Before I read Little Dorrit, I picked up David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, two novels that are, in the usual Dickens style, lengthy but full of surprises and turns that kept my attention. Little Dorrit, though the writing is wonderfully descriptive and the imagery magnificent, did not have the same effect on me when I read it. In fact, I found myself putting the novel down for longer periods of time and wishing I could move on sooner than later. I appreciate Dickens' style enough to be patient with him. I know that his plots do not unfold quickly and that you've got to stop and notice the details when reading his work. But I found that I lost some of that patience with Little Dorrit, and the book did not finish in a manner that gave me the usual satisfaction at the end of his novels.
The primary focus of Little Dorrit is the title character, her family and their lives in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. One thing that I admired in the novel was how Dickens put together all the elements of the prison. The towering, clanging gates. The scant housing. The always busy prison pub. The animated inhabitants and turnkeys. He painted a perfect picture of the prison, and I felt sympathetic to Amy Dorrit and the other members of the community who were forced to live a life cut off from society simply because they were poor. Everything Dickens wrote about the prison seemed genuine and unexaggerated. He presented the situation as it was, probably drawing on much of his memory of the place from his childhood, and I loved how real it all seemed not simply by the description but by the apparent heart in the writing. This is one example of just a brief description of the homes when Arthur Clennam visits the prison for the first time:
The night was dark; and the prison lamps in the yard, and the candles in the prison windows faintly shining behind many sorts of wry old curtain and blind, had not the air of making it lighter. A few people loitered about, but the greater part of the population was within doors. The old man taking the right-hand side of the yard, turned in at the third or fourth doorway, and began to ascend the stairs. "They are rather dark, sir, but you will not find anything in the way." (Chapter 8, Book the First: Poverty)
While I liked the primary plot and focus of the novel, which revolved around Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam and the Dorrits' time at the Marshalsea, I cannot say that I enjoyed the subplots of the novel nearly as much. True, the characters were intertwined and played some part in each other's lives, but when reading the novel, I wanted to skip through the more intricate details about these characters. The story of the embittered Miss Wade luring Tattycorum away from the Meagles family was one that lost my interest early on. I honestly did not care enough about Miss Wade, the attention-seeking Tattycorum, or the Meagles, who all seemed so one-dimensionally cheerful and optimistic that they were hardly believable or interesting. How and why the intelligent, caring and socially aware Arthur Clennam would fall in love with the sugary sweet, naive, exceedingly dull and simple "Pet" (the Meagles' affectionately nicknamed daughter) was beyond my comprehension.
Another character that I felt did not meet the usual Dickens standard was Monsieur Rigaud, the novel's villain. Rigaud was a murderer, escaped from prison and seeking to simply make money and wreck havoc. He tells others that his name is Blandois and adopts a new persona to fool the other characters. In fact, he often has soliliquies in which he proclaims his great character:
"You shall win, however the game goes. The shall all confess your merit, Blandois. You shall subdue the society which has greivously wronged you, to your own high spirit. Death of my soul. You are high-spirited by right and by nature, Blandois!" (chapter 30, Book the First: Poverty)
These soliquies become tiring and unoriginal. Also, per the quote above, nowhere in the text is the explanation of how the world has "greivously wronged" Rigaud. Even his reasoning behind the blackmail of Mrs. Clennam is strictly money-driven. Dickens seemed to try too hard to make him mysterious by making his character, even moreso than the Meagles family, very one-dimensional. He was more of an annoyance to me than a person I wanted to keep knowing about or seeing in the story. His villainy seemed trite compared to that of Dickens' other antagonists, like Bill Sikes and Fagin in Oliver Twist, Mr. Murdstone and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, or Ralph Nickelby and Wackford Speers in Nicholas Nickelby. Dickens' other antagonists had more depth of character, in that their motives were clearer.
