judicially stern and quasi-rational authority to her ruthless dominance:11 Urizen reigns. The essential nature of her disease is brought out by the simpler case of Miss Wade. Miss Wade has no need of disguised self-justification, and no need of God. In her, ‘identity’ is ‘selfhood’, completely, simply and without misgiving; as if, in fact, she were God, a jealous and vengeful one, and blameless. She had no Little Dorrit on whom to appease a suppressed need of tenderness and an unavowed qualm of conscience. Her righteousness is wholly a sense of being wronged (i.e. sinned against). And she has been wronged, how irremediably, the state expressed with mechanical invariableness in her behaviour manifests; she has been wronged by Victorian civilization, being a victim of the Victorian attitude towards illegitimacy12 – the attitude as experienced by the sex which was the more exposed to its cruellest consequences: she needs to be wronged in order to keep up the intensity of her resentment, the passion which for her is life.

To us the whole process presents itself as a hysterical mechanism – a mechanism which in fact is madness, and this is what she describes in the curriculum vitae she hands to Clennam13 in order to convince him of the hopelessness of his quest. Her need to be wronged is a need to dominate – to be uniquely real, unconditioned and absolute; and driven by it she destroys, she herself being the victim who can’t escape. She doesn’t rescue Tattycoram in order to make her happy; she doesn’t want to make herself happy – essentially she is destructive. This it didn’t take Tattycoram long to discover – or, rather, she had felt the lethal fascination at the first contact, and knew at once that the fascination was fear: restored to Twickenham, she confesses that.

No one would call Henry Gowan mad, but it is not for nothing that Miss Wade, in her compte rendu of herself, records that he was the first person who understood her, and that he understood her at once. He knew at a glance what her resentful pride meant, because his own pride was of a kind that could express itself only in resentment, his resentment being not less destructive, but more subtly so, than hers. His pleasure is to disconcert, and he uses his gentlemanly aplomb and his skill, which is constantly in practice, to that end. An extended example of the trait and of the gratuitousness of its manifestation is his part in the conversation at the supper-table of the Great Saint Bernard convent14 (Book the Second, chapter I). This incidental descriptive sentence sufficiently characterizes it: ‘There was enough of mocking inconsistency at the bottom of this speech to make it rather discordant, though the manner was refined and the person well-favoured, and though the depreciatory part of it was so skilfully thrown off, as to be very difficult for those not perfectly acquainted with the English language to understand, or, even understanding, to take offence at: so simple and dispassionate was its tone.’ But if he hadn’t known that the peculiar offensiveness would be felt for what it was, there would have been no point in the adroitness. Nevertheless, the inconsistency was not calculated; it expresses something in his basic condition.

We are told of this formidably proud man that he has ‘no belief in anyone, because he had no belief in himself’. His insistent consciousness of superiority is an underlying consciousness of nullity; the stultifying contradiction, sensed if not recognized, makes him sinister in his all-round destructiveness; he feels that if he doesn’t assert, as something that doesn’t need asserting, his intrinsic superiority – the ‘reality’ of which is the recognition it gets – he is nothing. His case is given in Blandois’ formula: ‘He is more than an artist; he is well-connected.’ His Barnacle kin have earned his resentment by not jobbing him into a well-salaried sinecure (the claim on the country that is a Barnacle’s right), and he has had, defiantly, to fall back on ‘being an artist’. He treats them, when they come up for mention, in his destructively equivocal way, but nevertheless cherishes with challenging intensity – born a Frenchman he would have been an addicted duellist – the superiority which is nothing but a matter of being ‘one of them’ (‘one of us’, of course, in direct speech).

Brought a commission to paint Mr William Dorrit’s portrait, he insults Blandois, the insultable kept-friend who brings it; ‘for he resented patronage almost as much as he resented the want of it’. Next day, he pays a call on the gentleman.

Mr Dorrit then mentioned his proposal. ‘Sir,’ said Gowan, laughing, after receiving it gracefully enough, ‘I am new to the trade, and not expert in its mysteries. I believe I ought to look at you in various lights, tell you you are a capital subject, and consider when I shall be sufficiently disengaged to devote myself with the necessary enthusiasm to the fine picture I mean to make of you. I assure you,’ and he laughed again, ‘I feel quite a traitor in the camp of those dear, gifted, noble fellows, my brother artists, by not doing the hocus-pocus better. But I have not been brought up to it, and it’s too late to learn it. Now, the fact is, I am a very bad painter, but not much worse than the generality. If you are going to throw away a hundred guineas or so, I am as poor as a poor relation of great people usually is, and I shall be very much obliged to you, if you’ll throw your money away upon me. I’ll do the best I can for the money; and if the best should be bad, why even then, you may probably have a bad picture with a small name to it, instead of a bad picture with a large name to it.’

This tone, though not what he had expected, on the whole suited Mr Dorrit remarkably well. It showed that the gentleman, highly connected, and not a mere workman, would be under an obligation to him.

The mocking inconsistency that imposes itself as ironic poise is an aggressively dominating mode of Mrs General’s ‘surface’, with its proscription of ‘wonder’, ‘opinions’ (i.e. convictions), and reality. Gowan practises this mode, the implicit intention and force of which are destructive, because, knowing deep down that he doesn’t know what, if anything, is real in himself, he is determined to eliminate all possible tests of reality: the reality of the self he prefers not to recognize for what it is had better, for others (and himself too), remain a brilliant and disconcerting equivocation. His essential nihilism, profoundly personal, and at the same time highly significant for Dickens’s ‘social criticism’, has a poignant manifestation in the upshot, for the Meagleses, of the sacrifice of their Pet.

By this time, Mr Gowan had made up his mind that it would be agreeable to him not to know the Meagleses … he mentioned to Mr Meagles that personally they did not appear to him to get on together, and that he thought it would be a good thing if – politely, without any scene, or anything of that sort – they agreed that they were the best fellows in the world, but were best apart. Poor Mr Meagles, who was already sensible that he did not advance his daughter’s happiness by being constantly slighted in her presence, said, ‘Good, Henry! You are my Pet’s husband; you have displaced me, in the course of nature: if you wish it, good!’ This arrangement involved the contingent advantage, which perhaps Henry Gowan had not foreseen, that both Mr and Mrs Meagles were more liberal than before to their daughter, when their communication was only with her and her young child; and that his high spirit found itself better provided with money, without being under the degrading necessity of knowing whence it came.15

If it is necessary to drive home the point that ‘essential nihilism’ is not a rhetorical emphasis but a cool judicial constatation, a passage offers itself from the exchange (Book the First, chapter XXVI) in which Gowan tells Clennam: ‘You are genuine also’.

‘By Jove, he is the finest creature?’ said Gowan. ‘So fresh, so green, trusts in such wonderful things!’

Here was one of the many little rough points that had a tendency to grate on Clennam’s hearing. He put it aside by merely repeating that he had a high regard for Mr Doyce.

‘He is charming! To see him mooning along to that time of life, laying down nothing by the way and picking up nothing by the way, is delightful! It warms a man. So unspoilt, so simple, such a good soul! Upon my life, Mr Clennam, one feels desperately worldly and wicked in comparison with such an innocent creature. I speak for myself, let me add, without including you. You are genuine also.’

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Clennam: ill at ease; ‘you are too, I hope?’

‘So so,’ rejoined the other. ‘To be candid with you, tolerably. I am not a great impostor. Buy one of my pictures, and I assure you, in confidence, that it is not worth the money. Buy one of another man’s – any great professor who beats me hollow – and the chances are that the more you give him, the more he’ll impose upon you. They all do it.’

‘All painters?’

‘Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he’ll impose upon you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds – to a corresponding extent; ten thousand – to a corresponding extent. So great the success, so great the imposition. But what a capital world it is!’ cried Gowan, with warm enthusiasm. ‘What a jolly, excellent, lovable world it is!’

‘I had rather thought,’ said Clennam, ‘that the principle you mention was chiefly acted on by –’

‘By the Barnacles?’ interrupted Gowan, laughing.

‘By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the Circumlocution Office.’

‘Ah! Don’t be hard upon the Barnacles,’ said Gowan, laughing afresh, ‘they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of the family is the most agreeable and the most endearing blockhead! And by Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too, that would astonish you!’

‘It would. Very much,’ said Clennam, drily.

‘And after all,’ cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of his which reduced everything in the wide world to the same light weight, ‘though I can’t deny that the Circumlocution Office may ultimately shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will probably not be in our time – and it’s a school for gentlemen.’

We see here, neatly exemplified in these juxtaposed passages, how Dickens’s analysis, presented in what is so distinctively a novelist’s art, becomes ‘social criticism’; or, to put it another way, how inseparable, in his art, the two are. William Dorrit, we note, not for the first time, but, as we read the episode of the portrait commission, with sharpened realization of what is involved, sacrifices life and reality to nullities – does it blindly, and with an unction of righteousness, in his set will to vindicate his dignity, his gentlemanly status, his ‘position’. He does it, we comment now, in what is at bottom essentially Gowan’s way; his resentments have the same significance as Gowan’s, and he is as incapable of happiness. And he is committed to supporting, with all the power of influence and suggestion he may have, the civilization, the world of privilege, and the cultural ethos that breed the Gowans, the Mrs Generals, the Chief Butlers and Mr Merdle. The difference is that William Dorrit has (it is largely a further indebtedness to Amy) a claim on our sympathy, and we see him in any case as a victim; whereas Gowan, strongly individualized as a formidable person and a militant parasite (his partnership with the bully Blandois defines a trait of his own), consciously means to be the disconcerter and destroyer. His highly articulate utterances make that plain, and make plain also, in a less conscious way, his representative significance, so that, as a dramatic character among the others, he gives something like explicit formulation – he certainly prompts explicitness in us – to the spirit he represents. Thus he plays a major part in relation to Dickens’s design to make a packed Dickensian novel a critique of English civilization.

It is obvious that he has a contrasting opposite in Little Dorrit, who, in the Marshalsea, is the centre, the test, and the generator of reality. Nevertheless, she isn’t the full answer to Gowan’s challenge – for it’s as a challenge, provoking and enforcing Dickens’s full positive answer, that Gowan has his presence in the book (which he pervades, as Little Dorrit herself, Mrs Clennam and the Marshalsea do). It is not for nothing that the arch-nihilist is made to present himself as an artist, and that the characteristic Gowan demonstrations (I may call them) that I have just adduced make his hatred of the real artist and of art, his implicit denial that art has any importance in civilization, overt and explicit. Here again we have the affinity between Dickens and Blake – unmistakably a natural and essential affinity. Dickens lays the same kind of emphasis on the creative nature of life as Blake does, and insists in the same way that there is a continuity from the inescapable creativeness of perception to the disciplined imaginative creativeness of the skilled artist, and that where art doesn’t thrive or enjoy the intelligent esteem due to it the civilization is sick. Little Dorrit, whom I have called a contrasting opposite to Gowan the nihilist, is not only not an artist; she hasn’t the makings of an artist in her. It is in being – being what she is – that she is creative.

Like the other key characters, she stands in a relation of contrast to more than one of the dramatis personae; but her antithesis above all is Mrs Clennam, whose value-significance is more complex and more comprehensive than Gowan’s. (We have by now, I suggest, these words noted down as bearing on the theme of ‘criteria’: reality, courage, disinterestedness, truth, spontaneity, creativeness – life.) When we compare Little Dorrit, as we naturally do, with Sissy Jupe, we see the significance of Sissy’s relation to the Horse-riding. Little Dorrit’s goodness and disinterestedness go with a modesty that is withdrawingness, and it is wonderful how Dickens conveys this without presenting them as anything but positive – creative with the essential creativity of life. Their effect on Clennam (a part of whose role it is to be virtually the reader’s immediate presence in the book) is given in the nosegay he finds by his tea-cup on waking from a fevered doze, he lying ill in the Marshalsea, the prison of this world (Book the Second, chapter XXIV). He has had an insistent dream-sense of a garden:

– a garden of flowers, with a damp warm wind gently stirring their scents. It required such a painful effort to lift his head for the purpose of inquiring into anything, that the impression appeared to have become quite an old and importunate one when he looked round. Beside the tea-cup on his table he saw, then, a blooming nosegay: a wonderful handful of the choicest and most lovely flowers.

