Little Dorrit

Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

Criticism on the British Money Craze and the Government Administration in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit

Supervisor: Professor Marysa Demoor

Paper submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels” by Sofie Hoogerwerf 2009 - 2010

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Table of Contents 1. Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... 4 2. Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 5 3. The New Market Economy ...................................................................................................................... 8 3.1. Historical Overview ...................................................................................................................... 8 3.1.1. The Industrial Revolution ............................................................................................. 8 3.1.2. New Economic Frameworks ..................................................................................... 11 3.1.3. Developments in the Banking Business ............................................................... 12 3.2. John Ruskin ................................................................................................................................... 15 3.3. Thomas Carlyle ............................................................................................................................. 19 4. Money in Little Dorrit ............................................................................................................................ 24 4.1. The Importance of Money in Victorian Society ............................................................... 24 4.1.1. Money as the Common Denominator in Victorian Society ........................... 24 4.1.2. Mr. Pancks........................................................................................................................ 26 4.2. Clennam & Doyce, Example of Good Business.................................................................. 29 4.3. The Destructive Power of Money .......................................................................................... 32 5. Money as a Prison .................................................................................................................................... 38 5.1. Prison Metaphors and Symbolism ........................................................................................ 38 5.2. The Marshalsea Prison ............................................................................................................. 42 5.3. From Rags to Riches ................................................................................................................... 47 5.3.1. Amy Dorrit, a Prisoner of Riches ........................................................................... 47 5.3.2. Mr. Dorrit, a Prisoner of Poverty ............................................................................ 52 5.4. Merdle, a Prisoner of Society................................................................................................... 58

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6. Circumlocution and the Art of Not-knowing...................................................................................... 64 6.1. The Circumlocution Office ........................................................................................................ 64 6.2. Mrs. General .................................................................................................................................. 69 7. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 71 8. Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................... 73

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1. Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, professor Marysa Demoor, for suggesting the topic of this dissertation, for allowing me to find my own perspective, for giving me her honest opinion and for correcting my stylistic errors and spelling mistakes.

My parents, for giving me the opportunity to follow my own ambitions and supporting all my academic decisions, even though they might not always have seemed the wisest thing to do.

Kai Van Landschoot, my best friend, for pushing me incessantly to adhere to my thousand words per day average and for teasing me incessantly if I dared to slack off.

Tom Van Steendam, for proof-reading, giving his honest remarks, and for providing corrections where needed.

Aline Lapeire, Ellen Verbestel, Martijn Dentant, Max Dedulle, Tine Maes and Tom Van Steendam, my classmates and writing partners.

All my friends, for their support, their jokes, their encouragement, their sarcasm, their distractions and their love.

I could not have done this without you.

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2. Introduction Little Dorrit, Dickens’s novel recounting the adventures of the Dorrit family and their friends, acquaintances and foes against the backdrop of economical and social turmoil during the Victorian era, was published in instalments between December 1855 and June 1857. The novel belongs to Dickens’s “late period” and is often dismissed by critics as being one of Dickens’s less successful works. Nonetheless, it paints a sharp and critical picture of Victorian society, denouncing the Victorian desire for money and prestige, the social abuse of the lower classes and the misconduct of the National Treasury. G.K. Chesterton, in his review of Little Dorrit, writes how this novel shows “how far [Dickens] had gone down the road of realism, of sadness, and of what is called modernity” (178). Indeed, it is a depressing, bleak story, despite the attempt at providing a romantic, happy ending.

As in many of his novels, Little Dorrit is influenced by Dickens’s life. Some autobiographical elements are minor and of little significance, e.g. Fanny Dorrit, who appears to be modelled on Dickens’s sister Fanny, who as a musical talent was sent to the Royal Academy of Music (Forster 38). The main biographical element, however, is one of the most important symbols in the novel: the Marshalsea Prison. The debtors’ prison where Amy Dorrit is born and raised, was actually one of London’s three debtors’ prisons, the others being The Fleet and The King’s Bench. Not coincidentally, it was also the prison where Dickens’s father was incarcerated for three months. His family went to live with him in the prison, but Dickens himself was put to work in Warren’s Blacking factory (Forster 50). The imprisonment of his father was a traumatic experience for the young Dickens, which can be illustrated by a quote from Forster’s biography The Life of Charles Dickens:

The interval between the sponging-house and the prison was passed by the sorrowful lad in running errands and carrying messages for the prisoner, delivered with swollen eyes and through shining tears; and the last words said to him by his father before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea were to the effect that the sun was set upon him

Hoogerwerf 6 forever. "I really believed at the time," said Dickens to me, "that they had broken my heart." (43) Because of the substantial impact this episode had on Dickens’s life, it has influenced many of his works, and the debtors’ prison has recurred in several novels, e.g. Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. Despite the fact that the debtors’ prison is one of the main symbols in the novel, one is supposed to associate it with an aspect of society that is much wider and permeates all layers of society: money. Money played a crucial role in the Victorian era (as it does now), and Victorian society was marked by the birth of a new market economy.

In this dissertation I will discuss this new economical system, some of the influential laws that were passed at the time and how it affected society as a whole. To deal more in depth with the flaws that were present in the system, I will then move on to discuss some of the arguments put forward by John Ruskin, a contemporary philosopher and social critic. Even though Dickens claims not to have read many of Ruskin’s works (O’Gorman 160), it is remarkable that some of Ruskin’s ideas have clear parallels in Little Dorrit, proving that Dickens’s criticism was certainly not an isolated case. Indeed, there are many contemporary writers expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

While Ruskin’s criticism is, in Little Dorrit, mostly applied to the economy, money and its importance in Victorian society, another important aspect of the novel is Dickens’s dissatisfaction with the government and its administration. He mainly draws on the ideas proposed by Thomas Carlyle, of whom he was a great admirer. Carlyle’s most relevant ideas in relation to Little Dorrit will be dealt with below. Discussing the ideas that were explicitly put forward by these contemporary thinkers, will make it much easier to understand how Dickens presents these same thoughts in Little Dorrit, although on a more implicit level.

Even though criticism of the system of debtors’ prisons is not the central theme of the novel, the prison is a very strong metaphor that is repeated throughout the story, and deserves to be

Hoogerwerf 7 investigated further. It is a metaphor on different levels of the novel, both in the shape of the actual imprisonment of some of the protagonists, not in the least the Dorrit family, but also the figurative imprisonment of all characters in a society that imposes certain rules and values onto them.

Finally, I would like to devote some attention to Dickens’s criticism of the British bureaucracy and more specifically the National Treasury, symbolized in the novel by the Circumlocution Office.

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3. The New Market Economy 3.1. Historical Overview Before I begin the exploration of Ruskin and Carlyle’s criticism on the economical and political situation in Victorian England, it is important to give a general overview of what this situation entails in order to achieve a better understanding of the points made by these political thinkers. Yet, giving a full, detailed overview would be impossible within the scope of this paper, and therefore I will limit myself to what I consider to be the most important factors for my further discussion on this topic.

3.1.1. The Industrial Revolution

One of the most important, if not most influential, factors determining the economical conditions in Victorian England, was the Industrial Revolution. Even though the Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century, its influence was such that it reverberated far into the 19th century, affecting all aspects of daily life and causing a unprecedented economical expansion. What caused the Industrial Revolution is the subject of an ongoing scholarly debate, without a solid consensus ever having been reached. In his novel The Economic History of England, 1760-1860, Arthur Redford summarizes the discussion as follows:

Some historians, following Adam Smith, have tried to explain [the Industrial Revolution] as the fruit of widening markets, both external and internal, others as the result of changes in the rate of capital accumulation, and yet others, ignoring parallel developments in other countries of Western Europe, have seen it mainly in terms of the rapid growth of population in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (3) The combination of all these circumstances influenced the economic and political landscape in Victorian England. England became one of the dominating sea-powers of the western world, establishing “an overseas empire of great economic importance” in which the role played by the

Hoogerwerf 9 East India Company’s trade should not be underestimated (Redford 4). At the same time, London became the financial centre as the “home of rapidly growing banking and insurance services”, while at the same time being one of the country’s main ports (ibid. 4). Technical improvements caused remarkable developments in the nation’s industrial growth in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while industrial producers became “gradually more dependent on overseas trade, both for their raw materials and for their main markets” (ibid. 5-8). Simultaneously, the need for better transport became apparent:

Improvements in transport and communications were as necessary as improvements in financial organization if the trade and industry of the country was to be efficiently linked together. The rising demand for goods which expressed itself not only in the growth of imports and exports, but also in the expansion of the coastal and inland trades, stimulated transport improvements on a considerable scale long before 1760. (ibid. 12) Even though the Industrial Revolution enabled an enormous economic expansion and development, this growth became unstable by the end of the French wars, which ended when Duke Wellington defeated Napoleon in Waterloo in 1815. The British Government was faced with economic problems in every aspect of daily life, but according to Redford, when Parliament reassembled in 1816, the speech from the throne declared that “the manufacturers, commerce and revenue of the United Kingdom were in a flourishing condition”(109). At the same time, other observers declared that there was “a very general depression in the prices of nearly all productions, and in the value of all fixed property, entailing a convergence of losses and failures among the agricultural, and commercial, and manufacturing, and mining, and shipping, and building interests”(ibid. 109). This economic instability led to an increase in the number of ablebodied unemployed poor workers, who were looked after by the parish authorities, which meant they were sent to special workhouses or ‘houses of industry’ (ibid. 114). This system was however not as profitable as expected, and soon voices demanding radical changes in the poor laws or the poor-law administration were heard (ibid. 118). Economic crises succeeded each other, with all-time lows in 1825, 1936 and 1939. Bankruptcies were innumerable, the bank

Hoogerwerf 10 reserves fell dangerously low and business confidence received a rude shock. The government saw the need to intervene and checked the issue of currency by the Bank of England, but these reforms did not remove the underlying cause of commercial instability. Contemporary opinion held that “irresponsible banking policy and defective banking organizations had been, in the ‘thirties as in the ‘twenties, among the main factors contributing to produce unsettled trading conditions” (ibid. 133,171). As pointed out by Redford, the crises of the ‘20s and ‘30s were followed by even more severe distress in the early ‘40s, referred to by several scholars as ‘The Hungry Forties’ (134).

The Second Industrial Revolution functioned as a turning point that finally brought an end to the string of economic depressions, and the Hungry Forties were followed by “booming expansion, and as it seemed to contemporaries, fabulous prosperity after the ordeal of the hungry forties” (Herbert 188). Again, there were several factors causing this new Industrial Revolution and a “new rhythm in economic life” (Redford 218):

This new rhythm in economic life was the resultant of many interrelated forces. The rapid increase of railways in every part of the world; the improvements in the navigation and speed of ships; the rapid spread of population into new and fertile regions; the quick succession of important new and fertile regions; the quick succession of important discoveries in practical science, the adoption more or less completely of principles of free trade, were all factors considered by well-informed contemporary writers to have accelerated the rate of progress and increased the material prosperity of the world. (218) Along with the changes in the economic landscape, came a shift from traditional wealth to commercial wealth. Redford indicates that the “changes in industrial organization and technique” were accompanied by a vast expansion in the “volume and value of English commerce”, which caused the English overseas trade to double during the first half of the nineteenth century, “despite the persistent sag in the general level of prices after the close of the French wars” (Redford 130).

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3.1.2. Developments in the Banking Business

A subject that has been already been touched upon in this paper, but needs further discussion, is the role played by the banks, and more specifically by the Bank of England, in these economic developments. The Bank of England was a powerful institution, located in the City of London. In London, it held a monopoly with the power to issue notes. It was only in 1826 that The Bank Act authorized the formation of other joint-stock banks, on the condition that these banks were more than 65 miles removed from London (Redford 171).

To understand more of the banking business, it is important to take a look at the two main principles governing the financial situation: the banking principle and the currency principle: Supporters of the banking principle held that the banks ought to be left free to regulate the amount of notes issued, according to the state of trade, so long as the notes remained freely convertible into gold on demand. [...] According to the advocates of the currency principle, the primary duty of the banker, and especially of the Bank of England, was to maintain a sufficient reserve to safeguard the stability of public credit. (Redford 173-174)

Redford indicates that the controversy between these two principles dragged on for many years, as “parliamentary committees of inquiry asked more than fourteen thousand questions without coming to any conclusion” (175). Meanwhile, the character of the banking system of the country had been modified by many changes, and especially by the rapid rise of joint-stock banking, which was growing speedily at the expense of private banking (Redford 177-178).1

1

Private banks “were restricted from seeking capital from public subscription and were limited to a maximum of six partners” (Black 399). According to Lucy Newton, “the early joint-stock banks of England were crucial to the development of financial markets and economic growth in the United Kingdom. They formalized modes of banking undertaken by the private banks and established the foundations for a stable domestic banking system, thereby providing the environment in which other sectors, and the overall economy, could flourish” (28). Even though new joint-stock banks already followed the principle of issuing out stocks, they were not modern joint-stock companies, as “shares did not have limited liability, and therefore shareholders, or proprietors, who owned the company were responsible for the financial stability of the institution in which they invested. They were also not distant investors: they were active members of the business community in which the bank was located” (Newton 29). This unlimited liability was dissolved in 1855 with the issuing of the Limited Liability Act. For more information on private and joint-stock banking, I refer to the articles by Iain Black and Lucy Newton as found in the bibliography accompanying this dissertation.

