Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit

• Themes
• Imprisonment (debtor's prison, mom left in store)
• Home life - what it means - where is Arthur accepted?
• Feminism - what is it? What's appropriate? (No normal women, Dorrit is closest)
• 22 years old woman trapped in a prepubescent girl's body
• Arthur, been gone for 20 years
• Arthur - 40 year old main mail protagonist

When did Dickens write Little Dorrit?

• Published as a series of "monthly installments" between 1855-1857
• 19 installments each one about 4 chapters
• Immediately popular. 
• Began at 24 years old
• Described London to Londoners
• Victorian novels "loose, baggy monsters" (Henry James)
• Meant to be read aloud, slowly. Used as a primary form of entertainment (thus the detail). A father would read each installment to his children
• Why did the British (especially the Londoners love Dicken's novels?
• He wrote of all classes [detailed subplots sewn together], could pick up accents and clothing perfectly. Peter Acroyd: His novels were a mirror in which they [his readers] could see themselves
• How Dickens collected details, especially of the poor and destitute.
• Follows them around
• Dicken's details very accurate
• experiment building tenemants & industrial cities
• Shame of poverty & lowering oneself in the class system
• Friends wouldn't go where he went.
• He went in and looked around.
• Dickens was not recognized because little photography.
• Never told his wife or children about father

How Dickens had changed as a writer by the time he wrote Little Dorrit

• His father had died of a urethral infection 1851. (His eight-month-year-old daughter, Dora, dies the same year. Wife has a nervous breakdown.) Postpartum Depression (www.charlesdickensinfo.com)
• Dickens' relationship with his father
• How this plays out with parents and children in his novels. This novel is darker, along with an earlier novel, Hard times.
• Definition of the "Dark novels." Change in plot. Harder, bleaker, no happy endings
• Includes Hard times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend
• Dickens' marriage has gotten bad 40's & 50's

Little Dorrit (Chapters 1-5)

• Opening with the chief villian: Monsieur Rigaud. A melodramatic stereotype (p44)
• Kills wife because he can't control her
• Killing his wife. "I can't submit; I must govern." 
• Dicken's loved the over the top drama
• Mrs. Clemmans also like Miss Havisham - doesn't leave her house for 12 years. Not because she couldn't but because she wants to give up on life.
• The grotesque: Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Grotesque: "fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness or caricature." (A handbook to literature, 9th Ed. 234)
• Or exaggeration for effect or moral training: Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House
• Description of Pete Meagles (p 54) versus Tattycoram (p55)
• Dickens' woman, kind, sweet, innocent
• Dicken's angry woman. Dickens always punishes angry women. They don't if are very well
• Miss Wade: "If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I know no more" (61)
• Sexist interpretation of women.
• Accurate about someone who has refused to go on & move on and be responsible
• Rage, frustration, bitterness
• Clennam: a lost man "I am such a waif and a stray everywhere, that I am liable to be drifted where any current may set" (59)
• Comes back from China.
• used up his life doing things he has hated
• (sent to China to work for a business he hated. No home, no sense of place. The opposite of the child in David Copperfield)
• 40 year old Victorian England.
• Arthur Clennam's Mother: kept to her room now for 12 years (71)
• has no interest in spending time with Arthur
• Clennam's mother and father: "She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest occupation of his childhood" (73)
• Grew up in a miserable family that hated each other
• Clennam was never experienced love. Always alone and isolated.
• Clennam's mother: "All seasons are alike to me (74)
• Clennam makes his stand and abandons the business (86)
• Mother renounces him (90)
• Uses Bible as a battering ram. Attacks this type of Christianity
• Description of Little Dorrit (92-93)
• Ideal prostitute was 10 years old, virgin, upper class girl, Little Dorrit had a sexual appeal too.
• 23, small, like a child, not clueless
• Conscious and aware of what ground her

Chapters 6-10

• Mr. Dorrit (p98) like a child himself when he first enters the Marshalsea. Accepts his "smooth decent" as a form of "peace" (103)
• Likes the prison because it's "peaceful"
• Adult who grows up as "child" must dump their responsibilities onto someone else
• His title as "Father of the Marshalsea." At 13, Little Dorrit becomes the surrogate mother to her father and two siblings
• Tip, an immature and lazy bum. Will do nothing.