Nothing had ever appeared so beautiful in his sight. He took them up and inhaled their fragrances, and he lifted them to his hot head, and he put them down and opened his parched hands to them, as cold hands are opened to receive the cheering of a fire.16

IV

But in Little Dorrit herself the disinterestedness of life – disinterested, and so implicitly creative, in being not ego-bound and not slave to a mechanism – hasn’t that overt relation with the developed creativity of art which Dickens so clearly intended in Sissy. Where, then, in the book have we the clear recognition-challenging emphasis on the creative nature of life (the large word I may now, perhaps, give the right focal force to by adding, ‘the spontaneous, the disinterested, the ego-free, the reality-creating’)? Is there any better answer than to point to Henry Gowan, the poised and drifting waster of the Best Families who, being unprovided for by his Barnacle kin, is ‘being an artist’17 – to point to him as evoking by negation Dickens’s positive conception of the artist and of art? Yes, there is Daniel Doyce. It is eloquent both of the impersonality of Dickens when creatively engaged and of the unconventional first-handness and fullness of his conception of art that, in his greatest work, he should have conveyed most explicitly his proud consciousness of the creative function by making its special representative an inventor. Dickens, we know – if we take it on the authority of Lord Snow (both a bicultural sage and a novelist), was a ‘natural Luddite’. Nevertheless, the significance of Doyce is plain and undeniable. Dickens, in fact, insists on it; Doyce’s distinctive function is to be it. Even when we consider his part in the plot, of which we might be tempted for a moment to say that an inventor as such wasn’t necessary to it, we see that what he essentially does, by being the person Dickens made him, is to bring the becalmed and debilitated Clennam into touch with strong and intransigent creativity.

Talking with him (Part the First, chapter XVI), Clennam is struck by the force of that disinterestedness in him which is the reverse of indifference, being commitment and resolution and undeflectable courage, though not at all of the order of ego-assertive will, but its antithesis. When, having heard of the obstructing Circumlocution Office, Clennam suggests that it’s a pity Doyce ever entered into so hopeless a battle and had better give it up, Doyce, ‘shaking his head with a thoughtful smile’, replies that ‘a man can’t do it’:

‘You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it.18 Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.’

‘This is to say,’ said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet companion, ‘you are not finally discouraged even now?’

‘I have no right to be, if I am,’ returned the other. ‘The thing is as true as ever it was.’

It is the quiet unassertive impersonality of his conviction that especially impresses Clennam. Of the effect on him of Doyce’s manner on a later occasion we are told:

He had the power, often to be found in union with such a character, of explaining what he himself perceived, and meant, with the direct force and distinctness with which it struck his own mind. His manner of demonstration was so orderly and neat and simple, that it was not easy to mistake him. There was something almost ludicrous in the complete irreconcilability of a vague conventional notion that he must be a visionary man, with the precise, sagacious travelling of his eye and thumb over the plans, their patient stoppages at particular points, their careful returns to other points whence little channels of explanation had to be traced up, and his steady manner of making everything good and everything sound, at each important stage, before taking his hearer on a line’s-breadth further. His dismissal of himself from his description was hardly less remarkable. He never said, I discovered this adaptation or invented that combination; but showed the whole thing as if the Divine artificer had made it, and he had happened to find it. So modest he was about it, such a pleasant touch of respect was mingled with his quiet admiration of it, and so calmly convinced he was that it was established on irrefragable laws.

Dickens himself was neither an inventor nor a scientist, but he understood that kind of conviction from the inside: he was a great artist, and familiar with the compelling impersonal authority of the real (and not the less for knowing so well that there is no grasp of the real that is not creative). It is not for nothing that Doyce is the severest critic of Henry Gowan, and that the first criticism recorded of that gentleman is what Doyce says in reply to Clennam’s questioning:

‘An artist, I infer from what he says?’

‘A sort of one,’ said Daniel Doyce in a surly tone.

‘What sort of one?’ asked Clennam, with a smile.

‘Why, he has sauntered into the Arts at a leisurely Pall Mall pace,’ said Doyce, ‘and I doubt if they care to be taken so easily.’

On Doyce, that judgment invites implicit recognition from us which is stated (Part the Second, chapter XXV) about Physician: ‘where he was, something real was’. With intrinsic fitness he, with Clennam, becomes patron and employer of Cavalletto, the light-hearted, warmhearted and spontaneous little Italian who surprises Bleeding Heart Yard by his ability to sit down and be happy, though poor. We note that Doyce, Clennam, Pancks and Bleeding Heart Yard are all drawn to him.

But Doyce, all said, is not an artist. Cavalletto carves things in wood, but that hardly makes him, either, an artist in a sense that licenses us to set him, as an actual creative presence in the book, over against Gowan, the anti-artist and arch-nihilist. The fact is that if a novelist sees reason for having among his characters an artist whose raison d’être is to be an artist all he can do is to introduce someone of whom we are told that he is an artist, and show him behaving in a way that seems to make the allegation plausible. Dickens’s conception of art and its importance was too serious, profound and intelligent to let him think such a solution worth resorting to. Doyce, however, doesn’t represent all that is done in Little Dorrit to make creativity-as-the-artist an actual presence – a potent presence in relation to which Gowan takes on his full value.

Dickens is a different kind of creative writer from both James and Tolstoy, neither of whom could have produced Flora Casby. The relevance of bringing in Flora at this point is given here, as it might be in a passage quoted from any one of her characteristic dramatic appearances – and they are all characteristic:

Flora, uttering these words in a deep voice, enjoyed herself immensely.

‘To paint,’ said she, ‘the emotions of that morning when all was marble within and Mr F’s Aunt followed in a glass-coach which it stands to reason must have been in shameful repair, or it never could have broken down two streets from the house and Mr F’s Aunt brought home like the fifth of November in a rush-bottomed chair I will not attempt, suffice it to say that the hollow form of breakfast took place in the dining-room downstairs that papa partaking too freely of pickled salmon was ill for weeks and that Mr F and myself went upon a continental tour to Calais where people fought for us on the pier until they separated us though not for ever that was not yet to be.’

The statue bride, hardly pausing for breath, went on, with the greatest complacency, in a rambling manner, sometimes incident to flesh and blood.

‘I will draw a veil over that dreamy life, Mr F was in good spirits his appetite was good he liked the cookery he considered the wine weak but palatable and all was well, we returned to the immediate neighbourhood of Number Thirty Little Gosling Street London Docks and settled down, ere we had yet fully detected the housemaid in selling the feathers out of the spare bed Gout flying upwards soared with Mr F to another sphere.’

His relict, with a glance at his portrait, shook her head and wiped her eyes.

‘I revere the memory of Mr F as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint-bottle it was not ecstasy but it was comfort, I returned to papa’s roof and lived secluded if not happy during some years until one day papa came smoothly blundering in and said that Arthur Clennam awaited me below, I went below and found him ask me not what I found him except that he was still unmarried still unchanged.’

Flora obviously enjoys herself (as we are told she does) in these astonishing expressive flights. It is obvious too that Dickens enjoys them, and takes delight in imagining Flora; and what is in fact astonishing is the ease and fertility with which he conceives her copious unpredictabilities, which, with all their leaps, poetic compressions and feats of imaginative linkage and substitution, are essentially sequential and coherent. It is important, however, not to convey a false implication in thus imputing enjoyment to Dickens. The enjoyment here is not different in kind from that which we may properly see in all his creating. Flora, that is, is not a piece of gratuitous ‘Dickensian’ exuberance; she has a major value in relation to Dickens’s comprehensive design, and needs, for a full appreciation, to be seen as part of a whole finely nerved organism.

She is talking, in the quoted passage, to Little Dorrit, towards whom from the outset she shows a warm-hearted sympathy. She has indeed a great deal in common with the ‘dear little thing’ – the differences serving, among other things, to emphasize that fact. She is disinterested, spontaneous and good-natured and – for all her addiction to romantic self-dramatization – ‘real’, with a robust basic reality that her addiction sets off. She is as incapable of snobbery as Little Dorrit herself, a truth that, with an innocent unconsciousness, she demonstrates in the interview she achieves with the embarrassed William Dorrit Esquire in his London hotel – giving proof in the whole episode of the kind of courage that doesn’t recognize itself as courage (Part the Second, chapter XVII). Though we are told that ‘when she worked herself into full mermaid condition, she did actually believe whatever she said in it’, we are also told, correctively, that she ‘had a decided tendency to be always honest when she gave herself time to think about it’. And, talking with Little Dorrit in the pie-shop at the end of the book (Part the Second, chapter XXXIV), she ‘earnestly begs’ her ‘to let Arthur understand that I don’t know after all whether it wasn’t all nonsense between us though pleasant at the time’. The ‘full mermaid condition’ is much in the nature of the condition produced by her other indulgence, brandy. But it mustn’t be suggested that her adventurous expressive flights are nothing but romantic irresponsibilities of self-indulgence. They are also poetic in a strong way, and register, in their imaginative freedom and energy, much vivid perception and an artist’s grasp of the real. Thus, correcting Mr Dorrit’s impression that the Clennam of Clennam & Co. must be Arthur, she replies: ‘It’s a very different person indeed, with no limbs and wheels instead and the grimmest of women though his mother.’

Mr Dorrit looked as if he must immediately be driven out of his mind by this account. Neither was it rendered more favourable to sanity by Flora’s dashing into a rapid analysis of Mr Flintwinch’s cravat, and describing him, without the lightest boundary line of separation between his identity and Mrs Clennam’s, as a rusty screw in gaiters.

The reader, however, sees the felicity. And when, in the passage I have quoted above from Flora’s unbosoming eloquence to Little Dorrit, we arrive at ‘until one day papa came smoothly blundering in’ we note how perfectly that gives us the Patriarch. Responding appreciatively to these felicities of creative utterance – and they abound – we can’t help being conscious, to the point of full and explicit recognition, that the genius here, in these inspired improvisations, is Dickens’s own. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t take the flights as Flora, and Flora as a person who is ‘there’ beyond all possible doubt.

There are other characters in Little Dorrit who invite the description ‘Dickensian’ – the adjective used in this way implying that they so little fall within the expectation suggested by the word ‘realism’ that they could occur only in a context boldly or licentiously unrealistic. It will be sufficient for my purpose to adduce Pancks.

Pancks, who may reasonably be thought of as a stylized Dickensian figure of comedy, associates easily in personal intercourse, not only with Flora, but with Little Dorrit herself and with Clennam who, tending to be very largely the reader’s own presence in the imagined drama, is for us at the centre of realistic ‘normality’. His significance, half-detected by Clennam in the abrupt factual dryness (is it sardonic?), as creative life imprisoned in the tyrannical mechanisms of a business civilization, is brought out by contrast with Cavalletto.

The foreigner … – they called him Mr Baptist in the Yard – was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow, that his attraction to Pancks was probably the force of contrast. Solitary, weak, and scantily acquainted with the most necessary words in the only language in which he could communicate with the people about him, he went with the stream of his fortunes, in a way that was new in those parts.19

This is Pancks:

‘Yes, I have always some of ’em to look up, or something to look after. But I like business,’ said Pancks, getting on a little faster. ‘What’s a man made for?’