Hoogerwerf 12 In 1844, the Joint Stock Banks Act made the first attempt to regulate the organization of these banking companies. Among other measures, this act stated that “there was to be no limitation of shareholder’s liability” (Redford 178). The Joint Stock Companies Act, instated in 1844 also, simplified the terms which new companies needed to meet in order to register, but still, the individual shareholders did not obtain the privilege of limited liability (Redford 183): “It was well understood that the limitation of shareholders’ liability would increase the amount of capital available for commercial purposes, and would facilitate the co-operation of the capitalist with the business organizer; but it was still feared that the introduction of the system would lead to a great increase in the flotation of fraudulent companies” (ibid.). In 1855, the principle of limited liability was finally adopted in the Limited Liability Act, limiting the liability of shareholders to the amount of the company’s share capital held by them (Redford 183), even though according to Dale Porter in his novel The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology and Society in Victorian London, it took more than a year before this measurement was properly installed (149).

3.1.3. New Economic Frameworks

All these changes led eventually to the formation of new economic frameworks. Some of the most influential theoretic thinkers were Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

According to Redford, Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 and frequently referred to as Wealth of Nations, is a “gospel of a growing movement towards economic liberalism (186).” In this novel, Smith expands on his ideas on ‘laissez-faire economics’. On The Victorian Web, Yousuf Dhamee briefly explains how Smith’s economic ideas were based on his principle called ‘division of labour’:

This idea relates primarily to the specialization of the labor force, essentially the breaking down of large jobs into many tiny components. Under this regime each

Hoogerwerf 13 worker becomes an expert in one isolated area of production, thus increasing his efficiency. The fact that laborers do not have to switch tasks during the day further saves time and money. Of course, this is exactly what allowed Victorian factories to grow throughout the nineteenth century. Assembly line technology made it necessary for a worker to focus his or her attention on one small part of the production process. (Dhamee, “Division of Labor”) Smith showed a great interest in the value of goods. He identified two different kinds of value, ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’. The concept of exchange value interested Smith considerably. He was fascinated by what he called the water-diamond paradox: why are diamonds more valuable than water, when people cannot survive without water but do not need diamonds at all? According to Dhamee, Smith hoped to discover the true source of value in order to find a benchmark for measuring economic growth. Eventually Smith settled on labour as the source of value: the number of hours labour that a good can be exchanged for constitutes its inherent worth (Dhamee, “Division of Labor”).

Besides the division of labour and the paradox of value, Smith held other important views, one of the most essential being “Smith's belief that competition, the market's invisible hand, would lead to proper pricing, [which] played a large role in his economic policy recommendations” (Dhamee, “Laissez-Faire Policies”). Smith strongly opposed any government intervention into business affairs. “Trade restrictions, minimum wage laws, and product regulation” were all considered to be unfavourable for a “nation's economic health” (ibid.). Smith’s views were shared by Ricardo, who is the second most important of the classical political economists (after Smith) and one of the most influential economists of modern times, according to E.K. Hunt in his History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective. Ricardo “criticized monopolies, tariffs, duties, and other state enforced restrictions of his time and believed that the market is the most fair and efficient arbitrator of resources” (91).

Even though Smith is not considered to be an apologist for the capitalist class, he created a great throng of followers among the new capitalist factory owners, who often intentionally

Hoogerwerf 14 misinterpreted his ideas to oppose to the government imposing laws against child abuse and maltreatment of factory workers (Dhamee, “Laissez-Faire Policies”). Against these abuses, antagonists like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reacted in their writings.

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3.2. John Ruskin John Ruskin, born in 1819 and a contemporary of Dickens, was an important 19th century art critic, and is remembered also as a poet and an artist. Besides being an authority in the world of art and architecture, he was an influential social critic, focusing on the social economy in Britain during the second half of the 19th century. As George P. Landow claims in the introduction to his biographical novel Ruskin:

Ruskin, the great Victorian critic of art and society, had an enormous influence on his age and our own. Like so many Victorians, he had astonishing energy, for while carrying on a voluminous correspondence and painting a large body of superb watercolours, he published poetry, a children's fantasy, and books and essays on geology, botany, church politics, political economy, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, art education, myth, and aesthetics. (3) Ruskin’s influence in the field of social economics should not be underestimated. According to Landow, a survey among the first Parliament in which the Labour Party was seated proved that Ruskin’s Unto This Last had a greater influence than Marx’ Das Kapital (Ruskin 5).

However, Ruskin’s earlier works were mainly concerned with art criticism. His most renowned work is Modern Painters, which was published in five volumes throughout his career. It was only in 1860, at the same time as the fifth volume of Modern Painters, and 5 years after Dickens’s publication of the final instalment of Little Dorrit, that Ruskin published Unto This Last, in which he turned to attack the economical system that was governing Britain at the time. He attacks the ideas of the classical economical theorists, which was not taken in gratitude by the general public: “Most contemporary readers found both Ruskin's general attitudes and his specific proposals so outrageous that they concluded that he must have been struck mad” (Ruskin 1415). Indeed, the first four chapters of Unto This Last were published in Cornhill, a magazine edited by William Thackeray, but Ruskin had to publish the finished work privately as publication in Cornhill was stopped due to the unwavering criticism (Herbert 191). Landow summarizes Ruskin’s ideas as follows:

Hoogerwerf 16 Ruskin, who realized that a new political economy was demanded by new conditions of production and distribution, argues that his contemporaries in fact exist in conditions of abundance and that therefore the old notions of Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, and others are simply irrelevant. According to him, then, the real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, […] is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction. (Ruskin 15) On a more concrete level, Ruskin uses his writings as an attempt to find an explanation for the search for fortune that was so present in his contemporaries. According to him, wealth is not defined by money, but by the capacity of exerting “power over men” (Unto This Last 181): riches on one side, implies poverty on the other side. When one person makes money, this directly implies another is losing it: “The art of making yourself rich, is […] equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor” (ibid.). Or as Herbert puts it:

[T]he motive of economic self-enrichment, on which political economy seeks to confer moral legitimacy, is always and inescapably cruel and aggressive, and all theories of capitalistic free enterprise as continually expanding national wealth in which the whole population shares are obfuscations of this fact. (193) It is also useful to look at Ruskin’s lecture “Traffic”, which was published in The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War in 1866. This lecture was delivered by Ruskin in the Town Hall of Bradford, where Ruskin was asked to speak about the new Exchange that was to be built in Bradford (“Traffic” 45). Ruskin starts out his lecture by claiming immediately that he will not talk about the new Exchange building, and goes on to say: “But I cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do not care about this Exchange of yours” (“Traffic” 45). Instead, Ruskin informs the audience of his opinion on the current economical spirit in Britain, using the erection of the new Exchange building and its place in architectural history as a starting point to prove to the public that Britain is stuck in a downward spiral. In “Ruskin as Victorian Sage”, Landow points out how Ruskin, like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, can be defined as a

Hoogerwerf 17 Victorian Sage, using rhetoric and poetical means to convince his audience (89). By means of discussing the Greek and Christian gods that were worshipped in the past, Ruskin then moves on to his main point:

You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual, national worship; […] Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time; but we have also a practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our property and six-sevenths of our time. […] I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best generally described as the 'Goddess of Getting-on,' or 'Britannia of the Market’. (“Traffic” 57) This Goddess of Getting-on, according to Ruskin, is a faulty Goddess: “She differs from the great Greek and Mediæval deities essentially in two things—first, as to the continuance of her presumed power; secondly, as to the extent of it” (“Traffic” 60). The first point Ruskin wants to get across, is that the pursuit of wealth is futile, because it has no clearly defined aim: “Getting on—but where to? Gathering together—but how much? Do you mean to gather always—never to spend?” (“Traffic” 61) According to Ruskin, the Greek and medieval gods are revered because they promised the people a coveted place in the afterlife. The Goddess of Getting-on does no such thing, and is worshipped solely because of the material comfort she provides in this life.

Secondly, he goes back to the point he also made in Unto This Last: one man’s riches is another man’s poverty. Therefore, the Goddess of Getting-on is a partial Goddess, unlike the pagan and Christian deities:

“But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess—not of everybody's getting on—but only of somebody's getting on. […]For, observe, while to one family this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting on.” (“Traffic” 62) The ideas expressed by Ruskin in this famous lecture are present throughout Little Dorrit, even though it was published years before the lecture was delivered. The pursuit of wealth and money is an incentive for many of the characters in the novel, and Dickens wants to alert his

Hoogerwerf 18 readers to the possible disastrous consequences their desire for money might have. Many of the characters in Little Dorrit face their own downfall by being obsessed by great plans to get rich, some examples being Pancks, the rent collector who claims there is nothing else in life but business and money; Mr. Dorrit, who tries his entire life to be a rich gentleman but ends up being rich and unhappy; and the entire population of Bleeding Hearts Yard, who put all their money in the hands of Mr. Merdle, the swindler, in an attempt at making more money, but who all end up being poorer than ever.

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3.3. Thomas Carlyle Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish historian, critic and sociological writer, born in Dumfriesshire in 1795 and very much influenced by the puritan beliefs of his parents. After a career in tutoring and studying German literature by himself, Carlyle turned down several job offers, refusing to become a journalist in order to focus on his writing. After finishing his work on the French Revolution, that had to be rewritten after it was accidentally mistaken for waste paper and burnt by an illiterate maid, Carlyle wrote several influential novels that express his controversial ideas on politics, economy and the social situation in Britain: “Chartism, On Heroes [and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History], Past and Present, and Cromwell all developed his thesis that the people need a strong and ruthless ruler and should obey him” (Kunitz 116). In his later work, which consisted mainly of shorter essays, he shows a consistent hardening of his political views, demonstrating a belief in the power of despotism. These essays were published as Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850. In the end, defining Carlyle’s philosophy and political views has been proven to be difficult:

No coherent body of philosophy can be extracted from his teachings: it is rather as a prophet and a seer that he has his place. He was blind to the greatest phenomenon of his age — the rise of science as an interpreter of the universe — and spoke insultingly of Darwin. Formal economics also incurred his censure. His theological attitude is hardest of all to define. At an early age he found himself unable to subscribe to any of the orthodox creeds, but he was even more condemnatory of atheism than of the Kirk, and never ceased to believe passionately in a personal God. His central tenet was the worship of strength; and, after beginning as a radical, he came to despise the democratic system and increasingly to extol the value and necessity of strong and stern government, in which the people themselves should have no share. (Kunitz 118) Even though some of Carlyle’s political points were rather extreme, his novels were very influential and other important thinkers like John Ruskin, who belonged to Carlyle’s circle of friends, and authors like Charles Dickens drew on his ideas in their own writing.

Hoogerwerf 20 To get a better insight into some of Carlyle’s most relevant ideas, it is interesting to look at the introduction Chris Vanden Bossche wrote for Carlyle and the Search for Authority, under the title “The Crisis of Authority and the Critique of Political Economy”. Vanden Bossche states: “Carlyle's works represent an attempt to resolve dilemmas raised by what he and his contemporaries perceived as a revolutionary shift of authority in virtually all realms of discourse and institutions of power in western Europe” (1). This shift in authority was observed in all fields of society: religion, politics and economics. Carlyle bases his theory on that of John Locke, who argued in his Two Treatises of Government that governors obtain their authority not through heredity – a divinely conferred ordination – but through individual merit, by choice of the "ablest" to govern (35). Carlyle was concerned about the fact that the rise of democracy and the shift to a ‘contract society’ meant that there was no central authority left: the people had the power to overthrow the government if they were dissatisfied: “What concerned [Carlyle], in economics as in politics and religion, was the absence of any higher authority to which one could appeal on questions of justice and the fear that the old hierarchy, which they identified with chivalric ideals of justice, was being replaced by a new elite that was concerned only with pursuing its own private interests” (Vanden Bossche 6).

