Something Old

 

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.    

“OLIVER TWIST” by Charles Dickens (First published as a serial 1837-1838; published in book form 1838)

 

Please do not reel back in consternation that I am now burdening you with a review about a book that does not need any explaining. Surely everybody knows the story of Oliver Twist? Didn’t you read it when you were a kid?  Or, more likely, didn’t you see a movie or TV version of it? But as always, I have a reason for writing about it. You see, I did read Oliver Twist [complete and unabridged] when I was a teenager, but I had never re-read it since then, even though as an adult I had read every novel by Dickens except one [Barnaby Rudge… which I believe is the least read of all Dickens’s novels]. Some months ago my wife and I took a long journey around the South Island, and as we drove, she and I taking turns at the wheel, we listened to podcasts, some good jazz and other things as we looked at the interesting scenery. Then we hit on one podcast – a complete and unabridged Oliver Twist, read by a man with an authentic Cockney accent. OK, he missed a few marks by saying “two penny” [as Americans mis-pronounce it] instead of the English “tuppeny” and also pronounced “gibbet” with a hard “g”. He also, when reading, stuck with the Cockney voice even when he was reading the words of clearly middle-class characters. But this is just me picking nits. It was a good and thorough reading that kept us on our way.

By this stage you are ready to tell me that you know the general story of Oliver Twist. Oliver is an orphan who does not know who his parents were. Oliver is put in a workhouse. The little boys put to work there are mistreated and underfed under the supervision of the pompous beadle Mr Bumble. Oliver asks for more. There is a commotion. Oliver is put out to work. He almost becomes a chimney-sweep, but instead he is apprenticed to an undertaker. He is horribly bullied by the young thug Noah Claypole. Little Oliver runs away, heading for a better life in London. En route he does meet some helpful people who are ready to look after him. But when he reaches London the first person he meets is the young pick-pocket nicknamed “The Artful Dodger” who introduces Oliver to the criminal Fagin. In his rookery, Fagin's forte is training boys to be thieves as well learning to commit other felonies. One of Fagin’s henchmen is the adult thug Bill Sykes. Also Fagin knows the prostitute Nancy [okay – she’s never called a prostitute in the novel, but grown-up readers will be aware that that is who she is]. There follow a number of complicated events. Oliver is rescued for a while by the benevolent Mr. Brownlow and looked after. He [by one of those miraculous chances that happen in some novels] gradually suspects that Oliver’s deceased mother was a relative he knew and Oliver might be worthy of a legacy… but Oliver is kidnapped back by the Fagin gang. Little Oliver is forced to take part in a burglary, in the midst of which he is almost killed. The gang run away. Meanwhile Nancy, her heart now changing, wants to protect Oliver. But because she has spoken to Mr Brownlow and told him what she knew of Oliver’s origins, she is beaten to death by Bill Sykes. The happy ending? Bill Sykes is now a murderer on the run. Cornered, he accidentally hangs himself. Fagin is in jail and waiting to be executed. The gang of boys is broken up [Dickens suggests that the best of then will end up as good farmers etc.] and Oliver, thanks in part to a lovely lady called Rose Maylie who looks after him, lives ever after. Yes, I’ve not mentioned many other things - such as the comlpcated dealing with a certain Mr. Monks -  but you didn’t want me to go into laborious specifics did you?

Now be honest. You all already knew all that, didn’t you?

Before I get into the serious stuff, allow me to say a few rude things. Naughty Charlie Dickens did insert a schoolboy-ish joke. One of “The Artful Dodger’s” mates is called Charlie Bates, but every so often Dickens just happens to call him Master Bates… and if you don’t get the joke you have a very pure mind. Then, though Mr. Bumble is an obnoxious character, he does utter one profound truth when he says “The law is a ass.” The situation is that his wife committed a felony, but the law in England in the early 19^th century said that a husband could be prosecuted for what a wife had done, even if the husband had nothing to do with it. In some ways, I can’t help believing that sometimes, for various reasons, the law could still be a ass.

So much for the synopsis.

What did I take away, while listening to the podcast, about things in Oliver Twist that I had not noticed when I first read the novel.

First, I noticed that little Oliver always spoke in a perfectly polite and middle-class voice, while all the other boys in the workhouse spoke raw cockney just as Fagan’s crew did. Reality would say that a real Oliver would speak just like the uncouth kids in the workhouse or with Fagin’s bunch. My guess is that Dickens wrote for a middle-class audience and understood that such an audience would therefore have more sympathy for a nicely-spoken little boy than for a roughly-spoken little boy.