‘For nothing else?’ said Clennam.

Pancks put the counter question, ‘What else?’ It packed up, in the smallest compass, a weight that had rested on Clennam’s life; and he made no answer.

‘That’s what I ask our weekly tenants,’ said Pancks. ‘Some of ’em will pull long faces to me, and say, Poor as you see us, master, we’re always grinding, drudging, toiling, every minute we’re awake. I say to them, What else are you made for? It shuts them up. They haven’t a word to answer. What else are you made for? That clinches it.’

‘Ah dear, dear, dear!’ sighed Clennam.20

Pancks’s briskness is that of a nippy steam-tug (he ‘docks’ in the office of Casby’s house), snorting about mechanically on his ‘proprietor’s’ business. ‘You oughtn’t to be anybody’s proprietor, Mr Clennam’, he remarks. ‘You’re much too delicate.’ The signs of vital energy, converted by repression into dangerous potentiality, are there, however, in insistent traits:

His little black eyes sparkled electrically. His very hair seemed to sparkle as he roughened it. He was in that highly-charged state that one might have expected to draw sparks and snaps from him by presenting a knuckle to any part of his figure.21

The great eruptive discharge takes place in the scene (Book the Second, chapter XXXII), towards the end of the book, that has its climax in the cropping, with Pancks’s suddenly drawn scissors, of the Patriarch’s venerable locks, the shearing-off of the broad hat-brim, and the replanting of the lopped crown on the now unpatriarchal head. But what I want to emphasize in order to bring out the point of proceeding in this way from Flora Casby to Mr Pancks is the nature of the eloquence with which Pancks accompanies his dramatic demonstrations. This excerpt from the sustained and abundantly felicitous episode will suffice for my purpose:

Mr Pancks and the Patriarch were instantly the centre of a press, all eyes and ears; windows were thrown open, and doorsteps were thronged.

‘What do you pretend to be?’ said Mr Pancks. ‘What’s your moral game? What do you go in for? Benevolence, ain’t it? YOU benevolent!’ Here Mr Pancks, apparently without the intention of hitting him, but merely to relieve his mind and expend his superfluous power in wholesome exercise, aimed a blow at the bumpy head, which the bumpy head ducked to avoid. This singular performance was repeated, to the ever-increasing admiration of the spectators, at the end of every succeeding article of Mr Pancks’s oration.

‘I have discharged myself from your service,’ said Pancks, ‘that I may tell you what you are. You’re one of a lot of impostors that are the worst lot of all the lots that are to be met with. Speaking as a sufferer by both, I don’t know that I wouldn’t as soon have the Merdle lot as your lot. You’re a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, a squeezer, and a shaver by substitute. You’re a philanthropic sneak. You’re a shabby deceiver!’

(The repetition of the performance at this point was received with a burst of laughter.)

‘Ask these good people who’s the hard man here. They’ll tell you Pancks, I believe.’

This was confirmed by cries of ‘Certainly’, and ‘Hear!’

‘But I tell you, good people – Casby! This mound of meekness, this lump of love, this bottle-green smiler, this is your driver!’ said Pancks. ‘If you want to see the man who would flay you alive – here he is! Don’t look for him in me, at thirty shillings a week, but look for him in Casby, at I don’t know how much a year!’

‘Good!’ cried several voices. ‘Hear Mr Pancks!’

‘Hear Mr Pancks?’ cried that gentleman (after repeating the popular performance). ‘Yes, I should think so! It’s almost time to hear Mr Pancks. Mr Pancks has come down into the Yard tonight, on purpose that you should hear him. Pancks is only the Works, but here’s the Winder.’

The audience would have gone over to Mr Pancks, as one man, woman, and child, but for the long, grey, silken locks, and the broad-brimmed hat.

‘Here’s the Stop,’ said Pancks, ‘that’s the man that sets the tune to be ground. And there’s but one tune, and its name is Grind, Grind, Grind! Here’s the Proprietor, and here’s his Grubber. Why, good people, when he comes smoothly spinning through the Yard tonight, like a slow-going benevolent Humming-Top …’

Dramatic utterance of that kind couldn’t (nor, of course, could the accompanying kind of action) be contained in a novel by Tolstoy any more than in one by James. And as of Flora’s, so of Pancks’s, we can say that he enjoys his creative flights and felicities, adding that so, again, does Dickens. And, again, to say this is not to pass, or to suggest, an adverse criticism on the novelist.

When we have in this way taken conscious note of the one case after the other we realize that the presence of Dickens they represent can be pointed to in numberless manifestations; diverse, but continuous in the sense that they belong to, they have their part in building up, a unity of effect. We take them, whether or not in full consciousness, not only in characters, but in the vivid energy of descriptions and the evocations of décor and atmosphere (as, for instance, of the Alps, Italy, Rome, Boulogne and London – to suggest the diversity and range of function and expressive value). In short, we see that we are not playing with a fanciful idea but recording a critical observation of major critical importance when we say that, opposing and placing Henry Gowan, the real artist is present in Little Dorrit – concretely present. He is present, the only way he could be, as Dickens himself, the creative Dickens. It is a presence potently enough felt, and at the same time impersonal enough, to perform perfectly its function in the organic whole. It is a success that is conditioned by the astonishing flexibility of Dickens’s art – its supple sureness in combining modes and conventions that might well have seemed irreconcilable.

What I have been pointing to is an emphasis (so to speak) in the total creativity of the book – it is apparent for instance when Little Dorrit is brought into close relation with Flora; an emphasis that prompts us to the recognition that Little Dorrit, though she may be the heroine, doesn’t represent the whole of Dickens’s answer to Henry Gowan, and, further, that her marriage with Arthur Clennam, though (solving the personal problem of each) it may be right and happy, is neither a romantically exalted ‘happy ending’, nor a triumphant upshot of the inquiry, the complex intensity of questioning, that the book so largely is. Dickens is neither a romantic optimist nor a pessimist (a proposition that holds of Blake too). And it isn’t that Little Dorrit is being criticized when we are moved to wish that she weren’t so docile to Mrs General. Dickens doesn’t simplify (nor does Blake). His human concern, being profound, is inescapably a concern with society and civilization, and, in face of Mrs General, Henry Gowan, Gowan’s mother, the Patriarch, the Barnacles and Merdle, he insists that qualities and energies not represented by Little Dorrit are indispensable too.

Nevertheless, there is no infelicity in the book’s being called by her name. She is at its centre, and the subtlety, delicacy and penetration with which Dickens conveys her distinctive paradoxical strength are, though not what ‘Dickensian’ commonly suggests, profoundly characteristic of his genius. In the painful scene after the rejection of young Chivery, her father’s line being to suggest, with a mastery of inexplicitness and of non-recognition in himself of what he means, that, in aid of the process by which (though a prisoner) he has succeeded heroically in preserving his self-respect as a gentleman, she should keep young John on a string, she gives us a representative instance of the way in which, by force of a complete and unquestionable disinterestedness, she can bring her father to the point of glimpsing from time to time the reality of what he is – and in so doing make him for us something of a tragic figure. Disinterestedness in her is goodness and love; she differs from Sissy in that, while manifested in scenes of this kind as a decisive presence, she can’t be called a challenging one – there are no dark hair and eyes and lustrous gleams (these in Little Dorrit belong to Tattycoram). Yet her decisiveness, with its peculiar quality, leaves us in no doubt, it is brought so potently home to us.

Of course, the art in general of Little Dorrit is more complex in its subtlety than that of Hard Times: the large book is not merely larger; it offers something in its point-to-point treatment of life that doesn’t go and couldn’t, with moral-fable economy, the scale and abundance of the work being necessary to the distinctive preoccupation with significance and to the accompanying local pregnancy. This truth is illustrated by the way in which the episode (Book the First, chapter XIX) I have referred to – and it is relevant to note that, without any effect of mere repetition, there have already been a number of the kind – comes in the whole generously charged and delicately modulated chapter that contains it. For a just critical consideration one has to re-read the whole chapter.

It gives us first the two brothers, William urging the broken Frederick22 to profit by the model in front of him:

The Father of the Marshalsea said, with a shrug of modest self-depreciation, ‘Oh! You might be like me, my dear Frederick; you might be, if you chose!’ and forbore, in the magnanimity of his strength, to press his fallen brother further.

William Dorrit’s possession of his role is complete, and magnificently confident. It carries him over the jar of the elder Chivery’s surliness, which he meets by turning an enhanced sublimity of patronizing solicitude on Frederick.

‘Be so kind as to keep the door open a moment, Chivery, that I may see him go along the passage and down the steps. Take care, Frederick! (He is very infirm.) Mind the steps! (He is so very absent.) Be careful how you cross, Frederick! (I really don’t like the notion of his wandering at large, he is so extremely liable to be run over.)’

With these words, and with a face expressive of many uneasy doubts and much anxious guardianship, he turned his regards upon the assembled company in the Lodge: so plainly indicating that his brother was to be pitied for not being under lock and key, that an opinion to that effect went round among the Collegians assembled.

But he did not receive it with unqualified assent; on the contrary, he said, ‘No, gentlemen, no; let them not misunderstand him.’

And he proceeds to deliver his homily on the rare union of qualities needed by the man who shall be able to support existence and maintain his self-respect as a gentleman in the Marshalsea.

Was his beloved brother Frederick that man? No. They saw him, even, as it was, crushed. Misfortune crushed him. He had not power of recoil enough, not elasticity enough, to be a long time in such a place, and yet preserve his self-respect and feel conscious that he was a gentleman. Frederick had not (if he might use the expression) Power enough to see in any little attentions and – and – Testimonials that he might under such circumstances receive, the goodness of human nature, the fine spirit animating the Collegians as a community, and at the same time no degradation to himself, and no depreciation of his claims as a gentleman. Gentlemen, God bless you!

If the boldness of the stylization as seen in extracts might prompt one to recall that Dickens had much frequented Ben Jonson, one would never, reading currently through the whole page, think of finding a descriptive felicity in ‘Jonsonian’ for this art, which is so sensitively supple over so unlimited a human range. Indeed, reading through the whole chapter, one isn’t prompted to talk of stylization: the nature of Dickens’s marvellous freedom suggests too much, in the exquisite vital sensitiveness that we see the boldness to be, the analogy of Shakespeare, and there are in fact the strongest reasons for calling the art of the great Dickens Shakespearian. This is the emphasis one might very well resort to if called on to justify the observation that Dickens is not only a different kind of genius from James, but a genius of a greater kind. The creative life in him flows more freely and fully from the deep sources – the depth, the freedom and the fullness being the conditions of the Shakespearian suppleness.

I refer in this comparative way to James because there is good reason for insisting that Dickens is certainly no less a master than James of the subtleties of the inner life – the inner drama of the individual life in its relations with others. The vivid external drama in the chapter under consideration (Book the First, chapter XIX) has its meaning in the inner drama, which is so largely a matter of the essentially inexplicit; or, rather, the inner drama is conveyed, with an inevitable felicity of supple shifts, in terms of the external. William Dorrit’s public demonstration of his heroically sustained role of Gentleman modulates into the domestic scene with his daughter.

Her arm was on his shoulder, but she did not look into his face while he spoke. Bending her head, she looked another way.

‘I – hem! – can’t think, Amy, what has given Chivery offence. He is generally so – so very attentive and respectful. And to-night he was quite – quite short with me. Other people there too. Why, good Heaven! if I was to lose the support of Chivery and his brother officers, I might starve to death here.’ While he spoke, he was opening and shutting his hands like valves; so conscious all the time of that touch of shame that he shrunk before his own knowledge of his meaning.