When reading Past and Present, Carlyle’s criticism on the new democratic leadership becomes abundantly clear. He accuses the government and the aristocracy of idly standing by instead of ruling the country as is their duty:

Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. […] For men are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak the things they do not think. (189) Carlyle blames the government of being hypocritical, of being insincere in both their speech and in their actions:

Hoogerwerf 21 Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me; - perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of the man. […] Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere Action. (189) In Past and Present, it also becomes clear that Carlyle shares some views with his friend John Ruskin. Ruskin pointed out that the welfare of the British has a darker side: one man’s wealth meant other man’s poverty. Carlyle also attacks the thesis of classical economists like Adam Smith, who claim that the British wealth is shared among the people:

The world, with its Wealth of Nations, Supply-and-demand and suchlike, has of late days been terribly inattentive to that question of work and wages. We will not say, the poor world has retrograded even here: we will say rather, the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get work and ever more work done, it has had no time to think of dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for by the Law of the Stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, Law of Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-laws, - saying, in its dire haste to get the work done, That is well enough! (2627) In Past and Present we find the roots for Ruskin’s crusade against the ‘Goddess of getting-on’. Carlyle already expressed his concern about people’s constant pursuit of money and wealth, even comparing money to man’s hell on earth:

What is this Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror of “Not succeeding;” of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world, - chiefly of not making money! Is that not a somewhat singular Hell? (182) Not only does Carlyle despise the way money is the motive that seems to drive the people, he also loathes the way in which the people who have money are worshipped by others. In one of the essays published in his Latter-Day Pamphlets, “Hudson’s Statue”, in which Carlyle attacks the

Hoogerwerf 22 wealthy in society, he lectures on the value of reverence and respect, and how these values are lost:

If a man have any precious thing in him at all, certainly the most precious of all the gifts he can offer is his approbation, his reverence to another man. […] Not lightly while a man give this, — if he is still a man. If he is no longer a man, but a greedy blind twofooted animal, "without soul, except what saves him the expense of salt and keeps his body with its appetites from putrefying," — alas, if he is nothing now but a human money-bag and meat-trough, it is different! In that case his "reverence" is worth so many pounds sterling; and these, like a gentleman, he will give willingly. (230) Dickens had read and admired Carlyle’s work, even so much that he dedicated Hard Times, published in 1854, to him. Indeed, Dickens criticizes the ‘Donothingism’ and ‘Saynothingism’ of the ruling class in many of his novels, though never as outspoken as in Little Dorrit, as Yvonne Bezrucka points out in her article “Material Culture as Society Informant” on The Victorian Web:

The failure of institutions had already been presented by Dickens as the butt of ridicule in Bleak House’s indictments of the English Law – in particular of the disparaging Equity system in its Chancery-practice outcome – and its unacceptable delays, which resulted in its inefficiency […] Bureaucracy and the ills of privilege now became his target of criticism, making of Little Dorrit his most politically outspoken novel. (Bezrucka) In Little Dorrit, Dickens expresses his dissatisfaction with the government and the way the country is managed. Even though his ideas are most likely not as extreme as Carlyle’s, Dickens is clearly reacting against the same ‘Donothingism’ and ‘Saynothingism’ Carlyle condemns in Past and Present. Dickens was disappointed in the government, and had little hope for the future. Butt and Tillotson say that, in a letter to the actor William C. Macready, he wrote:

In No. 3 of my new book [Little Dorrit] I have been blowing off a little of indignant steam which would otherwise blow me up, and with God’s leave I shall walk in the same all the days of my life; but I have no present political faith or hope – not a grain. (226)

Hoogerwerf 23 To express his dissatisfaction, Dickens invents the Circumlocution Office, run by the Barnacle family. This fictitious department represents everything Carlyle and Dickens loath about the bureaucracy and governmental ignorance of the 19th-century British government. Dickens uses his own, renowned, ironical style to mock the way the government – or rather, the Circumlocution Office – deals with criticism, looks upon change, and loses itself in a bureaucratic paper mill to avoid actually dealing with the problems of the country and the needs and wishes of the people. The Circumlocution Office will be dealt with further onwards in this dissertation.

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4. Money in Little Dorrit 4.1. The Importance of Money in Victorian society As discussed earlier, one of Ruskin’s main points of criticism was the constant pursuit of wealth that dictated life in Victorian England. This aspect of daily life presents itself throughout Little Dorrit, and even though it is not criticized explicitly, it becomes painfully obvious that Dickens condemns this obsession with money. According to Christopher Herbert,

Dickens never tires of mockingly mimicking the sort of complacency expressed in G. M. Young’s celebratory view of the 1850s, but he certainly confirms Young’s sense of the age as one in which the drive to make money was paramount. Thus he embeds the love story in Little Dorrit so deeply in the world of economics as to risk throwing the book morally and artistically out of balance. (196) Indeed, as Herbert continues, “[c]ommerce at all levels—import-export, petty shopkeeping, banking and high finance, contraband trading, entrepreneurship, rent collecting, debt and bankruptcy law, manufacturing, investment, business cycles, unemployment, accountancy— forms the preoccupation of Little Dorrit” (ibid.).

4.1.1. Money as the Common Denominator in Victorian Society

All characters in the novel, even the ones Dickens portrays as very likeable, are subject to this ruling national passion, the desire of getting on in the world. From Mr. Pancks to the poor old man Mr. Nandy, “a poor little reedy piping old gentleman, like a worn-out bird; who had been in what he called the music-binding business, and met with great misfortunes, and who had seldom been able to make his way, or to see it or to pay it, or to do anything at all with it but find it no thoroughfare”, spending his life in the workhouse, and even the good-natured and clever Arthur Clennam, all are easily persuaded to invest all their money in Mr. Merdle’s enterprises in order to enlarge their fortune (Little Dorrit 364).

Hoogerwerf 25 The investment fever has penetrated the poor Bleeding Heart Yard as well, “where there was not one unappropriated halfpenny, as lively an interest was taken in this paragon of men as on the Stock Exchange” (Little Dorrit 571). Merdle is the subject of many conversations in Mrs. Plornish’s grocery. Mr. Plornish, who had a small share in a small builder’s business in the neighbourhood, said, “trowel in hand, on the tops of scaffolds and on the tiles of houses, that people did tell him as Mr. Merdle was the one, mind you, to put us all to rights in respects of that which all on us looked to, and to bring us all safe home as much we needed, mind you, fur toe be brought” (Little Dorrit 571).

More implicit is the case of Mr. Meagles, who seems a balanced, morally superior, intelligent man familiar with the banking business, keeping his old scales on his desk as a constant reminder of his career in finances. Still, Mr. Meagles barely hesitates to marry his beloved daughter Pet off to the brutish Gowan when Gowan’s infatuation with Pet offers the Meagles family a chance to connect with Gowan’s aristocratic family. As Herbert rightly comments: “Is middle-class domesticity and the cult of affectionate family feeling connected by a subterranean cultural logic with the morbid worship of ‘riches and importance’? The Meagles plot is designed to intimate just such a possibility, which to many of Dickens’s original readers must have seemed almost incomprehensibly perverse” (199).

What is remarkable about Little Dorrit, is that, even though the class distinctions which characterized the Victorian era are most definitely present and are carefully respected, they do seem to fade away as the greed and desire for money envelops all characters, whether they belong to the upper classes or to the lower middle-class. Or, as Herbert puts it eloquently:

The society of Little Dorrit is nothing if not sharply stratified along real and fantasmatic class lines, but this condition of seething financial anxiety, of being in the grip of some lethal law of diminishing returns or of some failure of Say’s Law in the very midst of this “money-making age,” is prevalent among high and low, the seemingly opulent and the overwhelmingly impoverished, alike. It affects the great tycoon Mr. Merdle, whose

Hoogerwerf 26 financial resources are supposedly limitless, as keenly as it does Mr. Plornish, the chronically unemployed plasterer. (Herbert 197)

4.1.2. Mr. Pancks The culmination of this craving for wealth is personalized by the character of Mr. Pancks, who is often accompanied by blowing and tooting metaphors concerning tugboats. Mr. Pancks, who works for Mr. Casby and goes around collecting rent from Casby’s tenants in Bleeding Heart Yard, leads a life that is wholly centred around money, how to obtain it and how to pile it on, and he seems to be content doing so:

‘You lead such a busy life?’ [asked Clennam.] ‘Yes, I have always some of ‘em to look up or something to look after. But I like business,’ said Pancks, getting on a little faster. ‘What’s a man made for?’ ‘For nothing else?’ said Clennam. Pancks put the counter question, ‘What else?’ It packed up, in the smallest compass, a weight that had rested on Clennam’s life; and made no answer. ‘That’s what I ask our weekly tenants,’ said Pancks. ‘Some of ‘em will pull long faces to me, and say, Poor as you see us, master, we’re always grinding, drudging, toiling, every minute we’re awake. I say to them, What else are you made for? It shuts them up. They haven’t a word to answer. What else are you made for? That clinches it.’ [...] ‘I have an inclination to get money, sir,’ said Pancks, ‘if you will show me how.’ (Little Dorrit 160 – 161) Pancks truly believes that it is the duty of every man to “be as rich as [they] honestly can”, as it is their duty to support their families (Little Dorrit 584). This becomes clear when he says to Mr. Clennam he ought to become as wealthy as possible: “Not for your sake, but for the sake of others. Take time by the forelock. Poor Mr. Doyce [...] depends upon you. Your relative depends upon you. You don’t know what depends upon you” (Little Dorrit 584). Even when Pancks is helping the Dorrit family to the fortune that is rightfully theirs, he sees this merely as a business transaction, commenting on it that “[i]t may be out of the ordinary course, and yet be business. In short, it is business. I am a man of business. What business have I in this present world, except to stick to business? No business” (Little Dorrit 275-276).

Hoogerwerf 27 Even though Pancks is portrayed as one of the likeable characters in the novel, he shows little compassion towards the people of Bleeding Heart Yard. In this he endorses Ruskin’s view that wealth is in essence part of a power play. By keeping other people poor, Pancks makes his fortune:

‘Bleeding Heart Yard?’ said Pancks, with a puff and a snort. ‘It’s a troublesome property. Don’t pay you badly, but rents are very hard to get there. You have more trouble with that place, than with all the places belonging to you.’ [...] ‘The people are so poor there?’ ‘You can’t say, you know,’ snorted Pancks [...], ‘whether they’re poor or not. They say they are, but they all say that. When a man says he’s rich, you’re generally sure he isn’t. Besides, if they are poor, you can’t help it. You’d be poor yourself if you didn’t get your rents.’ (Little Dorrit 156, my italics) He advises Clennam repeatedly to be greedier, and to become a harsher businessman: “Take all you can get, and keep back all you can’t be forced to give up. That’s business” (Little Dorrit 278).

Ironically, the money gathered by Pancks does not benefit Pancks himself, but goes to his employer or as Pancks refers to Mr. Casby, his ‘proprietor’, who keeps pushing Pancks to extort the Bleeding Hearts as much as he possible can:

‘I mean, Mr. Pancks, that you must be sharper with the people, sharper with the people, much sharper with the people, sir. You don’t squeeze them. You don’t squeeze them. Your receipts are not up to the mark. You must squeeze them sir, or our connection will not continue to be as satisfactory as I could wish it to be, to all parties. All parties.’ ‘Don’t I squeeze ‘em?’ retorted Mr. Pancks. ‘What else am I made for?’ (Little Dorrit 797) When Pancks hears of the Bleeding Hearts investing their money in Mr. Merdle’s enterprises, he decides to investigate the matter. Despite his pragmatism and his insight in business, Pancks fails to see the risks of the investment and he gets carried away by the prospect of making money easily, even convincing Clennam to invest his own money in the process:

‘Right in sharing Calvalletto’s inclination to speculate with Mr. Merdle?’

Hoogerwerf 28 ‘Per-fectly, sir,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve gone into it. I’ve made the calculations. I’ve worked it. They’re safe and genuine.’ [...] ‘Do you mean, my good Pancks,’ asked Clennam, emphatically, ‘that you would put that thousand pounds of yours, let us say, for instance, out at this kind of interest?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Pancks. ‘Already done it, sir.’ [...] ‘I tell you, Mr. Clennam, I’ve gone into it,’ said Pancks. ‘He’s a man of immense resources – enormous capital – government influence. They’re the best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.’ (Little Dorrit 582) Pancks’s investment, like all investments entrusted to Mr. Merdle, will turn out to be a terrible mistake, and along with every investor, Pancks will lose all his money. As Norman Russel accurately points out in his book The Novelist and Mammon. Literary Response to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, this is exactly the warning Dickens wants to give to his readers: invested money is virtual money, a “complex of paper transactions which does the work of money without the actual passing of currency” (17). Dickens shows that not only “the aristocratic moneyed class, the rich bourgeoisie and the nouveaux riches” stumble into the pitfalls of the new financial system, but also large portions of the middle-classes: “Manufacturers, merchants, factors, bankers, people on fixed incomes, retired half-pay officers, governesses, widows, trustees of orphans’ funds, shopkeepers, aristocrats, and gentry all rushed in those years to the stockbrokers to claim their stakes in the new Age of Gold” (Russell 19-20).

