Abstract
‘At the very centre of the novel is Mrs Clennam’, writes Lionel Trilling.2 That being so, the centre is very dark. For most of the novel she imprisons herself in her ‘old brick house … within a gateway’ (I, iii, 31–2), propped up on her ‘black bier-like sofa’ (I, iii, 33) or rigid in her wheelchair. Not until five chapters from the end — Book II, Chapter 30 — does she leave her room. But her influence on her son is as deadly as any Biblical plague.
Quotations are from Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
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Notes
Quotations are from Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith, The Clarendon Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
L. Trilling, ‘Little Dorrit’, Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 371.
F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 285.
R. Barickman, ‘The Spiritual Journey of Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam: “A Way Wherein There Is No Ecstasy”’, Dickens Studies Annual, ed. R.B. Partlow, Jr., VII (1978), p. 163.
D. Walder, Dickens and Religion (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 184.
J.L. Larsen, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 177–279 passim.
See Walder, Dickens and Religion, op. cit., and Larsen, Dickens and the Broken Scripture, op. cit. See also e.g. Dianne F. Sadoff, ‘Storytelling and the Figure of the Father in Little Dorrit’, PMLA, XCV (1980), 234–45.
W. Iser, The Act of Reading (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 118.
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© 1989 James A. Davies
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Davies, J.A. (1989). Characterisation and Ideas in Little Dorrit: Clennam and Calvinism. In: The Textual Life of Dickens’s Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08582-8_5
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