Abstract
In Chapter 24 of Little Dorrit, Army Dorrit entertains the child-like Maggy with a fairy-tale that provides a clue to the change that has stolen ‘almost imperceptibly’ over ‘the patient heart’. ‘Every day found her something more retiring than the day before.’ Gazing out at the world from her prison garret, she sees it, as she always does, through the Marshalsea bars:
Many combinations did those spikes upon the wall assume, many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself into, many golden touches fell upon the rust, while Little Dorrit sat there musing. New zig-zags sprang into the cruel pattern sometimes, when she saw it through a burst of tears; but beautified or hardened still, always over it and under it and through it, she was fain to look in her solitude, seeing everything with that ineffaceable brand.
(Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, pp. 337–8)
Dickens shared George Eliot’s view of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘preternatural power’. As the novels of the 1850s suggest, he was himself increasingly preoccupied by the kind of feminine sensibility the Brontë novels unfold — a sensibility in retreat from the world, sustained in its isolation by the power to create its own self-enclosing vision. Miss Wade frequently strikes Lucy Snowe’s note of intense controlled bitterness.
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Notes
Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World (London, 1979) p. 53, draws attention to the similarity between this passage from ‘George Silverman’s Explanation’ and many passages in Dickens’s letters.
William Wordsworth, Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815).
From Henry James, ‘Talks with Tolstoy’, epigraph to H. L. Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (London, 1970).
G. Tillotson and J. Butt, Dickens at Work (London, 1957) pp. 223–5.
Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre (Oxford, 1965) p. 183.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Little Dorrit’, in The Dickens Critics, ed. G. H. Ford and L. Lane (New York, 1966) p. 293.
Raymond Williams, ‘Social Criticism in Dickens’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 3 (1964) p. 224.
Ross Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (London, 1967) p. 108.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Dickens and Blake: Little Dorrit’, in F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London, 1970).
John Bayley, The Uses of Division (London, 1976) p. 100.
See, for example, John Wain, ‘Little Dorrit’, in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (London, 1962) p. 175: ‘it is his most stationary novel … for all the scurry of event on its surface, it never for a moment suggests genuine movement’.
Philip Collins, in Dickens and Crime (London, 1962), gives a useful account of Dickens’s involvement in the Urania Cottage project.
Letter to Miss Coutts, quoted ibid., p. 105.
Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners (London, 1975) pp. 171–3, notes that the story is adapted ‘to the expressed and unexpressed needs of the listener and the teller’. Her account emphasises Little Dorrit’s needs rather than the novel’s implicit sense of her limitations.
Letter to Forster, 1856, in Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (London, 1970).
Speech in Leeds 1847, quoted in Alexander Walsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford, 1971) p. 155.
David Gervais, ‘The Poetry of Little Dorrit’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. IV, no. I (1968) pp. 46–7, argues to the contrary. While I agree that Clennam’s feelings are often ‘latent in the author’s view of his surroundings’, Gervais overlooks some delicate explorations of interior struggle in Clennam: between what is just and unjust resentment of the Gowans, for example, and in his searching self-analysis about the meaning and purpose of life.
J. S. Mill, On the Subjection of Women (London, 1929) p. 309.
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© 1983 Jennifer Gribble
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Gribble, J. (1983). Little Dorrit’s Prison. In: The Lady of Shalott in the Victorian Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06754-1_3
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