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4.2. Clennam & Doyce, Example of Good Business In Little Dorrit, Dickens offers his readers a counterexample for the loss of the “shareable ethos founded on mutual respect, liberty and reciprocal responsibility” that is felt throughout the novel: the company of Clennam & Doyce (Bezrucka). The company subscribes to the old work ethic that according to Dickens has been lost with the coming about of the new economic growth and the development of large companies and monopolies. Mr. Clennam and Mr. Doyce are some of the most likeable characters in the novel, and their partnership is built on their ability to complement each other, Clennam being the business brain behind the company, while Doyce takes care of the technical side of the operation. Dickens shows how both men are sometimes rather clumsy and inexperienced in their industrial endeavours, but they are at the same time down-to-earth, good-willed and honest:

Little peculiarities were easily to be detected by experienced eyes in Mr. Doyce’s way of managing his affairs, but they almost always involved some ingenious simplification of a difficulty, and some plain road to the desired end. That his papers were in arrear, and that he stood in need of assistance to develop the capacity of his business, was clear enough; but all the results of his undertakings during many years were distinctly set forth, and were ascertainable with ease. Nothing had been done for the purposes of the pending investigation; everything was in its genuine working dress, and in a certain honest rugged order. (Little Dorrit 256) The company Clennam & Doyce is, because of their old-fashioned and honest work ethics, an eyesore to the less genial institutions, like the Circumlocution Office. The Circumlocution Office sees it as its duty to obstruct the undertaking of Clennam & Doyce in any way possible as

“an ingenious man [Clennam], had necessarily to encounter every discouragement that the ruling powers for a length of time had been able by any means to put in the way of this class of culprits; but that was only reasonable self-defence in the powers, since How to do it must obviously be regarded as the natural and mortal enemy of How not to do it. In this was to be found the basis of the wise system, by tooth and nail upheld by the Circumlocution Office, of warning every ingenious British subject to be ingenious at his peril: of harassing him, obstructing him, inviting robbers (by making his remedy

Hoogerwerf 30 uncertain, difficult and expensive) to plunder him, and at the best of confiscating his property after a short term of enjoyment, as though invention were on a par with felony.” (Little Dorrit 514) Mr. Doyce, who is an inventor, though it never becomes clear what exactly is his invention, is given a hard time by the Circumlocution Office, even though he only wants to do good for his country. Doyce is successful in whatever his undertaking is, until he is noticed by the members of that infamous institution:

And so at home he had established himself in business, and had invented and executed, and worked his way on, until, after a dozen years of constant suit and service, he had been enrolled in the Great British Legion of Honour, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the Circumlocution Office, and had been decorated with the Great British Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings. (Little Dorrit 188) This infuriates Doyce’s friend Mr. Meagles greatly: “He is a public offender. What has he been guilty of? Murder, manslaughter, arson, forgery, swindling, [...]? Which should you say, now?’ [...] ‘[H]e has been ingenious and he has been trying to turn his ingenuity to his country’s service. That makes him a public offender directly, sir” (Little Dorrit 119). This unwillingness to help advance young entrepreneurs and the tendency to confuse and discourage them by trapping them in an endless paper mill, is presented as something that is typically English, as Doyce seems to realize: “Oh! Of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why many go there” (Little Dorrit 122). To prove that Doyce’s case is not an isolated incident, he comments: “Have you ever heard of any projector or inventor who failed to find [the administration] all but inaccessible, and whom did not discourage and ill-treat?” (Little Dorrit 122) Dickens’s irony reaches another peak when he describes the Circumlocution Office’s view on the way other countries in Europe treat their entrepreneurs:

A certain barbaric Power with valuable possessions on the map of the world, had occasion for the services of one or two engineers, quick in invention and determined in

Hoogerwerf 31 execution. [...] This Power, being a barbaric one, had no idea of stowing away a great national object in a Circumlocution Office [...]. With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and energetic notions of How to do it; and never showed the least respect for, or gave any quarter to, the great political science How not to do it. ( Little Dorrit 672) Eventually, Doyce leaves the country to develop his invention abroad. Clennam is left behind to take care of the business, and allows himself to be persuaded by Mr. Pancks to invest the company’s money in Mr. Merdle’s businesses, a choice he will soon regret. The company Clennam & Doyce goes bankrupt as a result of the Merdle scandal. Clennam, who has been seduced by the desire for unearned money has in fact invested all the company's capital in the Merdle speculation. He accepts full responsibility for this bankruptcy, caring more about the effect this will have on his partner Doyce than on his own person, which proves again that he is one of the most honest, if slightly naive, characters in the novel:

‘I,’ pursued Clennam, without attending to him, ‘who have ruined my partner! Pancks, Pancks, I have ruined Doyce! The honest, self-helpful, indefatigable old man, who has worked his way all through his life; the man who has contended against so much disappointment, and who has brought out of it such a good and hopeful nature; the man I have felt so much for, and meant to be so true and useful to; I have ruined him – brought him to shame and disgrace – ruined him, ruined him!’ (Little Dorrit 711) Clennam will be brought to Marshalsea Prison until he is able to pay his debts, surprising the turnkeys, who were “more astonished on seeing who the new prisoner was, than one might have thought turnkeys would have been” (Little Dorrit 718). Even though Clennam’s fate seems to be harsh, he does get rewarded for his truthfulness and sincerity when he confesses his love to Amy Dorrit and leaves the Marshalsea Prison to marry her.

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4.3. The Destructive Power of Money In the final chapters of Little Dorrit, Dickens’s loathing for the obsession with money occupying most of his characters becomes very clear when each of them meets their downfall and loses their beloved fortune. The ruin of many of the characters can be directly related to their trust in Mr. Merdle, the rich tycoon who commits suicide in a bathing house. When he is dead, the impressive figure of Merdle is reduced to a common man with “the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features” (Little Dorrit 705). Soon, rumours begin to circulate about Merdle’s true nature and the true origin of his poor health and nervous constitution, “for by that time it was known that the late Mr. Merdle's complaint had been simply Forgery and Robbery” (Little Dorrit 710).

The consequences of Merdle’s deception are immediate and severe:

Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by [Merdle’s] insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel. Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes; every servile worshipper of riches who had helped to set him on his pedestal, would have done better to worship the Devil point-blank. (Little Dorrit 709) People from all social layers of society have entrusted their money to Merdle, so his swindling has an effect that reaches from the highest upper class, where Merdle has cheated his peers, to the lower classes who have invested their sparse savings. One of the victims of Merdle’s scam is Mr. Clennam and his company, Clennam & Doyce. Dickens uses a very powerful metaphor when describing the devastation brought about when Mr. Pancks, who had encouraged Clennam to make the disastrous investment, visits the company with the bad news:

Hoogerwerf 33 With a precursory sound of hurried breath and hurried feet, Mr. Pancks rushed into Arthur Clennam's Counting-house. The Inquest was over, the letter was public, the Bank was broken, the other model structures of straw had taken fire and were turned to smoke. The admired piratical ship had blown up, in the midst of a vast fleet of ships of all rates, and boats of all sizes; and on the deep was nothing but ruin; nothing but burning hulls, bursting magazines, great guns self-exploded tearing friends and neighbours to pieces, drowning men clinging to unseaworthy spars and going down every minute, spent swimmers floating dead, and sharks. (Little Dorrit 711) As N. N. Feltes points out in his article “Community and the Limits of Liability in two MidVictorian Novels”, Clennam accepts full responsibility for the bankruptcy of the company, as the decision to invest money was entirely his own and his partner Doyce had even warned him for dangerous investments before going abroad. Feltes justly remarks that Clennam did not need to take all responsibility for the loss of money, as the new laws prescribing the new principle of ‘limited liability’, the Limited Liability Act and the Joint Stock Companies Act, had already passed (364). Still, the way in which Clennam accepts his fate and is above all loyal to his partner and colleague, proves again that Dickens sees Clennam as an offset for the morally corrupt Mr. Merdle, who escapes the consequences of his actions by committing suicide. Without hesitation, Clennam decides to sacrifice all he has left in order to clear Doyce’s reputation:

‘My course’, said Clennam, brushing away some tears that had been silently dropping down his face, ‘must be taken at once. What wretched amends I can make must be made. I must clear my unfortunate partner's reputation. I must retain nothing for myself. I must resign to our creditors the power of management I have so much abused, and I must work out as much of my fault – or crime – as is susceptible of being worked out in the rest of my days.’ (Little Dorrit 713) When the bailiffs are coming round for Clennam, “[t]hey walked through the Yard to the other end. The Bleeding Hearts were more interested in Arthur since his reverses than formerly; now regarding him as one who was true to the place and had taken up his freedom. Many of them came out to look after him, and to observe to one another, with great unctuousness, that he was pulled down by it” (Little Dorrit 718).

Hoogerwerf 34 Indeed, not only the factory in Bleeding Heart Yard had suffered from the Merdle scandal, but most of its poorer inhabitants had invested their money in Merdle as well. Still, their wretched state is not entirely to blame on Mr. Merdle. The Bleeding Hearts show a naïveté in doing business that shows their good nature, but at the same time makes it seem as though their poverty is of their own doing. The best example of this is Mrs. Plornish’s business, which she is able to set up with the money she receives from Mr. Dorrit. Mrs. Plornish sees her grocery store as a great success, as she has a lot of customers and her stock keeps selling out. However, no one is paying for the products, as she keeps giving the buyers credit:

‘It’s quite true that the business is very steady indeed,’ said Mrs. Plornish, lowering her voice; ‘and has a excellent connection. The only thing that stands in its way, sir, is the Credit.’ This drawback, rather severely felt by most people who engaged in commercial transactions with the inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard, was a large stumbling-block in Mrs. Plornish’s trade. When Mr. Dorrit had established her in the business, the Bleeding Hearts had shown an amount of emotion and a determination to support her in it, that did honour to human nature. [...] Influenced by these noble sentiments, they had even gone out of their way to purchase little luxuries in the grocery and butter line to which they were unaccustomed [...] In short, if the Bleeding Hearts had but paid, the undertaking would have been a complete success; whereas, by reason of their exclusively confining themselves to owing, the profits actually realised had not yet begun to appear in the books. (Little Dorrit 575 – 576) This solidarity, which gives the Bleeding Hearts an affable character, is typical for their behaviour. They are willing to be references for one another, even though they know they are all equally poor, to the annoyance of Mr. Pancks, the rent collector, who claims they are like “a person with two wooden legs, getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs” (Little Dorrit 273). The benevolent nature of the Bleeding Hearts also shows in their behaviour towards Mr. Pancks, who is after all the man who has persuaded them to invest their hard-earned money. Pancks, who is devastated by the havoc he has caused, wallows in his feelings of guilt and keeps going over the numbers that have led him astray:

Hoogerwerf 35 Solely supported by his unimpugnable calculations, Mr Pancks led an unhappy and restless life; constantly carrying his figures about with him in his hat, and not only going over them himself on every possible occasion, but entreating every human being he could lay hold of to go over them with him, and observe what a clear case it was. Down in Bleeding Heart Yard there was scarcely an inhabitant of note to whom Mr. Pancks had not imparted his demonstration, and, as figures are catching, a kind of cyphering measles broke out in that locality, under the influence of which the whole Yard was light-headed. (Little Dorrit 798) Despite his consternation about what he has done, and encouraged by his feelings of guilt, Pancks manages to address one of the injustices that are only dealt with indirectly throughout the course of the novel: the greed of Mr. Casby. Casby has an immaculate reputation and is a loved public figure. He is given the epithet of ‘The Last of Patriarchs’, and earned the public’s approval by acting as a “Patriarch for painters and for sculptors; with so much importunity, in sooth, that it would appear to be beyond the Fine Arts to remember the points of a Patriarch, or to invent one” (Little Dorrit 146). Underneath all this generosity and benevolence, however, Casby hides the personality of a money-grabber. When Clennam encounters Casby for the first time, to pay his respects, “Mr. Casby seemed a feather's weight disappointed by the last words, having perhaps prepared himself for the visitor's wishing to pay something else” (Little Dorrit 146). There are rumours about Casby’s true nature and about him being a “heavy, selfish, drifting Booby, who, having stumbled, in the course of his unwieldy jostlings against other men, on the discovery that to get through life with ease and credit, he had but to hold his tongue, keep the bald part of his head well polished, and leave his hair alone”, but he manages to distance himself from his financial affairs by sending Pancks in to do the dirty work (Little Dorrit 149). When Pancks sees how the Bleeding Hearts are ruined and is then urged on by Casby to extort them even more, he decides to expose Casby’s true nature to his tenants by meeting him in the middle of Bleeding Heart Yard and accusing him of being “one of a lot of impostors that are the worst lot of all the lots to be met with”, “a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, and squeezer, and shaver by substitute”, “a philanthropic sneak” and “a shabby deceiver”(Little Dorrit 800). Pancks uses the opportunity at hand to point out to the audience that has gathered

Hoogerwerf 36 that it is in fact Casby who is bleeding the Bleeding Hearts dry, not Pancks the messenger, who is constantly urged “never to leave off conjugating the Imperative Mood Present Tense of the verb To keep always at it. Keep thou always at it. Let him keep always at it. Keep we or do we keep always at it. Keep ye or do ye or you keep always at it. Let them keep always at it” (Little Dorrit 802).

When under attack, it becomes clear that Casby’s stoic, elegant and pompous exterior is merely an act. He is stunned by Pancks’s attack and offers no counterarguments at all:

The Last of the Patriarchs had been so seized by assault, and required so much room to catch an idea in, and so much more room to turn it in, that he had not a word to offer in reply. He appeared to be meditating some Patriarchal way out of his delicate position, when Mr Pancks, once more suddenly applying the trigger to his hat, shot it off again with his former dexterity. (Little Dorrit 802) Pancks completes Casby’s public humiliation by taking away those physical characteristics that make Casby so stately and memorable: he cuts of Casby’s long, flowing locks and ruins his hat, leaving Casby a “bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big-headed lumbering personage, [...] not in the least impressive, not in the least venerable, who seemed to have started out of the earth to ask what was become of Casby” (Little Dorrit 803). So even though Casby is not a victim of the Merdle crises and does not lose his property and fortune like Merdle and Clennam & Doyce, he is punished for his greed eventually.

Finally, the last victims of the Merdle crisis are revealed: the Dorrit family. We learn this when Amy Dorrit visits Clennam, who is incarcerated at the Marshalsea Prison after the bankruptcy of Clennam & Doyce: “'You will be sorry to hear what I have to tell you about Fanny. Poor Fanny has lost everything. She has nothing left but her husband's income. All that papa gave her when she married was lost as your money was lost. It was in the same hands, and it is all gone” (Little Dorrit 817).

Hoogerwerf 37 As Fanny Dorrit has married Merdle’s stepson, the Dorrits had invested all their newly obtained money in Merdle’s enterprises, as Clennam had already expected: “I had feared a heavy loss there, knowing the connection between her husband and the defaulter” (Little Dorrit 817). Amy Dorrit is again the poor girl she was in the first part of the novel:

'I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here. When papa came over to England, he confided everything he had to the same hands, and it is all swept away. O my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?' (Little Dorrit 817) In the end, Clennam and Little Dorrit are both rewarded for their honesty, their righteousness and their virtue, giving the story a happy ending and a positive outcome. Dickens’s moral lesson is clear: the obsession of the British with money and fortune will only lead to their downfall, but those who stay truthful and sincere will be rewarded eventually.

