Edwin Drood

Some thoughts on Drood, following on from the discussion in class.

Endings. Steven Connor has written persuasively on the way notions of ending, of false-endings, concealed endings and permeate the text. What is interesting for our purposes is the way the ‘ending’, half-way through the text, intersects the ‘life’ of the novel and leaves us with only a ghostly, spirit-text as conclusion. This in turn devolves upon two questions: how would Dickens have finished Edwin Drood, had he lived? How did Dickens finish Edwin Drood, being dead?

The former is the more respectable question, and has exercised critics ever since 1870. One interesting aspect of it is the way it elides into a specific ethical question that has to do with authorship. Dickens told Forster his intentions – that Jasper had murdered Edwin, and ‘at the close’ would ‘review’ the crime ‘as if, not he the culprit, but some other man’ were the criminal.

The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which the wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. [Forster, 365]

It has been suggested that this was a blind, a tale told to throw the dust in Forster’s eyes whilst Dickens planned some utterly other ending. Whether this seems plausible or not will depend upon the individual reader, although one factor that has always struck me is that this premise, recorded in Forster, is actually a very good one – why would Dickens waste such an ingenious conception as a mere beard? In effect, it postulates a man haunted by his crime, and presumably by his impending death, as Fagin is at the end of Oliver Twist, except that the ‘crime’ was committed by a different Jasper than the Jasper who reviews its circumstances. The device facilitating this is the opium, but he effect is to imagine a character haunted by himself at the novel’s end.

The question as to whether we believe Forster’s report was initially couched as a moral judgement upon Dickens’s character. Kate Perugini, Dickens’s daughter, wrote endorsing Forster’s account, in the Pall Mall Magazine 1906:

He told his plot to Mr Forster, as he had been accustomed to tell his plots for years past; and those who knew him must feel it impossible to believe that in this, the last year of his life, he should suddenly become underhand, and we might say treacherous, to his old friend, by inventing for his private edification a plot that he had no intention of carrying into execution. This is incredible [282].

‘Treachery’ – as if to suggest that Dickens would lead a double life, in howsoever small a way, aligns him with the underhandedness of his creation, Jasper. Luke Fields reported that Dickens told him that he must draw in a long neck-tie for the illustrations of Jasper because ‘it is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it’. Subsequently, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905, he insisted that doubting this story would be to deny ‘the nobility of character and sincerity of Charles Dickens’ and to accuse Dickens of being ‘more or less of a humbug’ [285].

Here's another ending:

Dickens awoke early on the following day, Wednesday 8 June 1870 in excellent spirits. He talked a little with Georgina [one of his daughters] about his book, and then after breakfast he went straight over to the chalet in order to continue to work on it. He came back for lunch, smoked a cigar in the conservatory and then, unusually for him, returned the chalet where he remained occupied upon the novel which had taken such a hold upon his imagination. The last pages were written with relative ease, marked by fewer emendations than usual … He wrote the last words to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ‘and then falls to with an appetite’; after which he formed the short spiral which generally marked the end of a chapter. He came back to the house an hour before dinner and seemed “tired, silent, abstracted”.

While waiting for his meal he went into the library and wrote two letters. One to [his friend] Charles Kent, in which he arranged to see him in London the following day: “If I can’t be – why, then I shan’t be.” The other to a clergyman to whom, in response to some criticism [that he had quoted the Bible irreverently in ch. 10 of ED: ‘like the highly popular lamb who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter’] he declared that “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour…”.

Georgina was the only member of the family with him, and just as they sat down together for dinner, she noticed a change both in his colour and his expression. She asked him if he were ill, and he replied “Yes, very ill. I have been very ill for the last hour.” Then he experienced some kind of fit against which he tried to struggle – he paused for a moment and then began to talk very quickly and indistinctly, at some point mentioning Forster. She rose from the chair, alarmed, and told him to ‘come and lie down.”

“Yes,’ he said. “On the ground.”