‘I – ha! – I can’t think what it’s owing to. I am sure I can’t imagine what the cause of it is. There was a certain Jackson here once, a turnkey of the name of Jackson (I don’t think you remember him, my dear, you were very young) and – hem! – and he had a – brother and this – young brother paid his addresses to – at least, but did not go as far as to pay his addresses to – but admired – respectfully admired – the – not the daughter, the sister – of one of us; a rather distinguished Collegian; I may say, very much so. His name was Captain Martin; and he consulted me on the question whether it was necessary that his daughter – sister – should hazard offending the turnkey’s brother by being too – ha! – too plain with the other brother – Captain Martin was a gentleman and a man of honour, and I put it to him – first to give me his – his own opinion. Captain Martin (highly respected in the army) then unhesitatingly said, that it appeared to him that his – hem! – sister was not called upon to understand the young man too distinctly, and that she might lead him on – I am doubtful whether lead him on was Captain Martin’s exact expression: indeed I think he said tolerate him – on his father’s – I should say brother’s – account. I hardly know how I strayed into this story. I suppose it has been through being unable to account for Chivery; but as to the connection between the two, I don’t see –’

His voice died away, as if she could not bear the pain of hearing him, and her hand crept to his lips. For a little while, there was a dead silence and stillness, and she remained with her arm round his neck, and her head bowed down upon his shoulder.

She says nothing, turns no dark eyes upon him, but merely by continuing to be what unselfconsciously she is, brings him to a halt and an unwilling self-realization – self-realization, though tainted and fleeting. It is utterly convincing; by the close acquaintance we have been given with her, she exists for us in a way that makes it so.

… he began his meal. They did not, as yet, look at one another. By little and little he began; laying down his knife and fork with a noise, takings things up sharply, biting at his bread as if he were offended with it, and in other similar ways showing that he was out of sorts. At length he pushed his plate from him, and spoke aloud. With the strangest inconsistency.

‘What does it matter whether I eat or starve? What does it matter whether such a blighted life as mine comes to an end, now, next week, or next year? What am I worth to anyone? A poor prisoner, fed on alms and broken victuals; a squalid and disgraced wretch!’

‘Father, father!’

Where shall we find an art like this? It is astonishingly original, the art of a great poet who is essentially a novelist. We can see that without a familiarity with the theatre of the time Dickens couldn’t have given William Dorrit, the Gentleman, that speech at the prison lodge, but we feel nothing infelicitously theatrical about it. And in noting that the convention Dickens actually uses is that of reported oratory we perceive at the same time what a manifestation of triumphant tact his use of it is. It makes what might otherwise have seemed too challengingly exaggerated in its absurdity, too stagey (for William Dorrit is essentially an actor here, playing the role he has cast himself for in the play, the histrionic unreality he has made of his life in the Marshalsea), wholly acceptable. Dickens in fact improvises, in a way characteristic of his art, his own convention, and does so with a perfect rightness. Our response as to a painfully disturbing actuality of life retains its full power; we don’t lose our embarrassed and apprehensive sense of the emotional and moral crisis – the poignant affair of John Chivery immediately present to us in the background.

The domestic sequel, the intimate scene between father and daughter, issues with a complete naturalness out of all that has gone before, and it is horrible and tragic. The father (Father of the Marshalsea) is committed to his role with an alcoholic’s irredeemableness; he can’t face life apart from it. But, without support from her, which in this matter it is impossible for her to give – a fact that there’s no saving him from having to admit to himself, he can’t sustain it. The fostered unrealities collapse; for a terrible moment of humiliation he can’t help seeing things as they are – what his daughter is, what he himself is, and what are their relations.

How is it possible not to recognize in the deviser of such an art, an art serving with such boldness, penetration and delicacy such an insight into the human soul, one of the very greatest of those dramatic poets whose genius has gone into the novel? The particular human situation presented in the chapter is of course central to Little Dorrit, and it appears recurrently in closely analogous forms, such recurrence with variation being necessarily entailed in the undertaking and the designed total effect. For another major instance, a comparable scene in which the painful comedy of the heroically preserved gentleman-status has for upshot a collapse into something like abject self-recognition, one can point to that which ensues on the Father’s encountering old Nandy (‘one of my pensioners’) being escorted into the Marshalsea on Little Dorrit’s arm (Book the First, chapter XXXI). The irony of the Chivery episode has a further development when Mr Dorrit, no longer the Father of the Marshalsea but impeccably and opulently a gentleman on tour, and rejoicing in Fanny’s marriage to Edmund Sparkler, a step-son of the great Merdle, torments poor Amy with the insistent and confident admonition that it is now her turn, her duty, to make an equally good marriage.

‘Amy,’ he resumed; ‘your dear sister, our Fanny, has contracted – ha hum – a marriage, eminently calculated to extend the basis of our – ha – connection, and to – hum – consolidate our social relations. My love, I trust that the time is not far distant when some – ha – eligible partner may be found for you.’

‘Oh no! Let me stay with you. I beg and pray that I may stay with you! I want nothing but to stay and take care of you!’

She said it like one in sudden alarm.

‘Nay, Amy, Amy, Amy,’ said Mr Dorrit. ‘This is weak and foolish, weak and foolish. You have a – ha – responsibility imposed on you by your position. It is to develop that position, and be – hum – worthy of that position. As to taking care of me; I can – ha – take care of myself. Or,’ he added after a moment, ‘if I should need to be taken care of, I – hum – can, with the – ha – blessing of Providence, be taken care of. I – ha – hum – I cannot, my dear child, think of engrossing, and – ha – as it were, sacrificing you.’

Reinstated in wealth and position, the Dorrit family in Italy not only don’t need the practical and material services so long taken for granted; they can afford – as they desire – never to be reminded of the real: they are securely in and of Society, which is personified for us in Mrs General – form, surface and emptiness; Papa, potatoes, prunes and prisms. Mrs General (who may be counted on not to decline Mr Dorrit’s imminent proposal) is a companion figure to Mr Gradgrind; they represent complementary ‘social’ ways of emptying the reality out of life – to note which is to recall the significance of Mr James Harthouse’s part in Hard Times.

But for Little Dorrit there is no challenge she can offer to meet dramatically with the counter-challenge: that kind of demonstration is not what life has cast her for. Deprived of her raison d’être, slighted, disciplined and neglected, she finds the beautiful and squalid world around her unreal in its strangeness, and looks back to the real reality left behind in the Marshalsea – a reality created among those familiar unrealities by love, spontaneity and habitual service of life:

the more surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls, the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a faltering horse would have been disastrous, the descent into Italy, the opening of that beautiful land, as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment – all a dream – only the old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was shaken to its foundations when she imagined it without her father. She could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just as she well knew it to be. With a remembrance of her father’s old life hanging about her like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a dream of her birthplace into a whole day’s dream. The painted room in which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace, would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vineleaves overhanging the glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window, a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing magnificence with the strength of fate … Then breakfast in another painted chamber, damp-stained and of desolate proportions; and then the departure, which, to her timidity and sense of not being grand enough for her place in the ceremonies, was always an uneasy thing.

V

Dickens, as in the chapter from which that comes (Book the Second, chapter III), can evoke scene and setting through long passages on successive pages, while relying with an easy confidence on a sustained attention from the reader – an attention as inevitably given as if what was being presented were a gripping narrative of events. For this evocative power that Dickens so abundantly commands is a different thing from what we admire, perhaps, in Ruskinian poetic prose (and Dickens, employing it, shows himself in an obvious way a greater poet than any of the Victorian formal poets). It is not merely that the effects in which it manifests itself present so vitally nervous a diversity; in considering this livingness we can’t but observe that it belongs to an art that doesn’t go in for set descriptions – products of a talent that we can think of as something additional to the gift that makes Dickens a great novelist. Dickens’s evocations are always a novelist’s; they are doing the novelist’s essential work.

In the chapter I have been quoting from they give us in poignant immediacy – give us as an experienced or suffered state – the peculiar loneliness and hunger of Little Dorrit’s situation; and the insistence, or free-flowing abundance (never felt as longueur), is necessary to the effect, so important an element in the total communicated significance of the novel. The family proceed towards Venice:

So they would be driven madly through the narrow unsavoury streets, and jerked out at the town gate. Among the day’s unrealities would be, roads where the bright red vines were looped and garlanded together on trees for many miles; woods of olives; white villages and towns on hill-sides, lovely without, but frightful with their dirt and poverty within; crosses by the way; deep blue lakes with fairy islands and clustering boats with awnings of bright colours and sails of beautiful form; vast piles of buildings mouldering to dust; hanging-gardens where the weeds had grown so strong that their stems, like wedges driven home, had split the arch and rent the wall; stone-terraced lanes, with the lizards running into and out of every chink; beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque, hungry, merry children-beggars and aged beggars. Often at posting-houses, and other halting-places, these miserable creatures would appear the only realities of the day …

In the evocation of Venice we get the obsessive sense that troubles the poor girl settling into a nostalgic hopelessness of enchantment:

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the death-like stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, sat alone to muse.

To the potency of this mode of the Dickensian genius George Eliot and Henry James after her, pay a tribute the more telling because unconscious (James at a remove, for he clearly derives through her). I am thinking of the passage in chapter 20 of Middlemarch that evokes, in terms of the effect on her of Rome, the state of fevered despair to which marriage with Casaubon has so soon brought Dorothea, and the unmistakably related passage in The Portrait of a Lady that gives us the disillusioned Isabel. To be sure of the derivative relation to Dickens one has only to recall Little Dorrit looking round at the grandeur and strangeness and squalor of the immemorial city. I will quote two sentences.

The family has moved on to Rome:

Through a repetition of the former Italian scenes, growing more dirty and more haggard as they went on, and bringing them to where the very air was diseased, they passed to their destination. A fine residence had been taken for them on the Corso, and there they took up their abode, in a city where everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else – except the water, which, following eternal laws, tumbled and rolled from its glorious multitude of fountains. (Part the Second, chapter VII.)

The peculiar poetic genius comes out here with cogent felicity in what, for a close, follows the ‘except’, evoking as ‘eternal laws’ the spontaneity and power of life – triumphant gloriously even in the eternal city; no, not triumphant as they ought to be (for the metaphorical potency of that close is complex). This, we say (perceiving as we say it that the Dickensian vitality of the whole passage is involved) is essential Dickens: neither George Eliot nor James is a great poet in this sense – the sense in which we find the description felicitous and potent when we acclaim this kind of effect as intensely characteristic of the writer’s genius. For George Eliot, of course, as for us, the whole preceding evocation of Little Dorrit’s state of malign enchantment makes its power felt in what we take as her response to Rome. Hence the profound impression associated in particular with Rome that George Eliot recalls unwittingly in her derivative passage.

But the nature of the distinctive genius as represented by the kind of poetic life I have called attention to is not fully recognized if we don’t, in considering the passage last quoted, note the tone, manner and burden of the paragraph into which, illustrating one manifestation of what I have called Dickens’s flexibility, it leads (the flexibility being something that has for its accompaniment pregnancy – manifestations, these, of the author’s wholeness and profundity of possession by his human theme). What follows immediately is this:

Here, it seemed to Little Dorrit that a change came over the Marshalsea spirit of their society, and that Prunes and Prisms got the upper hand. Everybody was walking about St Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody else’s sieve. Nobody said what anything was, but everybody said what Mrs General, Mr Eustace, or somebody else said it was. The whole body of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr Eustace and his attendants to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that sacred priesthood. Through the rugged remains of temples and tombs and palaces and senate halls and theatres and amphitheatres of ancient days, hosts of tongue-tied and blindfolded moderns were carefully feeling their way, incessantly repeating Prunes and Prisms, in the endeavour to set their lips according to the received form. Mrs General was in her pure element. Nobody had an opinion. There was a formation of surface going on around her on an amazing scale, and it had not a flaw of courage or honest free speech in it.