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5. Money as a Prison 5.1. Prison Metaphors and Symbolism The most prominent and most powerful symbol in Little Dorrit is that of the prison. Prison imagery and prison metaphors recur on every level of the novel and are part of all the storylines. Dickens uses these prisons as metaphors for the way the characters are imprisoned by their obsession with money, using both actual and symbolical prisons to show that people on all levels of society feel in one way or another imprisoned, whether that is by the lack of money, the constant pressure to get more money, or the pressure of society accompanying great amounts of money. Before discussing some of these cases in detail, I will start by giving a general overview of the prison symbolism in Little Dorrit.

First there are of course the real prisons occurring in the narrative, of which the Marshalsea prison is only one example. The story opens describing a searing hot summer scene in Marseille, moving on to a description of a dirty, rundown prison building where Rigaud and Cavalletto are incarcerated:

In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other vermin, in addition to the seen vermin, the two men. (Little Dorrit 2) In the next chapter, Dickens depicts a group of travellers kept in quarantine after travelling in the East. Though living in completely different circumstances than the prisoners in Marseilles, they are prohibited from leaving their comfortable quarters, which causes frustration with Mr. Clennam, who is among the travellers: “It’s almost an aggravation of the enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out? What have we ever been in for?” (Little Dorrit 15).

Hoogerwerf 39 Another prison is encountered when the Dorrit family is travelling through Switzerland. They are staying at the St. Bernard monastery during winter, a few weeks before the monastery will be completely snowed in and unreachable. Mr. Dorrit is baffled by the calmness of the monks, who spend their life in this kind of barren isolation by choice:

The cold was very severe. One needed youth and strength to bear it. However, having them and the blessing of heaven – Yes, that was very good. ‘But the confinement,’ said the grey-haired gentleman. There were many days, even in bad weather, when it was possible to walk about outside. It was the custom to beat a little track, and take exercise there. ‘But the space,’ urged the grey-haired gentleman. ‘So small. So– ha – very limited.’ Monsieur would recall to himself that there were the refugees to visit, and that tracks had to be made to them also. Monsieur still urged, on the other hand, that the space was so – ha – hum – so very contracted. More than that, it was always the same, always the same. With a deprecating smile, the host gently raised and gently lowered his shoulders. That was true, he remarked, but permit him to say that almost all objects had their various points of view. (Little Dorrit 140) The most important prison in the novel, however, is the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. As Christopher Herbert points out, the Marshalsea is the basis of Little Dorrit’s most important metaphor, serving several functions throughout the novel, but “first and foremost, the Marshalsea is the symbolic correlative of the persistent feeling among Dickens’s characters of never having enough money to pay their debts, and of being perpetually and agonizingly at risk, consequently, of failure and bankruptcy no matter what they do” (Herbert 197). A fear that will prove to be justified in case of most of the characters in the novel, as discussed above.

On The Victorian Web, Yvonne Bezrucka points out that Dickens not only uses tangible prisons made of jails and jailers in the novel. There is a spiritual imprisonment which concerns all characters and which is perceived at all levels of the book. Mr. Clennam’s mother is imprisoned in her own house. At first it seems this is the consequence of her disabled limbs:

Hoogerwerf 40 ‘Do you never leave your room, mother?’ ‘What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility or nervous weakness – names are of no matter now – I have lost the use of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door for – tell him for how long,’ she said, speaking over her shoulder. ‘A dozen year next Christmas,’ returned a cracked voice out of the dimness behind. (Little Dorrit 35) Later on, it will become clear that Mrs. Clennam is not only the prisoner of her own body, but is also imprisoned mentally by the secret she has been keeping since Clennam was born: that he is not her real son, but the result of an adulterous affair Clennam’s father had. Because of this, she finds a masochistic delight in her confinement, often interjecting: “Not that I complain of being afflicted; you know I never complain of that” (Little Dorrit 185). When this information threatens to be disclosed, she manages to walk all the way to the Marshalsea prison to tell her story to Amy Dorrit, breaking out of her prison to protect Clennam.

Another example of mental imprisonment is found in the character of Mr. Dorrit. In the first part of the novel, he is literally imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, but even after he is released and becomes a wealthy man, Mr. Dorrit is still caged in his own mind. Now he becomes the prisoner in his own head, constantly hiding the fact that he once was a poor man, living in fear of his own servants, a victim of his own fortune. His daughter Amy is also a captive of this fortune, although in an entirely different way. She keeps longing back for her simple life in the Marshalsea and cannot get used to the life of a rich girl. Surrounded by servants, she feels lonelier than ever.

As several critics point out, it is indeed society in itself that is the main prison of the novel. Society coheres thanks to an unwritten code regulating hierarchies of identity which work according to the well-known categories of class, race, and gender (Bezrucka). The most obvious example apart from Amy Dorrit is Mr. Merdle, the rich business tycoon, who is driven to suicide

Hoogerwerf 41 when he can no longer deal with the demands of society. The cases of Mr. Dorrit, Amy Dorrit and Mr. Merdle will be discussed in detail below.

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5.2. The Marshalsea Prison The most important real, rather than symbolical, prison in the novel, is the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. The Marshalsea, which was once a real prison in the city centre of London, “a few doors short of the church of Saint George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward”, holds a special meaning for Dickens himself, as it was the debtors’ prison his own father was locked up in when Dickens was still a child (Little Dorrit 57). However, Dickens does not mention this personal connection to the Marshalsea in the introduction to Little Dorrit, even though he does talk about the prison:

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or not any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned in this story, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey’, I came to ‘Marshalsea Place’: the houses in which I recognized, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s-eye when I became Little Dorrit’s biographer. (Little Dorrit xiii-xiv) By saying that he recognizes the buildings of the former prison, the reader can deduct that Dickens is indeed familiar with the place. Dickens’s memories of that time are unhappy and traumatizing, and he expresses his relief that it had been closed by the time he wrote Little Dorrit: “It had stood there many years before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it” (Little Dorrit 57).

Dickens presents the Marshalsea prison as a bleak, sombre institution, a collection of tattered houses gathered together, closed off from the rest of the world by high walls. Inside the prison, there is a separate area for smugglers, but in reality these mingle among the debtors whenever they wish to do so (Little Dorrit 57). It has a depressing effect on the inmates and their visitors,

Hoogerwerf 43 as becomes clear when Mr. Clennam is accidentally locked inside at night after a visit to the Dorrit family:

The walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried over them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of sea-sickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he had visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of the wall, where he walked up and down among waifs of straw and dust and paper, the waste droppings of the pump and the stray leaves of yesterday’s greens. It was a haggard a view of life as a man need look upon. (Little Dorrit 90) When Clennam himself becomes a Collegian in the Marshalsea prison after the bankruptcy of his company Clennam & Doyce, the influence of being in that sad, downcast place has a strong effect on him: “Shrinking from the observation of other men, and shrinking from his own, he began to change very sensibly. Anybody might see that the shadow of the wall was dark upon him” (Little Dorrit 735). For Clennam, the world inside the prison is a world that is entirely separated from the world outside. It marks a new chapter in his life, and “[i]n the unnatural peace of having gone through the dreaded arrest, and got there, - the first change of feeling which the prison most commonly induced, and from which dangerous resting-place so many men had slipped down to the depths of degradation and disgrace, by so many ways, - he could think of some passages in his life, almost as if he were removed from them into another state of existence” (Little Dorrit 720).

Even for Amy Dorrit, who is born and raised inside the walls of the Marshalsea, and has no other place to call home, the prison walls seem claustrophobic at times, when “the spikes upon the wall were tipped with red, then made a sullen purple pattern on the sun as it came flaming up into the heavens. The spikes had never looked so sharp and cruel, nor the bars to heavy, nor the prison space so gloomy and contracted” (Little Dorrit 231). Amy dreams of “the sunrise on rolling rivers, of the sunrise on wide seas, of the sunrise on rich landscapes, of the sunrise on

Hoogerwerf 44 great forests where the birds were waking and the trees were rustling” (Little Dorrit 231), but she could never dream of leaving her father alone between those dreadful walls.

The inhabitants of the Marshalsea are very poor, and so is Mr. Dorrit, who is the ‘Father of the Marshalsea’, and enjoys several privileges no other prisoner has. He has no moral objection to accepting the donations made by other Collegians. Every day he walks “with his own poor shabby dignity past the Collegian in the dressing-gown who had no coat, and past the Collegian in the sea-side slippers who had no shoes, and past the stout greengrocer Collegian in the corduroy knee-breeches who had no cares, and past the lean clerk Collegian in buttonless black who had no hopes, up his own shabby staircase, to his own poor shabby room” (Little Dorrit 225).

Despite all this negativity that surrounds the Marshalsea, Dickens does show his readers that not everything inside the prison walls is bad. The Collegians are depicted as good-natured, positive people who, despite their obvious flaws, show a lot of compassion with their fellow inmates and are willing to help out wherever they are needed. In describing the Collegians as such, Dickens creates the image that the Collegians are all victims of the money-driven society they live in. By using seemingly ordinary people and not real criminals, Dickens warns his audience that they could be victims as well, ending up in a place like the Marshalsea.

When the Dorrit family receives the wonderful news that they have access to a large sum of money and, later on, leave the Marshalsea prison triumphantly, the Collegians who are left behind do not begrudge the Dorrits’ their good fortune:

The Collegians were not envious. Besides that they had a personal and traditional regard for a Collegian of so many years’ standing, the event was creditable to the College, and made it famous in the newspapers. Perhaps more of them thought, too, than were quite aware of it, that the thing might in the lottery of chances have happened to themselves, or that something of the sort might yet happen to themselves, some day or other. They took it very well. A few were low at the thought of being left

Hoogerwerf 45 behind, and being left poor; but even these did not grudge the family their brilliant reverse. There might have been much more envy in politer places. It seems probable that mediocrity of fortune would have been disposed to be less magnanimous than the Collegians, who lived from hand to mouth – from the pawnbroker’s hand to the day’s dinner. (Little Dorrit 424-425) What is most remarkable about the Marshalsea prison, however, is how Dickens uses it as a recurring symbol throughout the novel. As Herbert puts it:

All trains of thought in Little Dorrit do end at this gate. In one of his most brilliant fictional inventions, Dickens not only focuses the action of the tale relentlessly upon the locale of the Marshalsea, but, in addition, he symbolically transcribes the unconscious life of this outwardly prosperous society as a constellation of different living quarters, from Bleeding Heart yard to the mansions around Grosvenor Square, all of which, as a number of critics have observed, uncannily reproduce the image of debtor’s prison. (197) The debtor’s prison in a way represents the indifference of the government towards the fate of those less fortunate. As mentioned earlier, inside the prison there was a separate wing for smugglers, who were supposed to be kept apart from and more confined than the debtors. In reality, however, “the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors (who received them with open arms), except at certain constitutional moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of overlooking something, which neither he nor anybody else knew anything about. On those truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this somebody pretended to do his something; and made a reality of walking out again as soon as he hadn’t done it – neatly epitomising the administration of most of the public affairs, in our right little, tight little, island” (Little Dorrit 57). This inadequacy, which is one of Dickens’s main points of criticism with regard to the government’s administration, will also become overtly clear in his narration of the Circumlocution Office, discussed below.

Hoogerwerf 46 On top of that, the prisoners of the Marshalsea show remarkable similarities to the people belonging to other layers of society. It is not coincidental that it is often Amy Dorrit, the child of the Marshalsea, who notices these similarities. As she is raised inside the walls of the prison, she knows the inmates and their personalities and habits better than anyone. The resemblance to the Marshalsea is something that to her is often comforting. When she is looking for her sister Fanny, who works as a dancer in a London theatre, she is ignorant about how the theatre world functions. Upon seeing “some half-dozen close-shaved gentlemen with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door, looking not at all unlike Collegians”, she feels reassured and approaches them for directions (Little Dorrit 233).

As Herbert points out, it is also Amy who remarks that the international society she frequents while travelling abroad with her family after they have left the Marshalsea prison, also shows an uncanny resemblance to the Marshalsea Collegians, even though they feel much superior. They go abroad for the same reasons people enter the prison, namely “through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home” (Little Dorrit 511). They surround themselves with couriers, followers and maids, who control them just like the Collegians are controlled by the turnkeys. The Marshalsea habits are matched accurately abroad:

They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom. They were envied when they went away, by people left behind feigning not to want to go: and that was again the Marshalsea habit invariably.[...] They had precisely the same incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have; they rather deteriorated one another, as the prisoners used to do; and they wore untidy dresses, and fell into a slouching way of life: still, always like the people in the Marshalsea. (Little Dorrit 511) The two main characters who are confronted with both life in the Marshalsea and life in the prison of upper class society, are Mr. and Amy Dorrit. They will both react in a completely different way to the life in the Marshalsea and their rise to fortune, but in the end it will become clear that both are, in the end, scarred for life by the Marshalsea prison.

