Little Dorrit

Abstract

Composition According to Forster, Dickens started to make notes for a new novel in January 1855, ‘six months before the first page of Little Dorrit was written’. He seems to have experienced great difficulty over the early stages of composition, and the preliminary planning occupied him for months: gone were the days when he dashed rapidly into the writing of a novel and even kept two novels going simultaneously. Dickens himself referred to the book for the first time in a letter of 10 March 1855, where he described himself as ‘In the ghostly unrest of going to begin a new book’: at about the same time he said he was ‘writing and planning and making notes over an immense number of little bits of paper’, and ‘in the first stage of a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it’. As Harvey Peter Sucksmith has said, this stage of the creative process was characterized by ‘intense unease, much difficulty in making progress, and considerable uncertainty and hesitation’. One sign of his uncertainty is in the memoranda he jotted down for the opening number: ‘People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be now shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in life.’