Reality, courage, disinterestedness, truth, spontaneity, creativeness – and, summing them, life: these words, further charged with definitive value, make the appropriate marginal comment. Little Dorrit, whose desolate sense of the unreality is what we have been sharing, is the focal presence of what they stand for. But she is beaten. For her – a profound irony – the real is what, at her father’s liberation, she left behind in the Marshalsea. The point implicitly made (the book makes it in many ways) is that reality is a collaborative creation: Little Dorrit, in ‘chartered’, mean and gloomy London, had found collaboration in the responsive human needs of her father and his other children, and in the human good-nature of the turnkeys, the Collegians and Flora – even of Mrs Clennam. But in Italy she is wholly denied it; her love for her father is reduced to expressing itself in docility to Mrs General, the arch-unreality. He, on the other hand (for Dickens’s irony is pregnant) has not left the Marshalsea behind; in this genteel world of collusive unreality the old familiar Marshalsea is the concealed reality – a menacing fact, ever-present in apprehension and suspicion.

Reality for him is what has to be feared. The Marshalsea he now, as a courier-respected gentleman, inhabits in Italy (and, when he goes there, in London) is the collusive unreality of the genteel world. It too is a collaborative creation. The novel gives us a richly diverse view of the creating and maintaining. Here again we have the subtlety of Dickens’s insight into the human psyche. Little Dorrit, like anyone else, needs collaboration in creating the reality she can grasp – more comprehensively, the reality she can implicitly believe herself to be, and that which she can feel with assurance she lives in. Her father too, as he exemplifies – with effects of both comedy and pathos – every day, can’t get on without collaboration: without it he couldn’t have maintained the unreality he inhabited as a gentleman in the Marshalsea (the prison that also protected – as he recognized in declining the turnkey’s offer to let him step outside into the street for a glimpse of the world.) It was a system of countenanced empty pretensions. But so is that in which he proudly takes his place when he is liberated into Society; the ‘real’ unreality is equally unreal, and, in his own way, equally a prison. It is unreal in a way symbolized by the authority of Mrs General, who is concerned for nothing but a conventionally approved kind of surface. Members, by observing a given code, are enabled to feel that their claims to be genteel, correct and of the ‘right people’ are recognized by the others who observe the code and are recognized; the recognition – a matter of externals (or ‘surface’) – is everything. The system of authoritative conventions that makes this Society possible is itself a perverse product of creative collaboration, collaborative creativity being so essentially in and of the human psyche that it must, one way or another, have play.

A Henry Gowan, whose social distinction is a matter of being recognized as most unquestionably one of the socially distinguished – one of the born and guaranteed élite, can rely on the system to give him his status and support him in it, in spite of the quasi-Bohemian habit he affects and his deliberately disconcerting articulateness (he doesn’t, of course, threaten anything that matters much to Mrs General or the Chief Butler).

Here we have the aspect of the system that particularly prompts the use of the word ‘snobbery’ – a word the implications of which are brought out when we say, as we might have done, that we can’t do clinical justice to Tattycoram without giving full weight to the benevolent British obtuseness of Mr Meagles, the retired banker, who is, as Dickens is not, a Philistine, placed as such by Dickens, and a snob as well.

No one has surpassed Dickens in the treatment of Victorian snobbery – indeed, has anyone approached him? He is clear-sighted about the social realities it portends; he sees that the successful banker’s amiable weakness represents a major political fact, and may be said to give us the effective condition of the continued unchallenged power of the Barnacles – whose Circumlocution Office, even if we don’t accept it as exhaustively representative of the way the country was administered, conveys so unanswerably what we know to have been a large measure of the essential truth. The Gowans are a branch of the Barnacle clan, so Mr Meagles, though he would have saved his daughter from Henry Gowan if he could, gets immense satisfaction from the wedding.23 The irony of the situation is developed in the comedy – painful, but still comedy, marvellous in its perfection – of the various dialogues in which Mrs Gowan imposes on Clennam, the Meagleses and the world her version of the marriage, which makes Henry the victim of designing bourgeois climbers, Pet’s good looks being the bait.

These things exhibit a consummate art that is very characteristic of Dickens’s genius. In the rendering of manners at the social level at which they are the essential art of living, to be practised with the assurance only a conscious state of initiation can give, Dickens is certainly not a lesser master than Henry James. The dialogue, along with the rest of the notation, in the scenes of ‘highly civilized’ intercourse I have referred to is perfect (and it comes from the creator of Flora Finching). In those scenes, of course, Mrs Gowan is the assured practitioner – the exploiter – of ‘civilization’, and Clennam and Meagles are the practised upon; the genius of the greater novelist comes out in the way the comedy is made painful for us by the quite uncomic significances that our deep sympathies respond to: we protest, in fact – the human issues are too important for us to be anything but partisan.

Fanny, in accepting the brainless Edmund Sparkler, does so as belonging with accomplished and single-minded assurance to that ‘civilization’, having, on the Dorrit re-emergence into Society, achieved her unquestioned position with exemplary completeness. Her ability to do so was achieved in the Marshalsea: it is the product of her upbringing, and her father can see in her the reward and vindication of his resolute stand for ‘self-respect’.24 The subtle perfection with which Dickens does her is seen in the way in which, enjoying the comedy of her unfailing success in holding her own socially, we never forget that she is the pupil of the Marshalsea and the sister of Little Dorrit, so that her value even in these scenes is felt as more than satiric. She provides, in fact, ‘one more illustration of what, associating it with pregnancy and depth, I have called flexibility, meaning the ease with which his art moves between different tones and modes. We can’t but regard her with a marked lack of sympathy, our applause being only for her spirit and skill in the heartless comedy of manners in which she triumphs; but at the same time she belongs as essentially to the sombre theme of the Marshalsea, the long drama of human disaster with its disturbing and monitory significance, as Little Dorrit and the rest of the family do.

And this is the moment to note a preoccupation of Dickens’s that has its part in the normative impulsion and the essential positive nisus, without which his inquest into civilization in England would be something other than the great creative work it is. The ‘civilization’ with which Fanny, the reverse of disabled by her Marshalsea education, triumphantly identifies herself is that in terms of which Henry Gowan, so unambiguously ‘more than an artist’, is beyond question a gentleman. But the word ‘gentleman’ as used consciously by Dickens in pursuit of his artist’s purpose of exploration and definition has a number of different values, the relations between which clearly seem to him a matter of great interest. Ferdinand, the pleasant young Barnacle, is a kinsman of Henry Gowan’s and a member of the same privileged class. In applying the word to him, however, we find ourselves, at the prompting of Dickens’s art, doing it in this way: ‘Ferdinand is charming, genuinely kind, and, in short, a gentleman.’ At the Circumlocution Office, where the Barnacles in general make no attempt to disguise their lack of any decent human consideration, and show not the least concern for manners, Ferdinand, with urbane friendliness, tries to dissuade Clennam from the futility of pursuing his inquiries.

This kind of thing, it will be commented, merely exemplifies the role that Ferdinand, who identifies himself happily with the system that maintains him, plays in it; plays in that whole complex organism of pretence, pretension, privilege, parasitic class-interest and ‘civilization’ – the whole social malady – that Dickens is exposing. And certainly Ferdinand’s charm, in Dickens’s sense of it as in Clennam’s, is a matter for exasperation and diagnostic comment: we remember as characteristic the part played by Ferdinand on the occasion of the Merdle dinner in finally bringing together for a tête-à-tête – the end for which the dinner was arranged – Lord Decimus and the great Merdle (Book the Second, chapter XII). Ferdinand has charm, urbanity and tact, and here Dickens shows them functioning. Before the culminating achievement – this we remember too – they have been shown functioning in the same spirit, but to an effect that eliminates all possibility of amusement or complaisance in the reader.

‘Pray,’ asked Lord Decimus, casting his eyes around the table, ‘what is this story I have heard of a gentleman long confined in a debtor’s prison, proving to be of a wealthy family, and having come into the inheritance of a large sum of money? I have met with a variety of allusions to it. Do you know anything of it, Ferdinand?’

‘I only know this much,’ said Ferdinand, ‘that he has given the Department with which I have the honour to be associated’; this sparkling young Barnacle threw off the phrase sportively, as who should say, we know all about these forms of speech, but we must keep it up, we must keep the game alive; ‘no end of trouble, and has put us into innumerable fixes.’

And he gives an account of the characteristic ritual of incompetence, incuria and obstruction, protracted in complete indifference to any decent human consideration, and holding up the discharge of the Dorrit debt and Mr Dorrit’s release from prison for months, that makes ‘charm’ and ‘urbanity’, for the reader, exceedingly unpleasant words.

‘It was a triumph of public business,’ said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily. ‘You never saw such a lot of forms in your life.’

He exhibits himself, in short, as the voice of the Barnacle caste, and utterly devoid of imaginative sympathy.

We mustn’t, however, simplify. The visit that Clennam in the Marshalsea receives from Ferdinand doesn’t come altogether under this account. The elegant gentleman riding up and dismounting is immediately recognized as unmistakably a gentleman at the Lodge and by the prisoners. But ‘gentleman’ shifts its value when, defining the effect on us of the scene in Clennam’s room, we say that it shows Ferdinand as charming, genuinely kind, and in short ‘a gentleman’. The effect itself isn’t a simple one. He makes the ‘confession of his faith as the head of the rising Barnacles who were born of woman’ – ‘A little humbug and a groove, and everything goes on admirably, if you leave it alone’ (a faith ‘to be followed under a variety of watchwords which they utterly repudiated and disbelieved’), and ‘Nothing could be more agreeable than his frank and courteous bearing, or adapted with a more gentlemanly instinct to the circumstances of his visit.’

It is a faith, or ‘civilized’ philosophy, that no one to whom the questions about life and civilization preoccupying Dickens matter can have failed to meet with and to hate. And that Dickens expresses here the strong feeling with which the ‘social criticism’ he conveys in the Barnacles and Gowans and their Merdle is charged is quite clear. Yet we remind ourselves – or are not allowed to forget – that Ferdinand’s visit is kind. And the favourable element in our response, an essentially evaluative one, is confirmed and enforced by the contrast with the immediately succeeding visitor, Blandois, who proclaims himself with characteristic gratuitousness ‘a gentleman from the beginning and a gentleman to the end’. The contrast prompts us with the implicit judgement that Ferdinand has not only external good breeding, but, associated with it, something that distinguishes him radically from Henry Gowan, the gentlemanly ‘friend’ of the blackguard to whom, in calling him a blackguard, we deny the name of gentleman in any sense. If anyone should comment that the element of genuineness in Ferdinand merely adds to his plausibility, qualifying him to represent an essential constituent of the Barnacle system, and serving to make the noxious ethos of the Circumlocution Office seem amiable, Dickens’s art prompts us with a reply: it won’t do simply to see Ferdinand as linked back with Lord Decimus and the Gowans, ignoring the significance of his being drawn, as he unmistakably is, towards Clennam, to whom he goes out of his way to be kind. The significance lies in the implicit recognition on the part of so limited a representative of good breeding that Clennam himself is a gentleman – Clennam in whom good breeding, apparent in his bearing and manners, expresses and engages (as even Ferdinand in his way perceives) something deep within that repudiates the Barnacle philosophy.