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5.3. From Rags to Riches 5.3.1. Amy Dorrit, a Prisoner of Riches Amy Dorrit, the youngest daughter in the Dorrit family, often nicknamed Little Dorrit, represents what Dickens considers to be a good person. She is the morally superior character in the novel, clever and observant yet docile and submissive. As Emily Constable in her online article “Female Saviors in Victorian Literature: Amy Dorrit” comments:

Throughout Little Dorrit, Amy takes it upon herself to care for and help others to the best of her ability. She does not wish to have independence and she possesses strange character quirks and insecurities that make her unlike the heroines of feminist authors. Little Dorrit seems to require someone to care for as an essential part of her existence. She lacks the pride and self-respect that are so apparent in heroines such as Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh. What is most remarkable about Amy in the light of this dissertation, is that unlike every other character in Little Dorrit, Amy is quite uninterested in all things having to do with money. In the first book of the novel, she has a job at Mrs. Clennam’s, but she only works there in order to provide for her father and her siblings, not for her own personal gain. In the second book, after the family has become wealthy, Amy’s personality is entirely unaffected by her sudden material comfort, unlike that of her family. If anything, she unhappier being a rich girl. By giving Amy’s story a happy ending along with the loss of her fortune in the Merdle scandal, Dickens proves yet again that money is not the key to happiness.

Amy is called the Child of the Marshalsea. She was born and raised within its walls and has hardly any knowledge of life outside the prison, only leaving to go to work. The prison is the only home she has ever known:

With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything indeed, but with something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of the Marshalsea and child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or

Hoogerwerf 48 wandered about the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek, and made the iron bars of the inner gateway ‘Home’. (Little Dorrit 69) Amy is a good-natured, honest and obedient girl who sacrifices everything for her father, brother and sister without ever being appreciated in return. The money she earns is spent on food for her father, and her own accommodations are meagre, though she seems perfectly content:

A garret, and a Marshalsea garret without compromise, was Little Dorrit’s room. Beautifully kept, it was ugly in itself, and had little but cleanliness and air to set it off; for what embellishment she had ever been able to buy, had gone to her father’s room. Howbeit, for this poor place she showed an increasing love; and to sit in it alone became her favourite rest. (Little Dorrit 291) Mr. Clennam, who wants to help Amy and her family, takes great pity on the girl. He has travelled the world and finds it hard to comprehend that the sweet girl he will eventually fall in love with, has grown up in a place as harsh as the Marshalsea:

‘Don’t call it home, my child!’ he entreated. ‘It is always painful to me to hear you call it home.’ ‘But it is home! What else can I call home? Why should I ever forget it for a single moment?’ ‘You never do, dear Little Dorrit, in any good and true service’. (Little Dorrit 263) When confronted with life outside the prison, Amy often feels insecure. She has grown up in an isolated environment, and when dealing with situations she is unfamiliar with, she tends to look for similarities between her life in the prison and the people outside it:

Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the ways of theatres as of the ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a furtive sort of door, with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed of itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated

Hoogerwerf 49 to approach it; being further deterred by the sight of some half-dozen close-shaved gentlemen with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door, looking not at all unlike Collegians. On her applying to them, reassured by this resemblance, for a direction to Miss Dorrit, they made way for her to enter a dark hall-it was more like a great grim lamp gone out than anything else--where she could hear the distant playing of music and the sound of dancing feet. (Little Dorrit 233) Despite Amy’s softness and her submissive nature, she is without doubt a character with surprising insight in the society surrounding her. Although she thinks highly of her father, she does realise that outside of the prison walls, he would not be treated with the same respect by the people surrounding him. When Mr. Clennam offers to help the Dorrit family, Amy is very reluctant to accept his help, realising that her father, who had lived in the prison for over twenty years, would not adjust, yet again sacrificing her own happiness for her father’s.

It is also striking that Amy is the one drawing the comparison between Marshalsea Collegians and the aristocratic society the Dorrit family encounters on their travels abroad. She observes that there are clear parallels with “the Marshalsea habits”, and realizes that her family has moved from the Marshalsea prison to another, metaphorical prison: society (Little Dorrit 511). She sees how, despite the fact that the members of the aristocracy live in great material comfort, they are still governed by money, just as the prisoners of the Marshalsea.

Unlike her family members, who keep up appearances of being happy and at ease in their new life, Amy has great difficulty adjusting. Their new surroundings, their new company and the presence of several servants and courtiers unnerves her, and she feels like living in a dream world:

Sitting opposite her father in the travelling-carriage, and recalling the old Marshalsea room, her present existence was a dream. All that she saw was new and wonderful, but it was not real; it seemed to her as if those visions of mountains and picturesque countries might melt away at any moment, and the carriage, turning some abrupt corner, bring up with a jolt at that Marshalsea gate. (Little Dorrit, 461)

Hoogerwerf 50 Abroad, she becomes very homesick, and “[s]he would think of that old gate, and of herself sitting at it in the dead of the night, pillowing Maggy’s head; and of other places and of other scenes associated with those different times. And then she would lean upon her balcony, and look over at the water, as though they all lay underneath it” (Little Dorrit 467). This longing for her former life is not appreciated by her family members, who are primarily concerned with concealing their past out of fear – fear of losing the respect of their peers, and fear of losing the respect of their servants. She is constantly reproached by her father for keeping her old habits and referring to their life in the prison:

'Amy,' he returned, turning short upon her. 'You--ha--habitually hurt me.' ‘Hurt you, father! I!’ ‘There is a--hum--a topic,’ said Mr. Dorrit, looking all about the ceiling of the room, and never at the attentive, uncomplainingly shocked face, 'a painful topic, a series of events which I wish -- ha--altogether to obliterate. This is understood by your sister, who has already remonstrated with you in my presence; it is understood by your brother; it is understood by--ha hum--by every one of delicacy and sensitiveness except yourself-ha--I am sorry to say, except yourself. You, Amy--hum--you alone and only you -constantly revive the topic, though not in words.’ (Little Dorrit 478-479) It is significant, as Emily Constable rightly notices, that Amy finds happiness when she returns to the Marshalsea to take care of Mr. Clennam, who has been incarcerated there after going bankrupt because of the Merdle scandal and who has fallen ill, “[l]ight of head and with want of sleep and food” (Little Dorrit 824). She takes on the habits she used to have when taking care of her father, completing a circle that brings her back to where she started her life. Amy willingly wants to give up her fortune to pay Clennam’s debt, which he refuses. It is only when Amy tells him that her family has lost all its money in the Merdle scandal, they truly confess their love for each other.

Dickens conveys a strong moral message in Amy’s story. She is the moral superior character in the novel, has no real flaws and is most importantly not as obsessed with money as every other main character. Because she is not affected by this money craze, her personality is not influenced

Hoogerwerf 51 by her family’s rise to fortune, and its demise at the end of the novel. As Emily Constable puts it: “Dickens does not empower Little Dorrit in the same way that Browning does Aurora Leigh, but he nevertheless creates his heroine in an admirable and benevolent way that far surpasses the goodness or influence of any of his male characters”. Eventually, Amy is rewarded for her inherent kindness and good nature, and she is able to leave the Marshalsea behind and start a new life with her love Mr. Clennam. This is contrasted with the fate of her father, who is so obsessed with money he is imprisoned by it until his death, as will be discussed below.

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5.3.2. Mr. Dorrit, a Prisoner of Poverty Mr. Dorrit’s case seems to be, at first sight, the opposite of his daughter Amy’s. While Amy is at home in the Marshalsea and dreams of going back to that simple, poor life, Mr. Dorrit feels like it is his right to be a part of the upper class society he has always wanted to belong to. When taking a closer look at the development of Mr. Dorrit’s character, however, it appears that things are not quite that straightforward. In portraying the evolution of Mr. Dorrit from ignorant but relatively happy prison royalty to an unhappy, rich gentleman always worrying about keeping up appearances in front of his peers, Dickens shows that money is not always the defining factor of happiness, which was according to him the common belief in British society.

In Book I, when Mr. Dorrit becomes a long-term Collegian in the Marshalsea prison, Dickens describes how Dorrit ascends to a status of ‘prison royalty’. Based on his seniority, he treats the other inmates as subservient, but always with a genteel, rather hypocritical generosity which he believes is typical of people who really belong to the upper classes in society:

All new comers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction of this ceremony. The wits would perform the office of introduction with overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could not easily overstep his sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked an introduction in the mere yard, as informal – a thing that might happen to anybody), with a kind of bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of the place. So the world was kind enough to call him; and so he was, if more than twenty years of residence gave him a claim to the title. (Little Dorrit 65) Mr. Dorrit keeps living in this fantasy world for his entire stay in the prison, and “the more dependent he became on the contributions of his changing family, the greater stand he made by his forlorn gentility” (Little Dorrit 73). He treats his brother Frederick with the same condescension he treats his fellow inmates with, even though Frederick is not the one being imprisoned with debt:

Hoogerwerf 53 The brothers William and Frederick Dorrit, walking up and down the College-yard – of course on the aristocratic or Pump side […] – the brothers, walking up and down the College-yard together, were a memorable sight. Frederick the free, was so humbled, bowed, withered, and faded; William the bond, was so courtly, condescending, and benevolently conscious of a position; that in this regard only, if in no other, the brothers were a spectacle to wonder at. (Little Dorrit 221) Mr. Dorrit’s greatest supporter is his daughter, Amy. She sees her father as superior to everyone else, a man with the manners of a gentleman, who does not belong in a place as poor and depressing as the Marshalsea. Her entire life has been devoted to taking care of her father, whom she loves unquestionably. For his sake, Amy keeps up the pretence of her father providing for his family, while in reality, it is Amy who provides for the entire family with her needlework. Not only is she not appreciated for her efforts, they are altogether ignored by her father, who is hurt whenever a reference to her employment is made.

In order to protect the fantasy world Dorrit lives in, his family and the people surrounding him have an unspoken agreement to keep everything that might harm Dorrit from him. One of many examples illustrating this is found when Dorrit’s son Tip makes some questionable business decisions and is imprisoned in the Marshalsea as well. Amy conceals this from her father, knowing it would hurt his pride and his feelings. When Mr. Clennam visits the Marshalsea prison for the first time, he is initiated in this collective secrecy:

[Frederick Dorrit] went on again, and Arthur accompanied him. ‘My brother,’ said the old man, pausing on the step, and slowly facing round again, ‘has been here many years; and much that happens even among ourselves, out of doors, is kept from him for reasons that I needn’t enter upon now. Be so good as to say nothing of my niece’s working at her needle. Be so good as to say nothing that goes beyond what is said among us. If you keep within our bounds, you cannot well be wrong. Now! Come and see.’ (Little Dorrit 81) Mr. Dorrit is treated like a bit of an old fool by his family, but despite of that, Dickens shows at several points in the novel that Mr. Dorrit is in fact aware of the things going on behind his back.

Hoogerwerf 54 One clear example is Mr. Dorrit’s reaction after hearing the news of his newly gained fortune, when he talks about informing his children of the good news: “We must break it to them cautiously, but they must be informed directly. We owe it as a duty to them and to ourselves, from this moment, not to let them--hum--not to let them do anything” (Little Dorrit 420). This is the “first intimation he had ever given, that he was privy to the fact that they did something for a livelihood” (Little Dorrit, 420).

Even though it seems that Mr. Dorrit’s children play along in his claims of a gentile heritage for Dorrit’s sake, it becomes clear that Fanny and Tip are raised to believe in this charade. When Fanny meets with Mrs. Merdle to discuss Mrs. Merdle’s son’s wedding proposal to Fanny, Mrs. Merdle alludes to Fanny’s status as mere dancer, to which an indignant Fanny responds:

'I told you, ma'am,' said Fanny, with a heightening colour, 'that although you found me in that situation, I was so far above the rest, that I considered my family as good as your son's; and that I had a brother who, knowing the circumstances, would be of the same opinion, and would not consider such a connection any honour.’ (Little Dorrit 240) Remarkable is Mr. Dorrit’s attitude towards other people who are in a position that is similar to, or even slightly better than his own. He treats them with the same condescension he shows his fellow Collegians, but at the same time shows a malicious pity and a perverse delight in their struggles and problems. As mentioned above, he treats his brother Frederick as a person of inferior status, with a pitiful disdain, commenting on his poor health and meager living quarters. Another victim of his pity is Old Nandy, who lives in a workhouse in similar conditions as those of the Marshalsea Prison, tough he enjoys more privileges. Mr. Dorrit compensates for his inferior position by expressing compassion and sympathy towards Old Nandy:

He had a wonderful satisfaction in seeing [Old Nandy], and in commenting on his decayed condition after he was gone. It appeared to him amazing that he could hold up his head at all, poor creature. ‘In the Workhouse, sir, the Union; no privacy, no visitors, no station, no respect, no speciality. Most deplorable!’ (Little Dorrit 365)

Hoogerwerf 55 When Mr. Dorrit becomes a wealthy man and ascends to the status he has always longed for, his attitude towards the people surrounding him changes completely. Finally, he belongs to the higher classes he has always felt he belonged to, but his friendly and good-natured manners, condescending as they were, now make place for a haughty, disdainful constitution. The people who looked out for him when he was still in the Marshalsea, he now treats badly, and he is ashamed of having to acknowledge their acquaintance. This applies to Fanny and Tip as well. Their new money brings their arrogance to a new level, and when Fanny catches Amy walking with Old Nandy in public, she inflames with anger:

'Why, good gracious me, Amy!' cried that young lady starting. 'You never mean it!' 'Mean what, Fanny dear?' 'Well! I could have believed a great deal of you,' returned the young lady with burning indignation, 'but I don't think even I could have believed this, of even you!' 'Fanny!' cried Little Dorrit, wounded and astonished. 'Oh! Don't Fanny me, you mean little thing, don't! The idea of coming along the open streets, in the broad light of day, with a Pauper!' (firing off the last word as if it were a ball from an air-gun). (Little Dorrit 367) Fanny sees it as entirely inappropriate to greet Old Nandy, even though he once was one of her father’s favourite visitors, and she says indignantly: “But, however, if you have no sense of decency, I have. You'll please to allow me to go on the other side of the way, unmolested” (Little Dorrit 368). Another victim of the Dorrits’s new status, is Young John. Once a favourite of Mr. Dorrit’s, he comes to pay a visit when Mr. Dorrit returns from his travels around Europe, and he brings him cigars, according to an old habit they had established during the years Mr. Dorrit spent at the Marshalsea. Mr. Dorrit, however, is not at all pleased to see Young John, but considers his visit an insult and a disgrace, much to the amazement and horror of Young John, “-for he had rather expected to be embraced next” (Little Dorrit 633).