But as she helped him he slid from her arms and fell heavily to the floor. He was now unconscious. He died the following day without regaining consciousness. [Ackroyd, Dickens, 1077]

Doubling: ‘As in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though tit were continuous instead of broken (thus if I hide my watch when I am drunk I must be drunk again before I can remember where) …’ [ch. 3]

Mesmerism: Jasper’s look ‘is always concentrated’; in his mesmeric intensity of communication all the power of his body is focused in his eyes: ‘the steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped’; when he plays accompaniment to Rosa’s singing ‘he followed her lips most attentively, with his eyes as well as his hands,’ producing strange music of subliminal sounds that become unbearable to the girl, for as Jasper stared he ‘ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself…’ So powerful is this transmission of influence through the eyes that ‘all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!” [ch. 7]. Except when he is under the influence of opium, nothing blocks Jasper’s view. Rosa laments that ‘he has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence without uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing he never moves his eyes from my lips. There is no escape from this mesmeric power: ‘ “he himself is in the sounds … I avoid his eyes but he forces me to see them without looking at them”’ [ch. 7]’ [Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism. The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Pinceton University Press 1975), 131-2]

Orientalism and Race: The Landlesses are ‘much alike, both very dark, and very rich of colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed in both of them’. Mr Crisparkle, leading them through the Cathedral close thinks of them ‘as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion’ [ch.6]

[Edwin Drood and Neville Landless argue]: ‘Say here, then,’ rejoins the other, rising in a fury … ‘You are a common fellow and a common boaster.’
‘Pooh pooh,’ said Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; ‘how should you know? You may know a black common fellow or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men’
This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent degree that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood’ [ch.8]

Death and the Gothic Mode: Peter Ackroyd thinks Edwin Drood is 'the closest Dickens came to Gothic'. One of the key themes of the novel is certainly the co-presence of the living and the dead:

‘Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun began to perish … in the Cathedral, all became grey, murky and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music’ [ch, 9]

Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts – albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself – but is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed … ‘If the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living …’ [ch, 12]

Ackroyd argues: ‘the mingling of the living and the dead is at the centre of nineteenth-century Gothic but of course it had also been at the centre of Dickens’s own imagination; the opening of David Copperfield, with the infant David’s fear of his father rising from the graves’ (1054) … and we might add the opening of Great Expectations too, with Magwitch leaping up from amongst the gravestones.

A Reading of Hyungji Park by Kieran Hutchings

“Going to wake up Egypt”: Exhibiting Empire in “Edwin Drood”
Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2002), pp. 529-550

For Hyungji Park the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 is a crucial, monumental moment in Egyptian history, it is also in her eyes a significant contextual factor affecting Dickens’ composition of Edwin Drood. At the centre of Park’s argument is the notion that Dickens’ structure and intended resolution for the novel is predicated implicitly upon a relationship to Empire, specifically Britain’s ever increasing influence over Egypt.

Park argues that there is theatricality within Edwin Drood which is not as prevalent within other Dickensian works and that this theatricality leads to a ‘greater than usual Dickensian stereotyping’ with regards to his characters. Whilst this may in fact be an overstatement it is nonetheless interesting that Park links this theatricality to an ever increasing Victorian fascination with Egypt and its significance within nineteenth century popular culture. Park sees a link between Dickens’ ‘pantomime conventions’ and the Victorian commodification of Egypt in that they are both significant parts of Victorian popular culture, their fascination with Egypt permeating all facets of life. It is this popular culture which Park believes in turn has permeated Edwin Drood and implicitly links the plot of the novel to Empire and to Egypt.

For Park however, notions of Empire and Egypt are exhibited in relationship to the domestic sphere, more specifically in relationship to the institution of marriage. Park views the resolution of Rosa’s marriage as central to the outcome of the plot and it is the ‘candidates’ suitability or likelihood for marriage which Park states is inexorably linked with their association to Empire. She identifies Jasper, Neville, Tartar and Edwin as the four most likely candidates for Rosa’s hand in marriage. However she is quick to dismiss the first two due to the negative connotations their associations with empire harbour; Jasper for his opium addiction and Neville for his ‘Mixture of Oriental blood.’ Tartar is also dismissed as a candidate for marriage, despite his role in the navy, due to his belonging to ‘that leisured wealthy class which Dickens criticises for its idleness’. This process of elimination leaves only Edwin is the remaining candidate for marriage. Park then embarks upon a close reading of the role-playing scene between Rosa and Edwin which she utilises as evidence for her theory as to the ending of the novel.