I am insisting, then, that ‘gentleman’ means something important here, and that Dickens – his art is witness – values very highly certain social and cultural achievements it portends. No one more unequivocally than he has placed snobbery and the stupidities and cruelties of class-pride (‘exclusiveness’), but he has the reverse of contempt for civilization manifested as manners – manners that in their refined form come under ‘politeness’; he knows that they may be, in what they entail or engage, more than a mere matter of external social grace or aplomb – Mrs General’s ‘form’ and ‘surface’. He simplifies no questions and doesn’t suggest that there can be any simple answers, and the ways in which he uses the word ‘gentleman’ in Little Dorrit, the range of his related uses (on one occasion, where in our period remoteness we a little flinch, he tells us that John Chivery showed the feelings of a gentleman), would repay study. By way of enforcing this suggestion, I will remark that in the world of (say) Kingsley Amis no one is a gentleman; the idea, whether as represented by Henry Gowan, Ferdinand, Clennam or John Chivery, is unknown – and the word has no use.

Before I proceed to justify the observation that Dickens clearly means us to judge Clennam a gentleman par excellence, I will slip in a point raised by the mention of Ferdinand. He belongs to the Circumlocution Office. Whether or not the Circumlocution Office conveys an altogether fair criticism of Government and bureaucracy at the time of the Crimean War doesn’t matter. Life always has to be defended, vindicated and asserted against Government, bureaucracy and organization – against society in that sense. The defence and assertion are above all the business of the artist, which is never what those who think that the ‘responsibility of the writer’ is something he can be instructed in suppose.

I have observed that Ferdinand’s taking to Clennam is a recognition that Clennam, though so demonstratively not of the ruling caste, but an offence to it, is a gentleman: in doing so Ferdinand, for all his unquestioning identity with the odious world of privilege and snobbery to which he belongs, implicitly recognizes that the ‘civilization’ of manners seems somehow to entail, at any rate for him, something more than Henry Gowan’s assured superiority and easy social competence do for Henry Gowan. Dickens knew, in bringing in such an episode, what significances constituted its point, and I won’t offer to develop them further in general terms. Ferdinand likes what we and Daniel Doyce like in Clennam, in whom the external ‘civilization’ that qualifies him to be dealt with as a gentleman by Mrs Gowan expresses and engages (to his disadvantage in dealing with her, a given kind of lady) sensitiveness, modesty and sympathetic tact.25 That is, it expresses and engages the qualities that enable him to be the intimate and wholly acceptable friend to Doyce that, with all his bourgeois geniality and good-nature, the obtuse and patronizing Meagles can’t be.

These are the qualities that, when it comes to coping with Flora, put Clennam at the disadvantage that has those decidedly comic aspects – as, for example, when, having contrived that she should be shown round the dark old Clennam house so familiar to them in childhood, she makes the escorting Arthur clasp her with his arm beneath her shawl. The whole comedy of Flora tends too much to be thought of as a self-justifying spontaneity of the Dickensian genius – a kind of creative largesse. It is comedy, and of a lively kind; but it doesn’t follow that the comedy hasn’t its part to play in a total significance. I have already pointed to ways in which Flora tells in the essential communication of the book. And it can now be observed with some force that a corrective emphasis is conveyed by the piquant contrast she presents with Clennam. Flora is decidedly not a lady in the sense that Clennam is a gentleman; but her exuberantly ungenteel characteristics don’t blind us – the contrary – to her robust and warm good-nature and the uninhibited completeness with which she has the courage of it. In fact, in her superbly innocent spontaneity she is the great anti-snob; she is qualified to be that as Clennam obviously isn’t.26 And her creative vitality brings home to us the way in which Clennam’s virtues, necessary as they are, don’t represent all that is necessary – I mean, in relation to the criteria of Dickens’s evaluative inquiry, which was initiated in the opening of Little Dorrit by the presentation of the repatriated Clennam’s own predicament; criteria that are sought, elicited, and brought to conscious recognition (that is, determined) in the course of the inquiry itself.

VI

I have referred to the way in which in the sufficiently dramatic poetry of Flora’s discourses we feel the presence of Dickens the creative genius himself. We know it to be impossible that any utterance of Clennam’s should affect us in that way. This certainty, however, doesn’t entail the conclusion that Dickens the poet, the incomparable Victorian master of poetic expression, is therefore debarred from having any direct part in the processes that make Clennam present to us. Consider the following – Blandois, belonging as he does to the melodramatic side of Little Dorrit, has melted into thin air, and the problem for Dickens (it might indeed have presented itself to him as one) is to make us feel in immediacy that the prolonged and unexplained disappearance does profoundly trouble Clennam, so that he is obsessed by it:

It was in vain that he tried to control his attention, by directing it to any business occupation or train of thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold to no other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat on a clear deep river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water flowed past him, to see the body of the fellow-creature he had drowned lying at the bottom, immovable and unchangeable, except as the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting, its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of, and that he could not fly from…. It was like the oppression of a dream, to believe that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father’s memory …

It is a developed formal simile, but a simile that has the swift directness of effect of the most spontaneous metaphor.

To take a different kind of manifestation of the same poetic gift, this is dramatic speech at a moment of crisis:

Mrs Clennam stood still for an instant, at the height of her rapid haste, saying in stern amazement:

‘Kept here? She has been dead a score of years or more. Ask Flintwinch – ask him. They can both tell you that she died when Arthur went abroad.’

‘So much the worse,’ said Affery with a shiver, ‘for she haunts the house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping dust so softly? Who else comes, and goes, and marks the walls with long crooked touches, when we are all abed? Who else holds the door sometimes? But don’t go out – don’t go out! Mistress, you’ll die in the street!’

Affery resumes here, with the attendant uncanny reverberations and feelings and apprehensions, the warning signs (as they turn out to be) that portend the collapse of the house. Our acquaintance with that shored-up structure, the inmates and the inner gloom –

At the heart of it his mother presided, inflexible of face, indomitable of will, and austerely opposing herself to the great final secret of all life.

– is associated with these disturbing monitions, coming to us in the force of Dickens’s prose with the immediacy of actual sensations, and having in terms of the symbolic significance a charging effect (the symbolism works as immediately as metaphor) that there is no need to enlarge upon.

There had been nothing like this poetic power of the great novelist’s prose since Shakespeare’s blank verse. A power that has of its nature such diverse manifestations forbids any offer to do it justice by assembling examples. It is a condition – this is my point at the moment – of the flexibility of Dickens’s art; of his ability to bring together in the service of one complex communication such a diversity of tones and modes. I will allow myself one more illustration.

Mr Merdle, making an apparently bored and pointless call on the Sparklers, borrows, as he gets up to go, a pen-knife:

‘Tortoise-shell?’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes, I think I should prefer tortoise-shell.’

Edmund accordingly received instructions to open the tortoise-shell box, and give Mr Merdle the tortoise-shell knife. On his doing so, his wife said to the master-spirit, graciously:

‘I will forgive you, if you ink it!’

‘I’ll undertake not to ink it,’ said Mr Merdle.

The illustrious visitor then put out his coat-cuff, and for a moment entombed Mrs Sparkler’s hand: wrist, bracelet, and all. Where his own hand shrunk to was not made manifest, but it was as remote from Mrs Sparkler’s sense of touch as if he had been a highly meritorious Chelsea Veteran or Greenwich Pensioner. Thoroughly convinced, as he went out of the room, that it was the longest day that ever did come to an end at last, and that there was never a woman, not wholly devoid of personal attractions, so worn out by idiotic and lumpish people, Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed by several devils.

Merdle, the stolid, coarse and commonplace, is actually going to the warm-baths to sever his jugular vein. For the victorious and bored Fanny, who – pure untroubled selfhood – is Little Dorrit’s antithesis, he has no real existence, indebted to him as she is (having captured his stepson) for her existence in the highest stratum of Society. And he is an essential nullity. But the empty, credulous and conscienceless self-interest (which serves nothing real) of Society has made him a force for evil, in working which he has achieved disaster for himself. The significance of what Fanny sees is for us – who see both what she sees and her. That the last sentence of the passage portends something sinister and disastrous we know without reflecting. And Fanny is one among the multitude to whom the great financier’s suicide will announce ruin.

It is time to say something about the aspect of Victorian civilization that Merdle stands for, the part he plays in Dickens’s critique, and the bearing it has on the essential communication of Little Dorrit. The Merdle ethos is significantly different from the Calvinistic commercialism of the decaying Clennam house The financier has no touch of Calvinism; he is cultivated by the best people, lives in a fashionable quarter, and has as much access to the most exclusive drawing-rooms and dining-tables as he cares to enjoy. But, for reasons that come out in an acid exchange with his wife (Book the First, chapter XXXIII), there is for him very little enjoyment. I quote from that exchange, however, with my eye primarily on the theme of nothingness, which presses itself on us yet again as we contemplate the nature of his relations with Society.

Merdle – Dickens, it seems relevant to remark, was familiar with demotic French – acquired the freedom of Society when the widowed Mrs Sparkler became Mrs Merdle. She, in what we take as a representative tête-à-tête, tells him that he is unfit for Society, and that there is a positive vulgarity in carrying his affairs about with him as he does.

‘How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?’ asked Mr Merdle.

‘How do you carry them about?’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Look at yourself in the glass.’

Mr Merdle involuntarily raised his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?

‘You have a physician,’ said Mrs Merdle.

‘He does me no good,’ said Mr Merdle.

Mrs Merdle changed her ground.

‘Besides,’ said she, ‘your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.’

‘Mrs Merdle,’ returned her husband, ‘I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.’

Society itself – Mrs Merdle – couldn’t quarrel with this summary, which answers to the implicit contract between itself and Merdle. The comment on it is the wonderful chapter (Book the Second, chapter XXV) that ensues on Fanny’s loan of the tortoise-shell penknife. There is a dinner at Physician’s, attended by the most illustrious company; and no one – not even his wife – is troubled by the fact that there is a vacancy in the place at table where Merdle should have been. The only difference the absence makes is that the guests are freer to whisper their questions and speculations about the honour – a peerage? – that is going to be conferred on the great public benefactor.

The guests depart, Physician hands Mrs Merdle to her carriage, sends (characteristically) the servants to bed, and settles down to read in his study. A ring of the door-bell takes him down to the door, and the upshot is that he hurries round to the warm baths.

There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features. A skylight had been opened to release the steam with which the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed into waterdrops, heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but, the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the bottom of the bath was veined a dreadful red. On the ledge at the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife–soiled, but not with ink.

Physician doesn’t question that it’s his duty to break the news to Merdle’s wife. He hurries round to Wimpole Street, and after much rousing of flunkeys succeeds in getting the Chief Butler summoned.

At last that noble creature came into the dining-room in a flannel gown and list shoes, but with his cravat on, and a Chief Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician had opened the shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see the light.

‘Mrs Merdle’s maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle up, and prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful news to break to her.’

Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle in his hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached the window with dignity, looking on at Physician’s news exactly as he had looked on at the dinners in that very room.

‘Mr Merdle is dead.’

‘I should wish,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘to give a month’s notice.’

‘Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.’

‘Sir,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘that is very unpleasant to the feelings of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice, and I should wish to leave immediately.’

‘If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?’

The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words. ‘Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on Mr Merdle’s part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can send to you, or any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what you would wish to be done?’

The Chief Butler is not a less apt representative of Society than Mrs General. The difference between his attitude to Merdle and Mrs Merdle’s is that he is less directly involved in the contract, and not at all involved in the discomfort caused by the suicide. He took the post for the wages; he was appointed to maintain the standards of civilization; he has done so to perfection and is doing so in his reply to Physician.