Mr. Dorrit is very aware of his newly attained status and realizes his new circle of friends and acquaintances will lose their respect for him if they would find out about his past in the

Hoogerwerf 56 Marshalsea. He is never comfortable or at ease, always fearing his own servants will discover the truth about his life in the prison. The Dorrit family travels in the company of four guides, a courier, two footmen and two waiting-maids, and Mrs. General, who is responsible for the education of his two daughters (Little Dorrit 434). This gives the family hardly any privacy and their constant presence keeps Mr. Dorrit on his toes. When kind, helpful Amy rushes to the aid of the fainting Mrs. Gowan, she is afterwards reproached by her sister, who claims that nursing the ill is a job for servants and says: “Can we ever hope to be respected by our servants? Never. Here are our two women, and Pa's valet, and a footman, and a courier, and all sorts of dependents, and yet in the midst of these, we are to have one of ourselves rushing about with tumblers of cold water, like a menial” (Little Dorrit 454). When Amy turns to Mr. Dorrit, hoping to find some faith in her good intentions, he agrees with Fanny:

Now, it is incumbent upon all people in an exalted position, but it is particularly so on this family, for reasons which I--ha--will not dwell upon, to make themselves respected. To be vigilant in making themselves respected. Dependants, to respect us, must be--ha--kept at a distance and--hum--kept down. Down. Therefore, your not exposing yourself to the remarks of our attendants by appearing to have at any time dispensed with their services and performed them for yourself, is--ha--highly important. (Little Dorrit 455) Overall, Mr. Dorrit’s new money does not make him happier than he was in the Marshalsea. He has access to material comforts that were unknown to him before, but at the same time he distances himself from the few real friends he had in life and is even afraid to pass by the Marshalsea prison on his way to Clennam&Co, fearing to return within the vicinity of that illustrious building (Little Dorrit 630). To escape the burden of his daily life, Mr. Dorrit takes up the habit of building castles in his head:

Mr. Dorrit, in his snug corner, fell to castle-building as he rode along. It was evident that he had a very large castle in hand. All day long he was running towers up, taking towers down, adding a wing here, putting on a battlement there, looking to the walls, strengthening the defences, giving ornamental touches to the interior, making in all

Hoogerwerf 57 respects a superb castle of it. His pre-occupied face so clearly denoted the pursuit in which he was engaged, that every cripple at the post-houses, not blind, who shoved his little battered tin-box in at the carriage window for Charity in the name of Heaven, Charity in the name of our Lady, Charity in the name of all the Saints, knew as well what work he was at. (Little Dorrit 635) Eventually, Mr. Dorrit becomes trapped in his imagination and he returns to the place where he was the happiest: his old room in the Marshalsea prison, a place where he was respected by all: “He looked confusedly about him, and, becoming conscious of the number of faces by which he was surrounded, addressed them: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the duty--ha--devolves upon me of-hum--welcoming you to the Marshalsea! Welcome to the Marshalsea!’” (Little Dorrit 647).

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5.4. Mr. Merdle, a Prisoner of Society Besides dealing with the horror of real prisons like the Marshalsea, Dickens metaphorically portrays society itself as being a prison. Its main prisoner in the novel is Mr. Merdle, a rich undertaker whose only wish is to be a part of the society that he worships, and that worships him, or rather his enormous fortune, in return. Even though this Mr. Merdle is a fictitious character, Dickens does not deny him being based on a real person and real events:

If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. (Little Dorrit xi) More concretely, Mr. Merdle was based on John Sadleir, Member of Parliament and banker, who committed suicide when his company went bankrupt in 1856. At the height of Sadleir’s success, rumours about his affairs led many financial institutions to ask for prompt payment of his debts. Faced with bankruptcy, he poisoned himself with prussic acid on Hampstead Heath, leaving his investors to deal with the consequences of his issue of false shares to the value of £ 150, 000. This influenced chapters 19 to 22 of Little Dorrit, which appeared in May 1856, three months after Sadleir’s suicide (Bezrucka).

Merdle is immensely rich. No one knows how much money he owes, but he is “acclaimed as the great public figure of the day, and we can easily understand why: he arises in the novel as the incarnation of the universal fantasy of having enough money to exorcise the neurotic spectre of debt” (Herbert 202). An interesting observation by Herbert, is that throughout the novel, Dickens describes Merdle as ‘being money’:

Hoogerwerf 59 He is money incarnate, in a word, and seems actually to be made of precious metal himself, in fact to be transmuted into just that gigantic golden image imagined by Marx and by Ruskin, the object of primitive idolatry in a supposedly Christian nation. He is nicknamed ‘the golden wonder’ and is said to turn upon society a ‘golden face’ (626, 756). […] Merdle is evoked by the narrator as ‘the rich man, who had in a manner revised the New Testament, and already entered into the kingdom of Heaven. The man who […] had made the money’. (202) Because of his money, Merdle is an active member of society. He “was everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other” (Little Dorrit 246).

Merdle is worshipped by everyone, and his faithful worshippers are referred to as “high priests”, giving Merdle a god-like appearance (Little Dorrit 557). Everyone wants to be acquainted with him, even Mr. Dorrit does not object to Amy socializing with Mrs. Gowan as soon as he hears she is in Mrs. Merdle’s circle of friends, as of course “[t]he name of Merdle is the name of the age” (Little Dorrit 484). But Dickens makes it very clear that society does not revere Merdle for who he is. They only worship him for what he owns:

Nobody knew that the Merdle of such high renown had ever done any good to any one, alive or dead, or to any earthly thing; nobody knew that he had any capacity or utterance of any sort in him, which had ever thrown, for any creature, the feeblest farthing-candle ray of light on any path of duty or diversion, pain or pleasure, toil or rest, fact or fancy, among the multiplicity or paths in the labyrinth trodden by the sons of Adam; nobody had the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which this object of worship was made, to be other than the commonest clay, with as clogged a wick smouldering inside of it as ever kept an image of humanity from tumbling to pieces. All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul. (Little Dorrit 557) The point Dickens is making with this description, is that society does not care that Merdle is in fact a rather socially handicapped, shy and sickly man. He is rich, and they all want a share of his

Hoogerwerf 60 unbelievable wealth. Dickens disapproves of this mentality, just as Carlyle did. In his article on swindlers in Victorian literature, published on The Victorian Web, Wells mentions that “[Carlyle] could see that society would never give these swindlers, such as Hudson, Melmotte and Merdle, reverence, unless they too got something out of their swindling. These men had society tied to their purse-strings”.

Indeed, Dickens mentions that “the Hampton Court Bohemians, without exception, turned up their noses at Merdle as an upstart; but they turned them down again, by falling flat on their faces to worship his wealth” (Little Dorrit 390). During the dinner organized by Merdle, Dickens pursues this matter in greater depth, when Society, represented by allegorical figures like Bar, Bishop and Treasury, remind him of how it is his duty to use his money to give back to the Society that respects, even worships him:

Treasury hoped he might venture to congratulate one of England’s world-famed capitalists and merchant-princes [...] on a new achievement. To extend the triumphs of such men, was to extend the triumphs and resources of the nation; and Treasury felt – he gave Mr. Merdle to understand – patriotic on the subject. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Mr. Merdle; ‘thank you. I accept your congratulations with pride, and I am glad you approve.’ ‘Why, I don’t unreservedly approve, my dear Mr. Merdle. Because,’ smiling Treasury turned him by the arm towards the sideboard and spoke banteringly, ‘it never can be worth your while to come among us and help us.’ [...] ‘In fact, [it is] a duty that he owed to Society.’ (Little Dorrit 250) One after the other, these figures take Merdle aside to convince him to donate money to their good causes. Bar knows about a “considerable estate, to be purchased by one who had the command of – Money” (Little Dorrit 251) and Bishop wonders “whether it had occurred to his good friend, that Society might not unreasonably hope that one so blest in his undertakings, and whose example on his pedestal was so influential with it, would shed a little money in the direction of a mission or so to Africa?” (Little Dorrit 252)

Hoogerwerf 61 Merdle is so obsessed with pleasing society, he becomes its prisoner. At the dinner party, when Treasury comments on how he should give back to society, “Mr. Merdle intimated that Society was the apple of his eye, and that its claims were paramount to every consideration” (Little Dorrit 250). Earlier on, when describing Merdle’s wealth, Dickens already mentions that “it may be supposed that he got all he wanted, otherwise with unlimited wealth he would have got it. But his desire was to the utmost to satisfy Society (whatever that was), and take up all its drafts upon him for tribute” (Little Dorrit 247).

Indeed, he will do whatever it takes to be the person society expects him to be, and he does so by purchasing things to please the eye of his visitors. The most obvious example of this is Mrs. Merdle, who is frequently referred to as ‘the Bosom’, and was acquired by Mr. Merdle for that reason only:

This great and fortunate man had provided that extensive bosom, which required so much room to be unfeeling enough in, with a nest of crimson and gold some fifteen years before. It was not a bosom to repose upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon. Mr. Merdle wanted something to hang jewels upon, and he bought it for the purpose. (Little Dorrit 247) Throughout the novel it becomes clear that Merdle is in his own way also a prisoner, but instead of being imprisoned due to a lack of money like the Dorrit family, Merdle is imprisoned by exactly the opposite: his abundant wealth. He is so fanatical about pleasing society, that he is often feeling ill, even though his doctor claims there is nothing wrong with him. In commenting on this, Bar claims that “there was a certain point of mental strain beyond which no man could go; that the point varied with various textures of brain and peculiarities of constitution [...]. The point of endurance passed by a line’s breadth, depression and dyspepsia ensued” (Little Dorrit 253).

Merdle’s imprisonment is symbolised by his habit of holding his own wrists, “taking himself into custody under both coat-sleeves” (Little Dorrit 700). He does this whenever he is feeling

Hoogerwerf 62 uncomfortable with the situation he is in, for example when he is calling on Mrs. Sparkle, or when he is confronted with his Chief Butler, of whom he is in fact terrified:

Mr. Merdle was slinking about the hearthrug, waiting to welcome Mrs. Sparkler. His hand seemed to retreat up his sleeve as he advanced to do so, and he gave her such a superfluity of coat-cuff that it was like being received by the popular conception of Guy Fawkes. When he put his lips to hers, besides, he took himself into custody by the wrists, and backed himself among the ottomans and chairs and tables as if he were his own Police officer, saying to himself, ‘Now, none of that! Come! I’ve got you, you know, and you go quietly along with me! (Little Dorrit 611) The Chief Butler symbolizes how society’s power over Merdle never wanes and is present even in his own house. The Chief Butler commands respect from Merdle’s visitors, an admiration he himself might not have been able to compel. While he is to Merdle a symbol of imprisonment, to society he is a symbol of wealth, riches and prosperity: “And when they saw the Chief Butler looking out at the hall-door in his moments of condescension, the gapers said how rich he looked, and wondered how much money he had in the wonderful Bank” (Little Dorrit 570). Merdle dislikes this man and is scared to death by him, feeling very uncomfortable whenever the Chief Butler is around. He is “stately”, “magnificent” and Merdle bought him to show off to society (Little Dorrit 250). He was “Mr. Merdle’s last gift to Society. Mr. Merdle didn’t want him, and was put out of countenance when the great creature looked at him; but inappeasable Society would have him – and had got him” (ibid.). The Chief Butler is a constant influence on Merdle’s life; Merdle feels restrained at all times, fearing the Chief Butler will surprise him and see him doing something considered to be improper:

He seldom or never took the liberty of standing with his back to the fire, unless he was quite alone. In the presence of the Chief Butler, he could not have done such a deed. He would have clasped himself by the wrists in that constabulary manner of his, and have paced up and down the hearthrug, or gone creeping about among the rich objects of furniture, if his oppressive retainer had appeared in the room at that very moment. (Little Dorrit 558)

Hoogerwerf 63 Eventually, Merdle succumbs to the pressure of constantly keeping up appearances, and after his visit to Mr. and Mrs. Sparkle, he slashes his own wrists with a pen-knife. Slowly rumours start spreading, a doubt that “Mr. Merdle’s wealth would be found to be as vast as had been supposed; whether there might not be a temporary difficulty in ‘realising’ it; whether there might not even be a temporary suspension (say a month or so), on the part of the wonderful Bank” (Little Dorrit 710). As soon as the society that worshipped Merdle realizes he was a fraud, they immediately turn their opinions completely around and comment on how he

had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that anyone could account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye; he had been taken up by all sorts of people, in quite an unaccountable manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. (Little Dorrit 710) According to Herbert, “Merdle’s many devotees may try to exorcise their contaminating contact with him after his crash and suicide by indulging in ‘a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with every form of execration’” (202).