Second, following the whole narrative again after so many years, I am more aware of Dickens’s severe irony, coming close to outright sarcasm, especially in the early chapters where he describes the sheer hypocrisy of the parochial system – lead by the likes of Bumble -  which lets underfed children almost starve in the workhouse while the official wardens eat heartily; and money intended for charitable works are squandered on thing that have nothing to do with the children. In some ways, Dickens was a radical in his days. It should also be made clear that, though he makes much use of comical characters, he is most often showing them up to be either sordid or disgusting. In fact, an atmosphere of sordor dominates much of the novel, in spite of the too-good-to-be-true characters who come to Oliver’s rescue.

Third, there is a real problem when you read this novel. Fagin is Jewish. Throughout the novel, Dickens most often calls him just “the Jew”. Fagin in the novel is depicted as crafty, heartless, a coward, a liar and a corrupter of children. In many ways, Dickens is giving us what could really be seen as a stereotypical anti-Semite rant. Some modern critics have also noticed that in the last chapter, Dickens almost gloats over Fagin’s impending execution as he sits in the jail, even though we are not told what exactly he is guilty of. Indeed some have said that Fagin is about to be lynched. After the novel was first published, a Jewish woman wrote to Dickens protesting that his character Fagin was a cruel caricature of Jewish men. Dickens was able to respond that the character of Fagin was based on a real person – a Jewish criminal who had been the leader of a boys’ gang working a decade or so before Dickens wrote his novel. But Dickens was essentially a humane and decent man [despite the fact that years later he deserted the wife who had given him ten children, and took up with a teenaged actress] and he was worried about his Fagin. Years later, in his novel “Our Mutual Friend”, he went out of his way to create a good and gentle Jewish character, Riah the generous money-lender. But Riah was only a small character in a long and complex novel; and  “Our Mutual Friend” is one of the least read of Dickens’s novels by the general public. But at least Dickens had a conscience.

So much for the critique. Among other things we have to salute Dickens for writing his first real novel when he was quite young, aged 26. (Coming before Oliver Twist was the very jolly The Pickwick Papers, but they were basically a series of sketches loosely put together in a picaresque way.) Note too that, though Dickens’s works are often said to be Victorian, most of Oliver Twist was written before Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1838.

And now for a melancholy fact. Nowadays, most people who claim to know about Oliver Twist are likely to have never read the novel itself but know the story only as they’ve seen it in movie or TV versions of it [which is of course also true of many illustrious books.] Oliver Twist has been turned into many films and TV adaptations, but only two of them are really worth consideration. 

 

                         Alec Guinness as the evil Fagin in "Oliver Twist"

The first: In 1946, the director David Lean and his crew scored a hit with a film version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which Alec Guinness had his film debut as the hero Pip’s friend Herbert Pocket. Having done so well, in 1948 David Lean directed his version of Oliver Twist. It is an outstanding work of cinematic art – in black and white, of course, using darkness like a film noir and suggesting the horrors of slummy London in the 1830’s. Naturally, as in the case of all films that adapt lengthy novels, this Oliver Twist leaves out some of the novel’s characters, and it made up the idea of having Bill Sykes running away with Oliver when Sykes is being chased by the police for murder. In the novel, Sykes is on his own when, with a crowd beneath him, he tries to use a rope to get to another building, putting the rope around his neck. He slips and accidentally strangles himself. In David Lean’s version, Bill Sykes dies like this, but Oliver is right next to him and he is rescued by good people who climb up and retrieve him. Also in this film, Alec Guinness did an excellent and frightening version of Fagin… but again there is this problem. Equipped with a large artificial nose, virtually signalling a stereotypical Jew, Fagin was a ruthless criminal. The film gained a large audience – but under pressure it was banned in New York and – given that the film was made shortly after the Second World War - the film was completely banned in Germany.

 

                                   Ron Moody as the jolly Fagin in "Oliver!"