The episode of the Chief Butler might properly be called satiric in its irony. Actually it is horrifying, and we are not permitted the detachment that ‘satiric’ tends to suggest. The whole chapter engages us profoundly and the dominant tone is tragic. It is not for nothing that the presiding, and (for us) determining, consciousness in the chapter is Physician’s, of whom we are told – and feel: ‘Where he was, something real was.’ In fact, the inclusive mode in which Dickens has composed the chapter is one that engages the full profound sense of reality generated in us by what has gone before in the book. We don’t, then, take pleasure of any kind in constating the Chief Butler’s utter human indifference – his nullity of the pure unqualified selfhood. What we do take in, and take in with horror, is the revealed nothingness of both terms of the Merdle contract – ‘manner’ and ‘money’. With horror, because Merdle’s death is a real death, and figures for us in immediacy (whether we say so to ourselves or not) the disaster brought upon innumerable real lives by the collusive perversity that created him – a collaborative illusion, but an illusion hiding realities fraught with destruction. So what we are made to contemplate is not only little Paul Dombey’s question (which is more than a question): ‘What can money do?’ We have the disturbing demonstration, under the head of ‘money’, of realities that, lightly treated, may vindicate themselves grimly at the expense of Society itself.

We may feel that we needn’t worry about Society (though the complex Dorrit situation, with its sensitive filaments, puts difficulties in the way of making more than a fleeting satisfaction of that response). But the Dickensian genius leaves us vividly realizing that the red-stained bath signals a large human disaster for society with a small s, entailing real and immeasurable human suffering.

The chapter containing Mrs Merdle’s arch aplomb in the face of questions about her husband’s imminent honour and the Chief Butler’s classical replies to Physician ends with this:

So, the talk, lashed louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and by edition after edition of the evening papers, settled into such a roar when night came, as might have brought one to believe that a solitary watcher on the gallery above the Dome of St Paul’s would have perceived the night air to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with every form of execration.

For, by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle’s complaint had been, simply, Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men’s feasts, the roc’s egg of great ladies’ assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgments within ten or fifteen years, at the most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their work to testify for them, during two centuries at least – he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared – was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.

It is impossible to discuss Amy Dorrit as disinterestedness (and the creative nisus that placed her at the centre of Little Dorrit is intrinsically normative) without being brought to an explicit recognition that the disinterested individual life, the creative identity, is of its nature a responsibility towards what can’t be possessed. As Daniel Doyce knows, and testifies in the utterance I have quoted,27 the creative originality in him, though it entails resolution and sustained effort, isn’t his: he is the focus and devoted agent. And I will permit myself here to quote once again from that place in the opening of The Rainbow which I have found frequently an apt locus classicus – the place where we are told of Tom Brangwen that ‘he knew he did not belong to himself’.

The implicit insistence is everywhere in Little Dorrit. The rise, in such a distinctively resuming and concentrating chapter as I have been adducing, to the close I have quoted is not a mere exhibition of accomplished rhetoric on the part of a practised popular writer. The reference to St Paul’s is not just convention. It invokes institutional religion, of course, but not in the spirit of satiric irony. The institutional is invoked as representing something more than institution; as representing a reality of the spirit, a testimony, a reality of experience, that, although it is a reality of the individual experience or not one at all, is more than merely personal. That the appeal is to the living cultural heritage which has its life here and now, and is kept living as a language is, becomes manifest as we move through that last paragraph of the chapter to the end. The inherited totality of the values, the promptings, the intuitions of basic, human need, that both ‘manner’ and ‘money’, in their lethal way, have no use for – that is what is being evoked. The reader who really reads Dickens will hardly feel that there is anything of rhetorical indelicacy in the overtly associating reference to the New Testament theme. The effect of it is to emphasize how essentially the spiritual, in what no one could fail to recognize as a religious sense, is involved in the whole evocation. How Dickens would have replied to theologically Christian questioning who can say? And who would think that, in the context of the present discussion, there could be much point in speculating? The value of Dickens’s vindication of the spirit lies in its being a great artist’s – as Blake’s is; and that kind of vindication has a peculiar importance for us today.

VII

The implicit insistence I have spoken of is what those who talk of Dickens’s bourgeois and unspiritual conventionality clearly miss – though it is inseparable from what makes him major. It takes many forms. We can point to it again and again in his prose. The astonishing life of language that characterizes his work – the infinitely varied power of his prose, and its vividness of imaginative evocation – manifests itself in ways that anyone would call poetic in those passages which evoke décor. But of course it is never any more mere evocation of décor than what we have in the opening of Hamlet is that. Consider the arrival of the Dorrit family at the convent of the Great St Bernard, with the whole dazed, awed and subdued party.

What has awed and subdued them has been almost as present to us as if we had ourselves been with the caravan. The daunting Alpine transcendence, the changing light, the known factual remoteness that is contradicted by appearance, the ethereal that is known by the evidence of the near at hand to be in fact inimically rugged, forbidding and massive, the de-realizing effect of the strange and shifting reality – the prose that evokes all this has certainly the Romantic poets behind it. But there would be no more point in calling this art ‘romantic’ than in calling Lawrence’s that in St Mawr (and the Dickensian genius in this vein is as marvellous as the comparable Lawrentian).

The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright day … The snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting their rugged height for something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours’ easy reach. Mountain-tops of great celebrity in the valleys whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months together, had been since morning plain and near, in the blue sky. And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede, like spectres who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly defined in their loneliness, above the mists and shadows.

Seen from those solitudes, and from the Pass of the Great Saint Bernard, which was one of them, the ascending night came up the mountain like a rising water. When it at last rose to the walls of the convent of the Great Saint Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten structure were another Ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.

. . . . .

At length, a light on the summit of the rocky staircase gleamed through the snow and mist. The guides called to the mules, the mules pricked up their drooping heads, the travellers’ tongues were loosened, and in a sudden burst of slipping, climbing, jingling, clinking and talking, they arrived at the convent door.

Other mules had arrived not long before, some with peasant riders and some with goods, and had trodden the snow about the door into a pool of mud. Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire, and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not seen for cloud, though their voices and all other sounds were surprisingly clear. Of the cloudy line of mules hastily tied to rings in the wall, one would bite another, or kick another, then the whole mist would be disturbed with men diving into it, and cries of men and beasts coming out of it, and no bystander discerning what was wrong. In the midst of this, the great stable of the convent, occupying the basement story, and entered by the basement door, outside which all the disorder was, poured forth its contribution of cloud, as if the whole rugged edifice were filled with nothing else, and would collapse as if it had emptied itself, leaving the snow to fall upon the bare mountain summit.

While all this noise and hurry was rife among the living travellers, there, too, silently assembled in a grated house, half-a-dozen paces removed, with the same cloud enfolding them, and the same snowflakes drifting in upon them, were the dead travellers found upon the mountain. The mother, storm-belated many winters ago still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years. An awful company, mysteriously come together! A wild destiny for the mother to have foreseen! ‘Surrounded by so many and such companions upon whom I have never looked, and never shall look, I and my child will dwell together inseparable on the Great Saint Bernard, outlasting generations who will come to see us, and will never know our name, or one word of our story but the end.’

The living travellers thought nothing of the dead just then.

We are very soon given them within the convent, reinstalled in their confident egos, and being absolute Society. But it is impossible (for the reader, I mean) to have forgotten the potent evocation of time, eternity, the non-human universe, the de-realizing lights and vapours, and death. The effect is to bring out with poetic force the nothingness of the Dorrit–Gowan–Barnacle human world. But it is not merely that Society, as figured in its sheltered conceit by the party enjoying warmth, wine, food and the mutual assurance of its superiority, is, for us, exposed to the irony and the challenge it ignores. We who live in the technologico-Benthamite age can hardly miss a force the episode – that is, the chapter – has for our time; for the whole book forms an exquisitely nerved context, and Dickens’s analysis is radical. ‘The individual life is tragic, but there is social hope’: ‘society’ as invoked in Snow’s representative cliché-wisdom is a nothing, and it is essentially the New Statesman’s, and, not only Mr Harold Wilson’s, but that of politicians, statesmen, social scientists and leader-writers in general. To those troubled by the vanishing of what humanity more and more desperately needs if it is not to be deprived of all that makes it human, the ‘society’ of organization, social science, ‘welfare’, equality and statistics is as empty a nothing as the ‘Society’ of manner and exclusiveness.

Dickens’s evocation of death, time and eternity and the non-human universe certainly plays a part in his critical irony, but he has no more bent than Blake towards conceiving life or mankind reductively. His exposure of unrealities is a vindication of human creativity, and an insistence that such a vindication, real and achieved, can (as Daniel Doyce is there to testify) have no hubris in it. Little Dorrit confronts the technologico-Benthamite world with a conception of man and society to which it is utterly blank, the blankness being a manifestation of its desperate sickness. I have offered my grounds for saying this in my discussion of Dickens’s affinity with Blake. To insist that the psyche, the individual life, is both of its nature creative and in its individuality inherently social is to insist that all human creativity is, in one way or another, collaborative, and that a cultural tradition is a collaboratively sustained reality in the way exemplified by a living language – by the language of Shakespeare, of Blake and of Dickens (to adduce three highly individual and potently creative writers). Dickens insists to this effect both implicitly and consciously, and, having the genius that created the Dickensian novel, more manifestly than Blake does.

To make the last point, of course, is to recognize that Dickens and Blake, significant as the affinity is, are also very different. Those who object to the way in which I have emphasized the affinity may point to the radical difference in the fact that there is no Swedenborg and no Boehme in Dickens’s case. That fact certainly constitutes a difference; but it is not radical in the sense that it makes the recognition of an affinity absurd. Blake’s interest in Swedenborg and Boehme, and, in general, in the ‘sources’ that for devotees and researchers constitute the ‘perennial philosophy’, is relatively accidental; his protest against ‘Locke and Newton’ in terms of insight into the human psyche is essential. He owed more to Shakespeare than to the ‘perennial philosophy’, and those voluminous works of research and systematization do very little for the understanding of his importance as the great enemy of spiritual philistinism. Dickens is in the same sense as Blake a vindicator of the spirit – that is, of life. The creativity he insists on as an aspect of disinterestedness is inseparable from the ‘identity’s’ implicitly recognized responsibility to something that (not ‘belonging to itself’) it doesn’t, and can’t, possess.

Such formulations as these by themselves are merely wordy formulations; but nothing could be more convincing than the art they point to. Dickens’s communication is, in its clear validity, compelling and unanswerable. In its political bearing it represents all that can be properly asked of an artist as such – and what it contributes is basic and indispensable: to comment that Dickens had no political philosophy and no practical advice to give reformers and politicians is gratuitous, obtuse and ungrateful. But it is in the same way true that to dismiss his claim to be recognized as a vindicator of the spirit, such as we sorely need, with the remark that he gives no sign of being concerned – or equipped – to answer the probing questions that theologically religious critics are moved to put, is beside the point, and unintelligent. The great artist presents the indispensable testimony of experience, perception and intuition, he being in respect of these an adept. The difference between Dickens and Blake is not that Blake is more spiritual; rather, it can with a measure of truth be said to be that Blake’s genius – which certainly suffered for lack of that essential kind of collaboration which Dickens’s relations with his public gave him – led him to spend a vast deal of his life and effort wrestling with ultimate questions that inevitably defeated him. (That, presumably, is what Lawrence meant when he said that ‘Blake was one of those ghastly obscene knowers’ – the implication being that, tainted with Urizenic malady, he failed to respect the force of his own insistence on essential ‘wonder’.) The evidence of defeat is failure in his major creative enterprises – failure implicitly recognized by Blake himself as he makes attempt after attempt, aspiring to a possession of ‘answers’ that is unattainable.

It is the prophetic books that give Blake his standing as a great addict of the specifically religious quest; but actually, for all the grist he affords the research-mills and the symbol-specialists, his concern for the spirit is of the same order as Dickens’s – he is, whatever the differences in emphasis and accent, religious in the same sense. The characters of the myths, in their confusing, equivocal and changing relations, are faculties, potentialities and aspects of the human psyche. But ‘human’ – the word becomes challenging in an un-Dickensian way when we consider the cosmic note of Blake’s insistence on creativity and of his defiance in general of Newton and Locke. The emphasis, all the same, rests on ‘human’ to such effect that theologizing students of Blake28 (who quite properly invoke too his aphorisms and prose commentaries) discuss whether or not, or how far, he should be pronounced heretical.