Dickens, like Thomas Carlyle, mocks the superficiality of society towards money. It is only after they have realized that Merdle was in fact a poor man living off the money they had invested in him, they start seeing, and focusing, on his many flaws, flaws they had very willingly ignored and overlooked as long as they believed he was their modern-day Midas.

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6. Circumlocution and the Art of Not-knowing 6.1. The Circumlocution Office As mentioned earlier on, one of the main themes of Little Dorrit is the blatant ignorance of the bureaucratic powers in Britain. The novel clearly shows how Dickens was influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s ideas and theories on leadership and what he considered to be the great flaws of the British system.

In the introduction to Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens recognizes that his criticism may come across as rather harsh, but he does not apologize for his parody of the British government, as he claims it is legitimate: “If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman” (xiii).

In his initial description of the Circumlocution Office, Dickens stresses how important the role of this department is in the country: “The Circumlocution Office was […] the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office” (Little Dorrit 104). This is immediately followed by the claim that the Department is also better than the other departments, but ironically it is not better at ruling or decision-making, no: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving – HOW NOT TO DO IT” (Little Dorrit 104).

Even though Dickens chooses to invent his own fictitious department, he does stress that its misconduct is representative for all departments and the government in general, even though he does not ignore the opposing voices, as will be seen further on.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and all professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. [...] It is true that the

Hoogerwerf 65 royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it. (105) This art of ‘How not to do it’ that is present in all Dickens’s accounts of the affairs of the Circumlocution Office, shows a clear resemblance to Carlyle’s idea of ‘Donothingism’ and ‘Saynothingism’, and it is apparent that both Dickens and Carlyle severely disapprove of the government’s idleness.

Another of Carlyle’s main points of criticism is the fact that the common man has no central authority to turn to when he is confronted with a problem. In Little Dorrit, Dickens shows how Mr. Clennam is sent from pillar to post in an almost Kafkaesque manner when he is trying to gather information about Mr. Dorrit’s creditors:

‘It is competent,’ said Mr. Barnacle, ‘to any member of the – Public,’ mentioning that obscure body with reluctance, as his natural enemy, ‘to memorialise the Circumlocution Department. Such formalities as are required to be observed in so doing, may be known on application to the proper branch of that Department.’ ‘Which is the proper branch?’ ‘I must refer you, ‘ returned Mr. Barnacle, ringing the bell, ‘to the Department itself for a formal answer to that inquiry.’ ‘Excuse my mentioning – ’ ‘The Department is accessible to the – Public,’ Mr. Barnacle was always checked a little by that word of impertinent signification, ‘ if the – Public approaches it according to the official forms; if the – Public does not approach it according to the official forms, the – Public has itself to blame.’ (Little Dorrit 112) Dickens portrays the Circumlocution Office as an impenetrable wall of paperwork and bureaucracy, impossible to reach for the common man, who is sent from one administration to another until he is forced to give up without any kind of result. Mr. Clennam expresses Dickens’s frustration by exclaiming: “But surely this is not the way to do the business” (Little Dorrit 116).

Hoogerwerf 66 Throughout the novel, Dickens shows the readers how the Circumlocution Office is primarily occupied with making easy decisions as complicated as possible. Not only is it inaccessible, it also makes sure that Carlyle’s ‘Donothingism’ and ‘Saynothingism’ is honoured to the highest degree, ironically putting effort in ‘not doing’:

The said company being now relieved from further attendance, and the chief Barnacles being rather hurried (for they had it in hand just then to send a mail or two, which was in danger of going straight to its destination, beating about the seas like the Flying Dutchman, and to arrange with complexity for the stoppage of a good deal of important business otherwise in peril of being done), went their several ways; with all affability conveying to Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, that general assurance that what they had been doing there, they had been doing at a sacrifice for Mr. and Mrs. Meagles’s good. (Little Dorrit 408, my italics) The culmination of Dickens’s bureaucratic irony is found when Mr. Dorrit’s attorneys attempt to return the money he owes the Circumlocution Office after he has come into good fortune. Even though this debt has kept Mr. Dorrit in prison for all those years, the department shows no interest in finally collecting the money. Instead, the young department employee dealing with the case, revels in the red tape and bureaucratic nonsense the situation creates:

When the fairy has appeared and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing, that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,’ said this handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily. ‘You never saw such a lot of forms in your life. “Why,” the attorney said to me one day, “if I wants this office to give me two or three thousand pounds instead of take it, I couldn’t have more trouble about it.” “You are right, old fellow,” I told him, “and in the future you’ll know that we have something to do here.”’ (Little Dorrit 565) In charge of the Circumlocution Office is the Barnacle family. From the very first description of this family, Dickens indicates that the Barnacle family “had for some time helped to administer the Circumlocution Office” and “considered themselves in a general way as having vested rights in that direction, and took it ill if any other family had much to say to it” (Little Dorrit, 107). The

Hoogerwerf 67 Circumlocution Office and the Barnacle family are so connected to each other, that the head of the family, Mr. Barnacle, shows characteristics of the department in his manner and dress, which are “inconvenient”, “oppressive” and “altogether splendid, massive, overpowering, and impracticable” (Little Dorrit 111). Beside preventing anything from happening and dealing in an efficient way with the appeals of the middle class, the Circumlocution Office is also concerned with pursuing the private interests of its driving force, which was yet another of Carlyle’s grievances. One of the prominent fragments proving this point, is Dickens’s description of how the Barnacles are sent all over the world to occupy public posts in the British colonies:

To have got the whole Barnacle family together, would have been impossible for two reasons. Firstly, because no building could have held all the members and connections of that illustrious house. Secondly, because wherever there was a square yard of ground in British occupation under the sun or moon, with a public post upon it, sticking to that post was a Barnacle. No intrepid navigator could plant a flag-staff upon any spot of earth, and take possession of it in the British name, but to that spot of earth, so soon as the discovery was known, the Circumlocution Office sent out a Barnacle and a despatch-box. (Little Dorrit 400) Even though Dickens reproaches not only the Circumlocution Office, but the entire government for exhibiting these negative characteristics, he does not deny that some Members of Parliament do have good intentions and that “[s]ometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made or threatened about it, by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it” (Little Dorrit 106). However, he immediately points out how easily the members of the parliament are intimidated: “Then would he [Barnacle] be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter” (Little Dorrit 106).

Hoogerwerf 68 When the Parliamentary insurgent would stand his ground and bring his criticism to the attention of the Parliament, the Circumlocution Office ironically defends itself by listing the mass of administrative work they are able to take on, passing over the fact that this administrative work only aids them in the art of ‘How not to do it’:

When that admirable Department got into trouble, and was, by some infuriated member of Parliament, whom the smaller Barnacles almost suspected of labouring under diabolic possession, attacked on the merits of no individual case, but as an institution wholly abominable and Bedlamite; then the noble or right honourable Barnacle who represented it in the House, would smite that member and cleave him asunder, with a statement of the quantity of business (for the prevention of business) done by the Circumlocution Office. [...] This much-maligned Department (Cheers) had written and received fifteen thousand letters (Loud cheers), and thirty-two thousand five hundred and seventeen memoranda (Vehement cheering). (Little Dorrit 517) This governmental hypocrisy, which is also denounced by Carlyle in Past and Present, is another negative characteristic of the Barnacle family, who claim, when confronted with Clennam’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea, “there is no doubt that it is our misfortune to do that kind of thing now and then. We don’t want to do it; but if men will be gravelled, why – we can’t help it” (Little Dorrit 737).

Carlyle condemns the hypocrisy he finds in Parliament, but accuses the aristocracy of this same charade and pretence. Similarly, even though Dickens’s main focus seems to lie with the government, he also touches upon the subject of how the aristocratic class pretends not to know about the problems of the country , especially when dealing with Mrs. General and her education of the two Dorrit girls.

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6.2. Mrs. General As was already mentioned in the chapter on Thomas Carlyle, both Carlyle and Dickens criticized the incompetence of the government and the indifference of the aristocracy. Though Dickens describes this indifference mainly by means of the Barnacle family, a character that should not be overlooked is Mrs. General. Mrs. General makes her appearance in the second book of the novel, when she is employed by Mr. Dorrit to attend to the education of his daughters, though she resents being referred to as a governess.

Christopher Herbert, in his article “Filty Lucre”, claims that Carlyle’s criticism was widespread, and that “Engels and Ruskin both fix on what they define as an integral function of the Victorian economic and ideological system, fraught as it is with the contradictions that we have noticed: the imperative concealment of the more glaringly indecent consequences of this system” (195). According to him, “writers of the day insistently described their society as a great many-layered system of occluded awareness, one in which not knowing what one knew became almost the defining principle of consciousness” (186). This imperative concealment is personified in Dickens’s portrayal of Mrs. General, both in her appearance, her behaviour and her ideas.

Mrs. General is described as a “dignified and imposing appearance; ample, rustling, gravely voluminous; always upright behind the proprieties” (Little Dorrit 450). Her exterior characteristics reflect what is on the inside – a woman with no opinions:

If her countenance and hair had rather a floury appearance, as though from living in some transcendently genteel Mill, it was rather because she was a chalky creation altogether, than because she mended her complexion with violet powder, or had turned grey. If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face. A cool, waxy, blown-out woman, who had never lighted well. (Little Dorrit 450)

Hoogerwerf 70 Indeed, underneath this placid exterior, Mrs. General is what she herself considers to be a perfect lady. Ladies should not be confronted with unpleasant things like “accidents, miseries and offences”, “passion” or “blood” (Little Dorrit 451). When she encounters such improper things, her solution is to varnish it:

In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the more Mrs. General varnished it. There was varnish in Mrs. General's voice, varnish in Mrs. General's touch, an atmosphere of varnish round Mrs. General's figure. (Little Dorrit 451) It is Mrs. General’s belief that a lady in society should have no opinions at all and should only be concerned with what is proper. She ignores all things which are considered to be offensive or unpleasant, and in her job as an educator, she has the chance to inject her ideas into the minds of young women:

Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people's opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs. General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. (Little Dorrit 450) In this respect, she definitely shows aspects of Carlyle’s ‘Saynothingism’ and ‘Donothingism’, actively ignoring the problems in society she is faced with. Dickens, who shared Carlyle’s ideas on this topic, shows his disagreement with Mrs. General’s ideas through the rebellion of Fanny, who is too stubborn to obey Mrs. General’s rules, and trough Amy’s failed attempts to adhere to these rules. Amy’s good nature and her love for her father prove to be too much for Mrs. General, who wants to teach Amy a more indifferent and distant composure but cannot stop Amy from caring about her family.

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7. Conclusion In this dissertation I have attempted to show Dickens’s dissatisfaction with the money-driven society he lived in, and with the government administration of that time. To illustrate that Dickens was not the only contemporary author condemning these aspects of Victorian life, I have first given an introduction to the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, contemporaries of Dickens who shared his concerns. The parallels between some of the ideas Carlyle puts forward in his work Past and Present, Ruskin’s plea in his novel Unto This Last and even more clearly in his lecture “Traffic”, and Dickens’s implicit message in Little Dorrit are remarkable, proving that Dickens’s criticism was definitely not an isolated case.

The purpose of this dissertation was to prove that Dickens, like Carlyle and Ruskin in their work, wanted to convey a strong message to his readers. First of all he wanted to show them that money is not the main source of happiness, as was commonly believed and which was John Ruskin’s main point of societal criticism. Dickens does so by showing the downfall of nearly every character in the novel, and pointing out that it was their greed that led to their ruin. Linking Amy Dorrit’s financial situation to her relationship with Mr. Clennam – they are separated from each other when the Dorrit family rises to fortune, and find each other again when they are both reduced to poverty – proves to Dickens’s audience that money is not necessarily the most defining factor of one’s life, and that those who live an honest, integer and good life will be rewarded eventually.

Dickens wants to show his readers that they are imprisoned by their obsession with money. Prison symbolism is omnipresent in the novel, the strongest image being the Marshalsea prison, representing the people’s constant fear of not having enough money. Mr. Dorrit proves that, if one is that obsessed with financial matters, these become prison that cannot be escaped. Despite his wealth, Mr. Dorrit remains a symbolical prisoner of the Marshalsea until his death.

Hoogerwerf 72 Besides the Marshalsea prison, which literally represents the importance of money in life, another important metaphorical image is that of society as a prison. Dickens shows how Mr. Merdle becomes a prisoner of his own wealth and the demands of society that accompany his money.

Dickens’s second main objective in Little Dorrit was to condemn the abuses of the government administration, a topic which was important to Thomas Carlyle as well. I have shown how Dickens ironically exaggerated the failures of the government’s institutions and transferred them onto the Circumlocution Office, a fictitious institution he invented for this purpose. Related to this is the ignorance and nonchalance of the aristocracy concerning this matter. The tendency to overlook governmental injustice is personified in Mrs. General.

In conclusion, I would like to point out that there are other interesting dissertation topics to be found in Little Dorrit. Although Dickens’s criticism on the money-driven society and the government administration are the main topics of the novel, there is a gender aspect that could also prove to be interesting to examine. A comparison between the economic issues discussed in Little Dorrit and the economic situation our society today is faced with, could be an interesting topic as well. On the other hand, it would also be interesting to see if these main themes of money and government abuses can also be found in other novels of Dickens’s hand.

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