Park highlights in this particular scene each characters contradictory attitude towards Empire and to the East, they ‘subscribe to a separation of spheres in Victorian expectations about Empire: engineering for him, sweets for her.’ It is Edwin’s desire to go become an engineer in Egypt which Park takes as a possible explanation for his disappearance suggesting that he is to return at the end of the novel having undergone some form of bildungsroman or maturation process in the mode of earlier Dickensian figures such as Allan Woodcourt or Walter Gay. It is Edwin’s desire for self-actualisation in the colonies and Dickens’ affinity for such a work ethic which Park takes as further evidence for her ending of the novel stating that ‘It is the middle-class Edwin Drood who faces a working career in the colonies, who deserves the greatest attention as Rosa’s possible husband.’

Central to this argument is Park’s belief that Dickens partly based Edwin’s character upon two significant figures of the day, made famous by their associations with Egypt, Giovanni Battista Belzoni a feted archaeologist working for the British museum and the chief architect of the Suez Canal Ferdinand de Lesseps. Each one displaying the ability for self-actualisation Dickens himself exhibited and revered so much and which Park believes Dickens intended for Edwin’s bildungsroman they ‘serve as examples for Edwin’s going “engineering into the East”’ . What these two figures represent is the link between Victorian popular culture, Empire and Edwin Drood which Park believes is crucial to the composition of the novel and her thesis as to its possible ending. Rosa’s allusion to Belzoni providing us with a tangible contextual factor with which we may read into the novel.

However, whilst Park raises many interesting points her argument is far from flawless, for instance many of Park’s statements such as ‘Many of Edwin Drood’s characters are ready stock caricatures who resemble players in a puppet show or pantomime’ are rather presumptive given that the novel, however short it is intended to be, is incomplete. Furthermore this initial link between pantomime and Empire, however interesting the discussion it leads into, is a tenuous one and seems to be largely based upon an interpretation of a twentieth century theatrical production. Also, there does appear to be some slight antagonism between Park’s reading of Edwin Drood as being filled with one dimensional characters, and her theory as to Dickens’ intention for Edwin’s story arc to be one of bildungsroman, such seemingly divergent readings do not sit well together within the same essay. Nonetheless I find Park’s argument for Edwin Drood’s possible ending highly compelling, entirely plausible and certainly in keeping with what Dickens has written before. I especially enjoyed her close reading of the role-playing scene between Edwin and Rosa and thought that her pinpointing of Belzoni and Lesseps as contextual influences upon Dickens illuminating and insightful. Overall I would thoroughly recommend this essay as despite its flaws, it is a genuinely thought provoking piece.

Lottie Niemiec, 'Who Killed Edwin Drood?'

Whodunnit? Not Jasper.

As a result of Dickens’ untimely demise almost exactly in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the disappearance of Edwin Drood will remain forever, indeed, a mystery. From the nineteenth century, speculation has suggested, and with ample enough evidence, that John Jasper murdered his nephew in order to secure a future for himself and Rosa Bud, Drood’s wife-to-be. Critics and readers alike have suggested that Jasper’s curious reaction upon learning of Rosa and Drood’s separation indicates that he realised the murder was unnecessary. Further evidence supports the theory that indeed it was Jasper that, presumably, murdered Drood. His monomaniacal obsession with Rosa, his unrealistic and disturbing professed love for his nephew, set within a landscape of opium addiction and double selves would appear to be clinching proof for Jasper’s violently criminal psyche. However, surely we cannot accept such a reductive explanation from one of Britain’s most prolific authors? To release the answer only halfway through creation, indeed implying the answer from the very beginning - is it plausible that Jasper, the violent, obsessive, devilish, obvious maniac could be the answer to all our questions? Surely not.