The second: In 1969, Carol Reed directed  the film “Oliver!” Written by Lionel Bart [original name Lionel Begieter], “Oliver!” performed very well on stage. It played for years in London, did well in New York and became a hit in much of the rest of the world. [May I add that as a teenager, in a school performance, I played one of the starving boys singing “Food, Glorious Food”… not that I’ve ever been starving.] As a musical play, it included some catchy songs… but they made characters whom Dickens would not have recognised. Nancy [who gets to sing the torch-song “As Long As He Needs Me”] is a jolly good girl, apparently deeply in love with Bill Sykes [in the novel their connection is brief and fleeting].  The pick-pocket boys were presented as a jolly lot of happy lads, singing such ditties as “Consider Yourself Well In” and later [with Nancy] “I’d Do Anything [For You Dear Anything]”. Most important though, Fagin was presented as a jolly rogue, not a heartless criminal, who gets to sing such witty songs as “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” “Reviewing the Situation” and “Be Back Soon”… and of course all this ends with Bill Sykes dead, Oliver saved, and Fagin and the Artful Dodger walking away to a happy sunset. The film version of “Oliver” has a London which is bright and sunny in technicolor. It copies David Lean’s Oliver Twist by having Bill Sykes being with Oliver when Sykes hangs himself. As a film, “Oliver!”  is very entertaining, won Academy Awards and won a huge audience. - but if you see “Oliver!”  on either stage or on screen, you are not really seeing Dickens’s narrative at all. Many, many viewers of “Oliver!” believe “Oliver!” is “Oliver Twist”, which is why I say it is the second most important film based in “Oliver Twist”.

P.S. Lionel Bart was Jewish, which in part explains why he took most of the nastiness out of Fagin - as well as knowing that a musical play and film had to have cheerful things in it. 

Concerning Dickens note that on this blog you can see reviews of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit,   Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop and Dickens's collection of Chistmas Books.

 

 

 

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

 “MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT” by Charles Dickens (first published in serial form 1843-44; published in book form 1844)

In the very early days of his blog, nearly 12 years ago, I wrote articles on earlier works by Charles Dickens – a survey of his five “Christmas Stories”  and his The Old Curiosity Shop. But more recently, whenever I’ve written about Dickens’ work, I’ve concentrated on his more mature, adult and sombre works, with accounts of Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit and Bleak House .  So I’ve decided to look again at something not as mature as Dickens’ most adult novels. Martin Chuzzlewit was written after his picaresque Pickwick Papers, his brilliant story of crime and the lower depths Oliver Twist, his melodramatic [and funny] Nicholas Nickleby, his sentimental Old Curiosity Shop and his historical (and least-read) novel Barnaby Rudge. But he had not yet written his partly-autobiographical David Copperfield, and he had certainly not yet written those often more melancholy and more adult novels Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations [his masterpiece], Hard Times and - though badly botched in its trick ending - Our Mutual Friend.

I see Martin Chuzzlewit as a kind of hinge to Dickens’ work. Dickens is halfway between the early melodrama and knockabout and the later sober and solemn.

Following my well-worn habit, I give you first a glib brief synopsis and then a more detailed one.

Brief Synopsis: Young Martin Chuzzlewit has a falling-out with his grandfather, Old Martin, over his plans to marry Old Martin’s ward Mary Graham. Young Martin is apprenticed for a while to a hypocritical architect, Mr. Seth Pecksniff, but he is forced to quit.  With Mark Tapley as his servant, young Martin travels to America seeking his fortune, but in vain. When he returns to England, the murderous schemes of his cousin Jonas Chuzzlewit are exposed as is the hypocrisy of Mr Pecksniff… and there is a happy ending in which Martin gets married to Mary Graham and he is reconciled to his grandfather.

Far too simplified a synopsis, isn’t it? Let’s flesh it out with a more Detailed Synopsis. (Far more detailed in fact. You’re going to be snoring before you get to the end of it.)

For the whole Chuzzlewit family, everything hinges of the wealth of Old Martin Chuzzlewit. He is very wealthy but he is apparently very ill. His family gather around him in Salisbury, such as his brother Anthony Chuzzlewit who is the father of Jonas Chuzzlewit; and distant relatives like Mr. Pecksniff, who is the father of two uncharitable and merciless daughters called Mercy and Charity. Also gathering with the clan are the likes of Chevy Slyme (Dickens wasn’t always subtle with the names he devised) and a sponger called Montague Tigg. Having a family gathering around a very sick man, in the hopes of being benefitting from his will, is a situation very like Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Much of the gathering takes place in the Blue Dragon Inn, run by Mrs Lupin, where the melancholy Mark Tapley works as a servant.