That kind of doubt has never been raised about Dickens; the placing criticism, making him a lesser creative writer than the greatest, has been that he is a Philistine – like Mr Meagles; to be pronounced merely conventional, and, in his genial worldly way, not much concerned. I hope, nevertheless, that I have justified my contention that the psychological insight (if ‘psychological’ is the word) so clearly determining the organization of Little Dorrit, with the entailed perceptions, intuitions and evaluative criteria that make ‘psychology’ a word one hesitates to use, is Blakean. And the criticism to be dismissed by way of completing the case is of the order of that which remarks Dickens’s failure to have a political theory or programme – it is not a creative writer’s business to be a theologian or a philosopher. Dickens communicates a profound insight into human nature, the human situation and human need; we have no right to ask anything else of a great artist.

In spite of the essential affinity I have been emphasizing, the sense of the human situation conveyed so potently in the Alpine chapter is distinctively Dickens’s and not Blake’s. Nor, though clearly post-Romantic, is it Words-worthian. The evocation of the Alps is associated, significantly, with the vision of the mortuary and its long-frozen dead; and the effect – not merely in relation to the touring party within the convent – is one, profoundly characteristic of the great Dickens, of solemn anti-hubristic realism. It is a realism, one must add, strongly anti-Gowan, enforcing, as it does, the dependence of the human world on the collaborative creativity that generates it, and sustains it continually as a living and authoritative reality.

I need say no more about the differences. The point of establishing affinities between two great writers is that they are great writers, and therefore in essential ways very different. The importance of the affinity depends on that – I mean, the peculiar importance for us now. With Blake and Dickens I associate Lawrence, so that we have a line running into the twentieth century. And when I accept the description of Dickens as ‘the greatest of the romantic novelists’,29 it is with the proviso that, in the complex Romantic movement, Blake in particular is the poet I take it to be invoking. For it is he pre-eminently who represents what I have in mind in saying that the Romantic movement added something – that is, enriched the human heritage in ways not as a rule given clear or full recognition even in sympathetic uses of the adjective.

The general failure to recognize Dickens’s greatness is a failure to perceive the force of the truth I point to here. Something of indubitable high value the Romantic movement brought to the human heritage was a distinctive sense of responsibility towards life. Lawrence implicitly invokes this truth in the comment with which he dismisses Eliot’s ‘classicism’: ‘This classiosity is bunkum, still more cowardice.’ Eliot’s classicism is anti-romanticism – explicitly; when he identifies the ‘romantic’ it is always in characteristics that enforce the pejorative senses of the world.

The kind of vital strength that makes Dickens a romantic novelist and relates him to Blake is what Eliot rules out from the creative process and the ‘mind of the artist’ in his account of ‘impersonality’, which has for essential purpose to deny that art expresses, or in any way involves, a responsibility towards life. That kind of denial, in Eliot and his nineteenth-century prompters, is a new thing, and its appearance – it being a reaction (and incoherent) – is an index of the new consciousness of responsibility against which it reacts. The century of the American and the French Revolutions, of the opening Industrial Revolution, and of the inevitable reaction against ‘Locke and Newton’, produced changes, challenges and creative incitements enough to make the emergence of a new sense of human responsibility comprehensible, and to explain a notable development of language. Writers in the English tradition, responding to the development, had the immeasurable advantage of being able to draw – as both Blake and Dickens did – on Shakespeare.

1. “And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you, whether you have come to a decision where to go next?”

“Indeed no, I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to be drifted where any current may set.”

“It’s extraordinary to me – if you’ll excuse my freedom in saying so – that you don’t go straight to London”, said Mr Meagles, in the same tone of a confidential adviser.

“Perhaps I shall.”

“Ay! But I mean with a will.”

“I have no will. That is to say”, he coloured a little, “next to none that I can put in action now.”’

2. In The Wound and the Bow.

3. The opening phrase of the book is ‘Thirty years ago’, and chapter VI begins: ‘Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward, the Marshalsea Prison.’ Nevertheless, it is England of the time of writing that Dickens plainly offers to examine. The ‘anachronism’ doesn’t in the least qualify the felicity of his use of the Marshalsea; rather, it serves to emphasize the essential nature of his ‘social criticism’.

4. The Imagination of Charles Dickens, pages 40–41.

5. See the essay, ‘What Maisie Knew’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays.

6. ‘The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered.’ – D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix (‘Morality and the Novel’), page 528.

7. Introduction to The Image of Childhood by Peter Coveney (Peregrine Books), page 19.

8. Part the Second, chapter XXX.

9. Part the Second, chapter XXXI.

10. The suggestion of life become mechanism is used pervasively and subtly in Little Dorrit. Here, for instance, with immediate relevance to Mrs Clennam’s case, is the opening of chapter XXIX, Book the First:

‘The house in the city preserved its heavy dullness through all these transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork.

‘The wheeled chair had its associated remembrances and reveries, one may suppose, as every place that is made the station of a human being has. Pictures of demolished streets and altered houses as they formerly were when the occupant of the chair was familiar with them; images of people as they used to be, with little or no allowance for the lapse of time since they were seen; of these there must have been many in the long routine of gloomy days. To stop the clock of busy existence at the hour when we were personally sequestered from it; to suppose mankind stricken motionless, when we were brought to a standstill; to be unable to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger standard than the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence; is the infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.

‘What scenes and actors the stern woman most reviewed, as she sat from season to season in her one dark room, none knew but herself. Mr Flintwinch, with his wry presence brought to bear upon her daily life like some eccentric mechanical force, would perhaps have screwed it out of her, if there had been less resistance in her; but she was too strong for him.’

    The potent doubleness of suggestion represented by the co-presence and combined action of ‘dragging piece of clockwork’ in the first paragraph and ‘stop the clock of busy existence’ in the second will have been noted. The ‘symbolic’ value of Mrs Clennam and the Clennam house has the kind of indeterminateness that makes the Marshalsea pervade the whole novel.

11. ‘“As well might it be charged upon me that the stings of an awakened conscience drove her mad, and that it was the will of the Disposer of all things that she should live so, many years. I devoted myself to reclaim the otherwise predestined and lost boy; to give him the reputation of an honest origin; to bring him up in fear and trembling, and in a life of practical contrition for the sins that were heavy on his head before his entrance into this condemned world.’” Part the Second, chapter XXX.

12. See here.

13. Book the Second, chapter XXI.

14. The implicit, significantly sympathetic, valuation conveyed to us of the young monk who urbanely and firmly presides is unmistakable.

15. Book the Second, chapter XXXIII.

16. We note how the intense vividness of that is generated in the temperature-paradox.

17. I have discussed the force of this phrase of Lawrence’s in the note at the end of D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, and in the essay on Anna Karenina in Anna Karenina and Other Essays.

18. That we have a positive Dickensian affirmation here is beyond doubt. It is an insistence on that ‘upright’ human posture, with its entailed hazards, which Marvell treats of in ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’. No one realizing how essential to the Dickensian critique the emphasis is could endorse Cockshut’s reflections on the significance of the Marshalsea:

The first description (chapter VI) of the Marshalsea is curiously nostalgic; and we soon find the place possesses an attraction for its inmates. It is a place of rest, of kindness, of gentle and harmless deceits.

When Mrs Dorrit is giving birth there, the charwoman says, ‘The flies trouble you, don’t they dear? But p’r’aps they’ll take your mind off it, and do you good. What between the buryin’ ground, the grocer’s, the waggon-stables, and the paunch trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P’r’aps they’re sent as a consolation, if only we know’d it.’ The religious sensibility revealed here may not be of a very high order, but the humanity and kindness are genuine. In the same scene the beery, disreputable doctor says: ‘We are quiet here; we don’t get badgered here; there’s no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man’s heart to his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man’s at home, and say he’ll stand on the door till he is. Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It’s freedom, sir, it’s freedom.’

Actually, what Dickens’s evocation registers is not attraction, but recoil – intense and ‘placing’. It is an evocation of final human defeat as a subsidence into a callous living deadness of abject acquiescence. If we are to talk of ‘religious sensibility’, then what we have is Dickens’s vision of the Marshalsea as Hell: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.

19. Book the First, chapter XXV.

20. Book the First, chapter XIII.

21. Book the First, chapter XXXII. Also: ‘He had suddenly checked himself. Where he got all the additional black prongs from, that now flew up all over his head, like the myriads of points that break out in the large change of a great firework, was a mystery.’

22. When, in The Princess Casamassima, we consider Mr Vetch (who, though once a gentleman, is reduced to earning his living as a fiddler in a low theatre) along with Millicent Henning in comparison with Frederick Dorrit and Fanny, it becomes hardly questionable, and not the more so for the differences, that memories of Little Dorrit were the promptings to James’s characters. His dependence on Dickens is more general than that, and may fairly be called parasitic. Thus the prison, the child protagonist whose young life is intimately associated with it, and the seamstress in the squalid area of London, are plainly vague memories of Little Dorrit, used in The Princess Casamassima for atmosphere unconvincingly, since James had no corresponding first-hand knowledge. It is significant that he expressed a high admiration for Dickens’s Fanny.

23. Here, at a lower social level, is Plornish on William Dorrit:

‘“Ah! there’s manners! There’s polish! There’s a gentleman to have run to seed in the Marshalsea jail! Why, perhaps you are not aware”, said Plornish, lowering his voice, and speaking with a perverse admiration of what he ought to have pitied or despised, “not aware that Miss Dorrit and her sister dursn’t let him know that they work for a living. No!” said Plornish, looking with a ridiculous triumph first at his wife, and then round all the room. “Dursn’t let him know it, they dursn’t!”’

It’s in place to remember Rugg’s concern that Clennam should have more respect for himself and his legal representative, and shift to the King’s Bench.

24. He has Mrs General’s corroboration:

‘I took the liberty’, said Mr Dorrit again, with the magnificent placidity of one who was above correction, ‘to solicit the favour of a little private conversation with you, because I feel rather worried respecting my – ha – my younger daughter. You will have observed a great difference of temperament, madam, between my two daughters?’

Said Mrs General in response, crossing her gloved hands (she was never without gloves, and they never creased and always fitted) ‘There is a great difference.’

‘May I ask to be favoured with your view of it?’ said Mr Dorrit, with a deference not incompatible with majestic severity.

‘Fanny’ returned Mrs General, ‘has force of character and self-reliance, Amy, none.’ Book the Second, chapter V.

25. ‘“I have been expecting him”, said Mrs Plornish, “this half-an-hour, at any minute of time. Walk in, sir.”

‘Arthur entered the rather dark and close parlour (though it was lofty too), and sat down in the chair she placed for him.

‘“Not to deceive you, sir, I notice it,” said Mrs Plornish, “and I take it kind of you.”

‘He was at a loss to understand what she meant: and by expressing as much in his looks, elicited her explanation.

‘“It ain’t many that comes into a poor place, that deems it worth their while to move their hats,” said Mrs Plornish. “But people think more of it than people think.”’ Part the First, chapter XII.

26. What Flora and Pancks have in common is that each vindicates dramatically an essential human realness that is independent of good breeding, and that, in both, what might seem calculated to make them uncongenial to Clennam only lends emphasis to the approving constatation that the reader in due course arrives at – sharing with Clennam himself.

27. See here.

28. See, e.g., The Theology of William Blake, J. G. Davies.

29. See The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society – A Study of the Theme in English Literature. Peter Coveney. Peregrine Books.