I shall suggest an alternative theory, one that takes into consideration some of the great themes of Dickens’ work: doppelgangers, childhood bitterness, twisted psyches and, ultimately, extreme plot twists. Into the relatively quiet cathedral town of Cloisterham arrive two outsiders, Helena and Neville Landless. Children orphaned while young and, we learn, brutally treated as they were growing up, resulted in a meek, feminine, yet quietly independent Helena and a passionate, violently driven Neville; twins that seem almost to read each other’s thoughts, and yet so different in temperament from each other. Doubtless many critics have suggested Neville was the murderer - another obvious choice - but I shall suggest instead that his sister is not only the more capable, but also the more rationally plausible.

Overshadowed by a brother that speaks for her, one that admits to having to ‘suppress a deadly and bitter hatred’ that has made him ‘secret and revengeful’, is it not possible that Helena herself could suppress a similar emotion? Neville continues to say:

‘In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children), you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued her, though it often cowed me. When we ray away from it (we ran away four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished), the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocketknife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.’

Interestingly, Neville reiterates the fact that they are twins, even though Crisparkle is aware of the fact; it impresses upon us once more that they are connected not only through blood and, Neville claims, mentally, but also visibly. For such a quiet woman, it is surprising that she has a strong, animalistic urge to tear and bite at her hair when she feels trapped in her female form. This indicates the strong anger of a hysterical woman, a ferocity that neither Neville or Jasper show or are capable of. She is the one to instigate running away every time, showing a highly independent and masculine streak, one that is prepared to put into action what she desires, as opposed to a brother that, curiously, follows her. If she succeeded in cutting her hair short, she would physically look no different from her brother, making them, as it were, true doubles. Helena may be the real, dark side of Neville’s psyche, even while appearances remain to the contrary. Just as there are two Flintwich’s in Little Dorrit, strikingly similar men in A Tale of Two Cities, doubling and mistaken identity in Our Mutual Friend and even double narratives in Bleak House; so in Edwin Drood does this recurring theme appear.

Helena, a repressed version of her brother, stands very much as the Hyde to a Jekyll, a monster to a Frankenstein: outwardly so demure, yet inwardly burning with rage and repressed anger. Moving from Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens depicts Bradley Headstone as the archetype of repression boiling over into murderous violence, pathologically insane as a result of his obsession with Lizzie Hexam (although this can be deeply questioned), Dickens’ gives us now the opposite: a woman seemingly innocent, but the other, darker half of her passionate
brother.

The question of motive remains, which again is revealed when the novel’s other themes are taken into consideration, themes such as colonialism, the outsider and marriage. When Helena arrives in Cloisterham she is confronted with a pretty, white female whose engagement to a nice, white gentleman seems all too cosy. Already disturbed from a childhood of brutality, the hatred with which she might perceive Rosa’s relatively easy life, planned out for her stage by stage, would be intense. Helena’s ‘sunburnt’ skin labels her the other, and what vengeance would be greater than ridding a woman of happiness while feigning to befriend her? Once the deed is done, she could quite easily escape to London - which, surprisingly enough, she does. An overshadowing brother would be suspected of the murder because he fits the stereotype perfectly; there is every piece of evidence against him that one could need to convince a jury of his guilt. It is all too convenient. Helena would not only have passed on her inherent unhappiness to another woman, but she would herself be free to live life as she pleased, not having to follow her brother everywhere and perform through him. Additionally, she may have murdered Drood from anger, since by offending Neville, he offends her through him.

Since Bleak House, Dickens’ had set about depicting females as anything from innocent and self-sacrificing to naïve and money grabbing - but not murderers. Lizzie Hexam is the very picture of virtue; Bella Wilfur may be mercenary, but she eventually becomes the perfect Victorian angel in the house. Not since Hortense had Dickens used a woman to paint a bloody, violent picture. This fulfills Dickens’ last great theme - that of the shocking plot twist, the unexpected overthrowing of what we have been lead to believe. With six installments still to be written and published, any reader at the time would have lost interest if Jasper had indeed been the murderer, having figured out the plot far ahead of time.