But despite expectations, Old Martin does not die. He goes back to London with his young ward Mary Graham. Young Martin Chuzzlewit is very much in love with Mary Graham, but Old Martin – who has legal control over Mary - refuses to let them marry. Young Martin accepts a position as apprentice to the architect Mr Pecksniff. He is befriended by the charitable and naïve Tom Pinch, who believes Pecksniff is a genius, even though we know Pecksniff’s reputation is built on plagiarising the work of his apprentices and trainees. Indeed Pecksniff’s fraudulence was known by a previous apprentice, John Westlock, who left Pecksniff’s business in disgust. But for some cloudy reason, Old Martin befriends the oily Pecksniff and expresses his dislike for young Martin… and Pecksniff devises a way of having young Martin fired. At about the same time, thoughtful, melancholy Mark Tapley, seeking something “jolly”, leaves his employ at the Blue Dragon Inn, and joins young Martin (who is aided by some unknown benefactor) as he sets off to find his fortune in America. Before they go, Martin meets John Westlock, and they express their shared disgust with Pecksniff.

At this point the tone of the novel changes radically, with Martin and Mark Tapley in the alien environment of the United States. The two of them land in New York. They fall in with the likes of Colonel Diver, Jefferson Brick and Major Pawkins, American “boosters” and self-promoters who constantly laud the American concept of Liberty while at the same time taking slaves for granted….

Meanwhile, back in England, Martin’s uncle Anthony Chuzzlewit dies – and Anthony’s son Jonas Chuzzlewit loudly draws everyone’s attention to the fact that there were witnesses to verify that Anthony died of natural causes. Jonas is now the heir to Anthony’s wealth. He pays court to Mr Pecksniff’s two daughters. Dickens inserts much comedy into the fact that these obnoxious creatures, Charity and Mercy, have frequent cat-fights, and while Jonas Chuzzlewit is generally expected to marry Charity, he instead marries Mercy… And it is at this point, well into the novel, that Dickens tries to ramp up the comedy by introducing us to the old drunken nurse Sarah Gamp (and her friend Betsy Prig), not to mention the inhabitants of Mrs. Todgers’ lodging house in London, including  the Puck-ish servant Bailey, and Mr Mould the undertaker (once again, score one for Dickens making up such a subtle name). Dickens now piles on the “low” comedy of these characters, especially Sarah Gump, whose illiterate and often drunken soliloquys were apparently regarded as hilarious when the novel first appeared, with Sarah Gamp making such [repeated] observations as “Don’t try no impogician with the Nuss, for she will not abear it!” (Chapter 40). Somehow I think this no longer raises a laugh. Old Martin at this time seems to suffer some form of stroke. He effects a reconciliation with Mr Pecksniff who, of course, is very solicitous towards him in the hope of inheriting his wealth. So Old Martin and Mary Graham now live in Pecksniff’s home….

Meanwhile in America, young Martin and Mark Tapley have met at least one honest American, Mr Bevan. But despite his honest advice, Martin and Mark purchase from shysters land in “Eden”, which Martin imagines to be a city where he will prosper as an architect. Martin and Mark travel there by riverboat, all the while hearing the boasting of “boosters” like General Choke, General Fladdock and La Fayette Kettle. “Eden” turns out to be a desolate swamp where people die of fever. Only Mark’s acquired cheerfulness and common sense keep Martin going… so Martin and Mark, bereft of funds, decide to return to England…

Meanwhile in England, the widower Mr Pecksniff is making advances to Mary Graham. She repulses him. One evening, in the church where Tom Pinch plays the organ, Mary Graham reveals to Tom the true nature of grasping, lecherous, hypocritical Pecksniff. The scales fall from Tom Pinch’s eyes… but little do Mary and Tom know that Pecksniff is eavesdropping and overhears the whole conversation. Back in his home, Pecksniff confronts Tom Pinch and dismisses him. Tom Pinch goes to work in London where he lives with his sister Ruth Pinch, who works as a governess. John Westlock gravitates towards them. Needing employment, Tom gains a comfortable post, by the agency of Mr Fips, as private librarian to an unknown benefactor. [“OY!  ”, you say at this point. “Isn’t there something suspicious in these ‘unknown benefactors’ conveniently popping up!!??”]

Meanwhile, we have unhappy scenes of the marriage of the villainous Jonas Chuzzlewit and Pecksniff’s daughter Mercy. Jonas becomes involved in a fraudulent insurance company run by the (now prosperous) Montague Tigg, attracting to its board the likes of David Crimple and Dr. John Jobling… Montague Tigg and Jonas Chuzzlewit involve Mr. Pecksniff in their schemes…. But Tigg now begins to blackmail Jonas, having heard nasty rumours about how Jonas’s father Anthony Chuzzlewit really died… So stalking Montague Tigg through the darkness, Jonas murders him.

