Wordsworthian Psychology and Little Dorrit: the Unresolved Dialogue

Abstract

Nobody reading Little Dorrit would be surprised to learn that it was written during a period of personal crisis for its author.¹ Of all Dickens’s novels it is the one where his violent contradictoriness is most dramatically foregrounded. Rebellious anger and the longing for rest, a vivid and derisive satiric imagination and an authentic sensitivity — unmatched in his work — for the beauty of the serenely demure: these contraries come to a head with a unique force, and their clash gives the novel its distinctive vibration. Equally distinctive, too, is the novel’s inability, or refusal, to resolve the conflicts it explores; unlike Great Expectations, which to some extent therapeutically ‘works through’ its material, the play of modernity’s dialectic in this work is at every point locked in the impasse of insoluble ambiguity. Its virtues are partially liberal ones, its achievement as a work of imaginative thought the negatively capable one of an intelligently sustained uncertainty, though of the genuinely disinterested kind that maintains itself against the pressure of a powerfully felt wish for certainty. Its scepticism is an affliction rather than a pleasurable convenience. An engagement with the Wordsworthian Romantic psychology of the self in Time is, too, a crucial focus of this non-progressing dialectic.