Futhermore, and finally, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is fast-paced, violent, sexual and drug infested, much like the Sensation novels at the time. Much desired, these novels sold extremely well, and Dickens’ good friend Wilkie Collins could arguably be the first author to augment the Sensation novel as following on from the Gothic with his novel The Woman in White. In this, a woman that is beautiful from behind turns out to be ugly from the front – ‘The woman was ugly!’ - highly controversial at the time, while another has been driven mad by an evil seducer. In Lady Audley’s Secret, a woman turns out to be the murderer (although in the end, not) of a man by pushing him down a well. In The Moonstone a woman commits suicide by letting quicksand suck her down (reminding us of the quicklime in Edwin Drood that would have quickly devoured a body), and in East Lynne a woman commits adultery, leaving her children and husband for a wicked murderer. From this we can clearly see that what was selling well were the frightening, yet popular, stories of female hysteria, of strange, uncanny events and murderers. In this ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ climate, it is very possible that in leading us to believe Jasper killed Edwin Drood, we have been entirely led away from the fact that Helena is more capable of cold-blooded murder.

OMF II

For the second class on Our Mutual Friend I'd like to talk about the river, and about sexuality. On this latter, I'd point you towards Eve Sedgwick's famous book Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire (Columbia University Press, 1985). Her category 'homosocial' to describe intense, eroticised but not necessarily fully sexual male-male relations is useful, and her reading of OMF is famous. Google books has some of this text available online -- though sadly not the specific Our Mutual Friend chapter! But see what she has to say about Edwin Drood, and other nineteenth-century texts, and see how persuaded you are. (You'll find reviews of Sedgwick's book here, and here.

J Hillis Miller's chapter on the novel in his older but still useful Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels (1958), 279ff., is very good too.

Our Mutual Friend

This coming Monday for the first of our two Our Mutual Friend sessions, and there are a couple of contexts I'd like to discuss in class. In the first instance it would be interesting to see whether we think 'the dustheaps' (or waste more generally) functions as effectively as a governing metaphor in this novel, the way 'prisons' did in Dorrit, and 'the law' (or 'fog and mud') did in Bleak House.

There are a number of good readings of waste in OMF: Nancy Aycock Metz's 'The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34:1 (1979), 59-72) for one. Following the swampy path, Howard W. Fulweiler's essay '"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49:1 (1994), 50-74) argues for the novel as a distinctively post-Darwinian text:

Abstract: Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

Personally I have my doubts; although Darwin's book was a major event in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life (and still has the power to shake the world, even today). On the other hand, Daniel P. Scoggin thinks it's all about vampires: 'A Speculative Resurrection: Death, Money, and the Vampiric Economy of Our Mutual Friend', Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 (2002), 99-125. Which appeals to me rather more.

Natalie Leeder on Dorrit

In ‘Little Dorrit’s London: Babylon Revisited’, Nancy Aycok Metz argues that Little Dorrit acts as a response to the changing shape of London in the mid-nineteenth century. Whilst she acknowledges that such an interest in the transitory nature of the metropolis is nothing new in Dickens’ work, she maintains that in Little Dorrit he visits the theme with a deeper critical eye and seriousness.

Aycok Metz suggest that the novel engages with contemporary archaeological discourses which were brought to the public eye; in 1951 Household Words told ‘The Story of Giovanni Belzoni’, and that same year Austen Henry Layard returned to England. The images of ruined civilizations touched the romantic imagination, and there was a vogue of landscape images of London as a ruin. Aycok Metz emphasises the depiction of the ruined city in Little Dorrit, which she argues ‘sometimes reads like a museum guide to “lost” London’.