At which point, inevitable in Dickens’ earlier novels, and in this novel, the happy denouement announces itself. Happy endings are unavoidable. Back from America, Martin and Mark Tapley join forces with Tom and Ruth Pinch and John Westlock. Tom’s unknown benefactor turns out to be (drum-roll please) Old Martin Chuzzlewit. And it was (another drum role) Old Martin who left money for Martin to travel to America… It turns out that Old Martin was simply testing young Martin’s mettle all along and he is much pleased to find the young man morally improved by his experience. In a scene in which all the novel’s sympathetic characters are gathered together, Old Martin confronts Pecksniff, berates him for his hypocrisy, and beats him with his cane. Pecksniff is financially ruined when the fraudulent insurance company crashes. Thanks to detective work by minor characters (oh alright then… Nadgett and Lewsome) the crimes of Jonas Chuzzlewit (murdering his own father and Montague Tigg) are revealed. Jonas escapes hanging by drinking his own poison. This leaves Mercy a widow, but she is received sympathetically by the sympathetic characters even as her sister, poor carping Charity, is being jilted by a bounder called Moddle.

So John Westlock marries Ruth Pinch. Mark Tapley marries widow Mrs. Lupin of the Blue Dragon Inn. And young Martin Chuzzlewit marries Mary Graham at last, while Tom Pinch plays the organ.

I beg you at this point to stop swearing, as all I have done so far is to give you a very detailed synopsis. But I did [WAKE UP!] warn you that by this point you would be snoring. In fact I have been charitable to you. If you think I have introduced in this account more named characters than you can remember, I beg you to understand that there are even more named characters whom I have not mentioned.

Now what do I make of this frankly messy novel?

 Typical of Dickens, there are whole chapters which involve characters who are not essential to the plot, such as it is - like the garrulous Sarah Gamp, the toasts she proposes and her endless gossip about “Mrs. Harris”. There are redundant side-shows such as Bailey, the cheeky Cockney servant from Mrs Todger’s establishment, who seems killed after falling off a coach, but who returns for the happy finale. Then there’s old Anthony Chuzzlewit’s clerk Old Chuffey and… oh, the hell with it. Too many side-shows. Too many redundant characters.

In one of his many books, G. K. Chesterton said that Dickens’ novels were all simply lengths cut out from the same cloth called Dickens. This judgement probably makes fastidious academics hopping mad, but it’s hard not to see some truth in Chesterton’s statement as you plunge back into one of Dickens’ more chaotic novels. Familiar features are a profusion of characters who are not really necessary to the story (Sarah Gamp is as detachable from the plot as Harold Skimpole is from Bleak House). There are those frequent descriptions of food and feasts and that melodramatic use of the weather. There is that messy construction, repetition, and yet great vitality. Something is always going on, even if it is of no real import.

And typically, when it comes to the main characters, nobody really works (one of the great virtues of Great Expectations is that Pip eventually resigns himself to having to work.) Yes, Pecksniff is an architect, but frankly we never see him at work in his profession, apart from learning that he plagiarises other people’s work. (Perhaps Dickens didn’t know all that much about architecture). Young Martin seeks work as an architect in America, but this is simply a plot throwaway as he never attracts any work. Tom Pinch works in a private library. And (apart, of course, from clerks, servants, one governess and comical characters like Sarah Gamp) that is really it for work in this novel. The main characters’ ideal is to live an easy life on unearned income – a legacy or a wealthy marriage. (I steal this view from George Orwell’s essay on Dickens… but Orwell was right.) Likewise, nobody really discusses politics, religion, current affairs etc. But then it may be the absence of these things that prevents the novel from “dating” in the wrong way, as happened with the work of George Meredith whose reputation faded away because he stuck too often to topical problems that now mean nothing to us.

In Martin Chuzzlewit some characters are presented in a barely credible way. A sort of trick is played on the reader with regard to the novel’s villains Mr Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit.  By his manner, bearing and pompously self-important way of speaking, Mr Pecksniff is made detestable to us before he has actually done anything reprehensible.  (This is very much the same technique used by Dickens in characterising Uriah Heep in his later novel David Copperfield - we are triggered to see a character as negative or malign before we really have the evidence.) Pecksniff’s hypocrisy is largely a matter of tone of voice. And it is disconcerting that the language of grandiloquent speeches, in which Old Martin denounces Pecksniff, are virtually indistinguishable from Pecksniff’s own speeches.

