Little Dorrit: Serving Mammon

Abstract

The world of Little Dorrit is one in which the same phenomena among the most vulnerable that Dickens had portrayed in his earlier novels are again observable. At Covent Garden, Little Dorrit observes children on a level of poverty below hers enduring immediate suffering: ‘miserable children in rags … fed on offal, huddled together for warmth’. They have been dehumanised, and are ‘like young rats’; they ‘slunk and hid’ and ‘were hunted about’ (p. 182).¹ Similarly, when Arthur Clennam sits in a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, he is surrounded by homes that reflect more suffering, for they are places ‘where people lived so unwholesomely, that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning’. There are ‘miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air’. The River Thames nearby is ‘a deadly sewer’. Once again, the humanity of the inhabitants is not recognised, as they live in what are more ‘lairs’ fit for wild animals than homes fit for humans (p. 44). The spiritual welfare of these people is also a cause for concern: as the bell of a local church peals prior to a service, with ten minutes to go ‘it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At five minutes it abandoned hope …’ (p. 44).