In this it differs from the immediacy of the descriptions in Dickens’ other novels; Little Dorrit plays with distance. Aycok Metz uses Mrs Clennam’s house as an example of the temporal confusion of the novel, as architecture serves to remind us of the past: it is an ‘anomaly’ among the changing metropolis as it clings to a long gone stability.

Aycok Metz argues that this distance is particularly relevant from a readerly perspective; removed by time, we are forced away from any sense of integration. We must share the detached consciousness of the characters as they ‘camp out on the ruins of the past’. Clennam walks down empty streets, reminiscent of a lost civilization, which parallels the depopulation of the city (whilst the slums continued to grow). This contrasts to Dickens’ usual portrayal of the crowds of London, and such journeys as Oliver, Snagsby and Florence take through the metropolis.

Another historical influence Aycok Metz draws attention to is the improvements in London from 1847-54, such as the railways, a new sewer system and slum clearance. The visible ruin and upheaval is reflected in the ruins of Little Dorrit. The Italian episodes in the novel serve to further this image, as they provide a reminder of the fate of Rome, hinting at London’s own destiny.

Aycok Metz argues that Clennam attempts to confront the past that is ever present in his surroundings, but struggles with its fragmented and empty nature: ‘discontinuity rules’. His experience of it as such is reflected in the more minor characters such as Flora. They are forced to return to the past. To conclude, Aycok Metz draws upon Dickens’s own experience of return as he revisits the prison ‘so closely associated with his own early and intense pain’.

Ultimately, Aycok Metz’s reading of Little Dorrit is an interesting insight into Dickens’ world and its discourses. However, it seems to fall short of any deep analysis of the novel. There is little in the essay that could be disputed as such, but it never seems to go far enough to truly penetrate Little Dorrit’s London.

New term: Dorrit

You'll probably have already heard that teaching has been cancelled for tomorrow (Monday 11th January) on account of the inclement weather. We'll start with Little Dorrit next week (18th) instead, and roll the course through to reading week.

What I'd mostly like to talk about, in that session, is prisons, and the consistently worked-through thematic of imprisonment in the novel. This is a mainstream critical perspective on the novel that takes its cue from an essay written half a century ago by the American critic Lionel Trilling. Trilling was commissioned to write the introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens ed of Dorrit; the essay was later reprinted in The Kenyon Review Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1953), pp. 577-590 (click that link and you’ll find the whole essay):

The subject of Little Dorrit is borne in upon us by the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book, which is the prison. The story opens in a prison in Marseilles. It goes on to the Marshalsea, which in effect it never leaves. The second of the two parts of the novel begins in what we are urged to think of as a sort of prison, the monastery of the Great St Bernard. The Circumlocution Office is the prison of the creative mind of England. Mr Merdle is shown habitually holding himself by the wrist, taking himself into custody, and in scores of ways the theme of incarceration is carried out, persons and classes being imprisoned by their notions of predestined fate or of religious duty, or by their occupations, their life-schemes, their ideas of themselves, their very habits of language.

Symbolic or emblematic devices are used by Dickens to one degree or another in several of the novels of his late period, but nowehere to such good effect as in Little Dorrit. The fog of Bleak House, the dustheap and the river of Our Mutual Friend are very striking, but they scarcely equal the force of the prison image which dominates Little Dorrit. This is because the prison is an actuality before it is ever a symbol; its connection with the will is real, it is the practical instrument for the negation of man’s will which the will of society has contrived.

Trilling later added a footnote: ‘Since writing this I have had to revise my idea of the actuality of the symbols of Our Mutual Friend. Professor Johnson’s biography of Dickens taught me much about the nature of dustheaps, including their monetary value, which was very large … I never quite believed that Dickens was telling the literal truth about this. From Professor Dodd’s The Age of Paradox I have learned to what an extent the Thames was visible the sewer of London, of how pressing was the problem of sewage in the city as Dickens knew it, of how present to the mind was the sensible and even the tangible evidence that the problem was not being solved. The moral disgust of the book is thus seen to be quite adequately comprehended by the symbols which are used to represent it.’ [AR]