Chapters 10-15: The Circumlocution Office

• Name for huge govt bureaucracy
• Russian & Ottoman Empire
• Crimean War: 1853-1855. Between the Russians and the British, French and Ottoman Empire
• British govt. no ability to handle paperwork & bureaucracy
• Florence Nightengale (1854) "The Lady with the Lamp"
• Went to Crimeanea to care for soldiers. She was a nurse 

Chapters 15-29

• Clennam sees Little Dorrit as his "adopted daughter" (p231). "Little Dorrit was a leading and a constant subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of her own story, presented the little creature to him as the only person between whom and himself that were ties of innocent reliance on one hand, and affectionate protection on the other; ties of compassion, respect unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity"
• Doesn't call her a woman Lover/daughter Victorian theme
• Young woman often married very older friend. Common to marry father's friends or business partners
• Wasn't an odd concept to the Victorians
• Doesn't see Little Dorrit romantically/sexually at this point.
• How Little Dorrit and Maggy are in danger:
• Dangers are presented as nuances
• "Three o'clock, and half-past three, and they had passed over London Bridge. They had heard the rush of the tide against obstacles; and looked down, awed, through the dark vapour on the river; had seen little spots of lighted water where the bridge lamps were reflected, shining like demon eyes, with a terrible fascination in them for guilt and misery. They had shurnk past homeless people, coiled up in nooks. They had run from drunkards. They had started from slinking men, whistling and signing to one another at bye corners, or running away full speed." (217)
• Severe danger of rape/molestation
• Gin=meth of the day
• poor would have sex in the street or in bushes. He was common
• Extremely dangerous to young women
• Victorian London
• Streets very, very crowded and dangerous
• Mother drunk on Gin
• Mother killed baby so she could sell the clothes to buy more Gin
• Church of England was for upper class
• Didn't marry with a license
• Upper class Victorians very different
• Clennam's feelings toward pets
• He is attracted to her, but doesn't think he has much of a chance:
• "He was twice her age. Well he was young in appearnce, young in health and strength, young in heart. A man was certainly not old at forty; and many men were not in circumstances to marry, or did not marry, until they had attained that time of life (239)
• "The bad choice" person chose in youth
• No divorce laws - marriage permanent
• "int he evening they played an old-fashioned rubber; and Pet sat looking over her father's hand, or singing to herself by fits and starts at the piano. She was a spoilt child; but how could she be otherwise? Who could be much with a pliable and beautiful a creature, and not yield to her enduring influence? Who could pass an evening in the house, and not love her for the grace and charm of her very presence in the room?
• the obsession with Social Class
• Fanny about the other dancing girls: "I don't care," said the Daughter of the Father of the Marshalsea, "If the others were not so common. None of them have come down in the world as we have. They are all on their own level. Common" (283)
• Sees herself as an upper class woman that's fallen on tough circumstances
• Mrs. Merdle bribing Fanny with cheap jewelry (287) and dresses to keep Fanny away from her son. Threatens to disinherit her son if he marries Fanny.
• Dickens grandparents were servants, very aware of his own class
•  Mr. Merdle (Immensely rich) (292) always hiding his hands in his coat cuffs. "Bought" his wife fifteen years ago for her bosom: "it was not a bosom to repose upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon, and he bought it for the purpose." (293)
• Wealthy women changed outfits approx 5 times per day. Way to show others your husband has money. "Trophy Wife"
• Mrs. Merdle's "chuckle-headed" step-son, Mr. Sparkler (295)
• Mrs. Gowan calling Pet an "unfortunate fancy" (363)
• Little Dorrit knows that she is in a loveless world. No one cares for her except Maddie, but she's developmentally disabled.
• A good man versus a bad man
• Daniel Doyce
• a good man
• self-made man, hard-working, long years of education and industry
• Modest, quiet. Perceptive but keeps most of his opinions to himself. Honest
• Henry Gowan
• Living off an inheritance, "Plays" at painting
• Cruel and narcissistic. A poor (or lazy) judge of character. Thinks that Clarence Barnacle is entertaining.
• Tiny acts that people perform tells real story of person's real personality
• Bad choices
• Tattycoram runs away to live with Miss Wade
• Mr. Meagles' warning to Miss Wade: "I don't know what you are, but you don't hide, can't hide, what a dark spirit you have within you. If it should happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough to have heard of such), I warned her against you, and I warn you against yourself" (379)
• Pet elopes with Henry Gowan
• Homophelia alive and well
• Didn't have word for homosexuality
• Women living together all over the place
• Henry James called these "Boston Marriages"
• gay women dangers because woman's existence for taking care of men 

Chapters 30-35

• Monsieur Rigaud as a "gentleman"
• M. Rigaud calls himself a "gentleman," a "Citizen of the world." (400)
• "In effect, I am of no country," said Mr. Blandois, stretching out his leg and smitting it: "I descend from half-a-dozen countries" (404)
• Mr. Blandois "swaggered out of his chair (it was characteristic of this man, as it is of all men similarly marked, that whatever he did, he overdid, though it were sometimes by only a hair's breadth) and approached to take his leave of Mrs. Clennam (408)
• Symbol of what class had become. Dicken's father claimed to be a gentleman while in prison
• Gentleman=vague definition
• Very easy going to change identity - no paperwork/tracking someone. Just change name and put on different airs

• Who was a Victorian gentleman?
• status vague and fluid, but based on class, position (clergyman), well-bred manners, money. Many of those with new money (like Dickens) wanted to be gentlemen
• "The essence of a gentleman," John Ruskin would write, "is what the word says, that he comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred. After that, gentleness and sympathy, or kind disposition and fine imagination.
• All are fake that are performers
• Manners and money are most important
• Dickens kept getting it wrong