Even though some of the characters in the novel were not as interesting and vibrant as Dickens' earlier characters, I read on. Two characters that actually made me laugh out loud were Flora Finching and the woman only referred to as Mr. F's Aunt. Flora, Arthur Clennam's former fiancee, is silly, flighty and always tightly wound, especially when Arthur is around. Her long bouts of dialogue in the novel have sparse commas, which was a brilliant touch on Dickens' part. Her hurried, rambling, usually off-topic words tell of her flightiness and marvelously add to the comedy of her character. Below is a bit of dialogue from Flora, in which she is commenting on a room in the dank house belonging to Mrs. Clennam, at least at first:
"Ah dear me the poor old room," said Flora, glancing round, "looks just as ever Mrs. Clennam I am touched to see except for being smokier which was to be expected with time and which we must all expect and reconcile to ourselves to being whether we like it or not as I am sure I have had to do myself if not exactly smokier dreadfully stouter which is the same or worse, to think of the days when papa used to bring me here the least of girls a perfect mass of chilblains to be stuck upon a chair with my feet on rails and stare at Arthur--pray excuse me--Mr. Clennam--the least of boys in the frightfullest of frills and jackets ere yet Mr. F appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well-known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B is a moral lesson inculcating that all the paths in life are similar to the paths down in the North of England where they get the coals and make the iron and things gravelled with ashes!" (Chapter 23, Book the Second: Riches)
Quite the opposite of Flora, the elderly Mr. F's Aunt is a solemn character, though ever so comically due to her senility and feisty, brief commands that have no reason behind them. Mr. F's Aunt is left to Flora by the death of her husband Mr. Finching, and pairing the two was a genius move by Dickens. Mr. F's Aunt is described as having the same hard expression on her face and a crooked wig upon her head. For reasons completely unknown, she despises Arthur, and often glares at him and makes threatening comments to him. My favorite comments from this "respectable gentelwoman," as Dickens calls her at one point, remain "Bring him for'ard, and I'll chuck him out o' winder!" and "He has a proud stomach, this chap! Give him a meal of chaff!" The latter comment, and an increased animosity, came from Mr. F's Aunt when Arthur only stared at the woman when she told him simply, "Take that," holding out to him the crusts of the toast she had just eaten during tea. At the woman's one-line outbursts to Arthur, Flora attempts to calm her but never succeeds, which never makes Flora angry or even irritated with the woman. Indeed, she acts as though Mr. F's Aunt's behavior is quite commonplace.
While Little Dorrit has some interesting characters, the characters do little to help strengthen the major theme and overall plot, which is a bit weak. The ultimate message of the rags to riches story is that "money doesn't buy happiness," which is a good theme to explore, but after I completed Little Dorrit, I felt that this theme was quite beaten into me. And I won't give away the ending so as not to spoil anything, but I will say that the conclusion is a bit predictable and the demise of Rigaud is, well, for lack of a better word, befuddling. I appreciated Dickens' satire on the British government, the "Circumlocution Office," but not having much background knowledge on the British government of the mid-nineteenth century, I did not fully understand it. I'm sure that this added to some of my frustration with the plot.
The plot did have some unexpected twists, but I felt that the predictablity of the story outweighed the surprises. Parts of the book felt too long, even for Dickens. I particularly felt strongly about this with the Meagles/Tattycorum situation as well as the Dorrits' tour of Europe. Up until the end of their tour, the story seemed repetitive: Amy Dorrit is sad, William Dorrit is pompous, Fanny Dorrit is selfish, Tip Dorrit is vain, Frederick Dorrit is complacent. These were issues seen in the Dorrits' poverty, and perhaps Dickens was trying to make a point that having money did not improve these characters. Still, as a reader, I like to see change and evolution in characters. I will say that Arthur Clennam underwent genuine changes and evolution in persona, which I commend, but I wish I could have seen that in the other characters.
Overall, I would not recommend this novel to anyone who is not seriously devoted to Dickens. First time readers of Dickens should definitely not pick up this novel before any others. As a lover of Dickens' work, I can move on from what I've disliked in Little Dorrit and still look forward to reading his other novels.
To first time readers of Dickens, I would recommend starting with his early works and then moving on to his later works, as Dickens' style evolved as he grew older. Here is a list of Dickens' novels in chronological order. Some biography and analysis of the author's writing style is also included on the site, which may be of interest to both novices and seasoned veterans of Dickens.
That was a well written post.
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