In a (messy) plot-driven novel, there are many psychological inconsistencies. There is the absurd contrivance of Old Martin himself, finally revealing that he has been play-acting. (Dickens ruins Our Mutual Friend by pulling the same stunt.) And one sees no reason for Old Martin to live with the Pecksniffs, except that it suits Dickens’ story. Tom Pinch is presented as totally trusting and admiring Pecksniff, yet his trust is shattered by one conversation with Mary Graham (conveniently overheard by Pecksniff). Tom Pinch, hitherto callow and easily deceived, goes to London and at once has the resilience, savvy and forthrightness to confront his sister Ruth’s employers and denounce the way they patronise her. Most flawed of all as a character is young Martin Chuzzlewit himself. There is a spark of something interesting in his character – young Martin is conceited and proud. Dickens was moving a little way from the flawless protagonist (Nicholas Nickleby) to the flawed and self-examining protagonist (Pip in Great Expectations). But once young Martin arrives in America, his conceit is gone and he simply becomes Dickens’ mouthpiece for what the author thought of America. (Dickens had spent six months on a tour of the United States in 1842, was not very impressed with the country and its mores, and wrote a travel book about it, American Notes). Martin gets to make such observations as “[America] was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues and associations, seemed to be melted down to dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that feel into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up and knocked down for its dollars…” (Chapter 16) One can’t help wondering why, if young Martin is so aware of rampant American materialism and shyster-ism, that he is gullible enough to fall for the shonky “Eden” speculation. Mark Tapley is necessary to extricate young Martin from his mistakes – a ghost of Sam Weller helping Mr Pickwick perhaps? As for young Martin’s attachment to Mary Graham, she is presented in such generic terms that it’s hard to accept her as a real character at all.

Unlike some of Dickens’ other novels, this one does not seem to attack any English social institution (parish relief, Yorkshire schools, debtors prisons, Chancery etc.). Apart from entertaining its readers over 19 serial months, its main point seems to have been the danger of self-love, though this is not very clearly worked out. And what of the “satire” that is in this novel? One critic, referring to the American section, called it “a good satire embedded in an indifferent novel”. Oops! That turns out to be G. K. Chesterton again.

By this stage, you think you have seen me systematically trashing a novel by Dickens. Not quite. It does have its genuinely funny moments. It does treat us to a little bit of the grotesque. It has some real – and savage – satire in the American sections. But it is still one of Dickens’ less illustrious novels and one of the first I would happily kick out of the Dickens’ canon if that were possible.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“BLEAK HOUSE” by Charles Dickens (first published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853. First published in book form in 1853)   

I feel compelled to write this “Something Old” to complete my comments on what are generally regarded as Charles Dickens’ three most daunting novels, as well as being among his longest. They are Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend (both reviewed on this blog) and Bleak House. In these novels you will find much scathing satire and some incidental humour, but little of the rumbustious action, broad comedy and frank melodrama that continue to make his earlier novels more popular with readers. In short, these three novels are largely serious and heavy affairs. Reviewing Little Dorrit, I called Bleak House Dickens’ second greatest novel after Great Expectations. I hold to this view. But by every rational examination I’m blowed if I know why I do.

So what you are about to read is an exercise in ambiguity.

I will forego giving you a detailed plot summary, as I too often do, and boil the tale down to its essence. 

The Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on uselessly for many years. Three wards-in-Chancery are nurtured and kept by their guardian John Jarndyce.  They are Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Corrupted by his expectations in the suit, Richard Carstone dabbles in medicine, the law and the army, but fails to make a career anywhere. Though he falls in love with, and marries, Ada Clare, he dies a disappointed man, the promise of his youth blighted.  It is to this character we must look if we are to interpret the novel as a solemn satire on the law’s delay and the inefficiency of the legal system. Justice delayed is justice denied etc.

The second, but connected, strand of plot concerns the Tory squire Sir Leicester Dedlock, who is in his 60s, and his younger wife Lady Honoria Dedlock, who is in her 40s. As we long suspect, but find out definitively about halfway through the novel, Esther Summerson is in fact Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate daughter, about whose existence Sir Leicester Dedlock knows nothing. Lady Dedlock is on the point of being blackmailed about this scandal (notably by the lawyer Tulkinghorn, who is found murdered). Fleeing for her husband’s palatial country seat Chesney Wold, she dies at the gates of the pauper graveyard where her lover is buried.

These two threads of narrative (the nurturing and crushed hopes of the wards-in-Chancery and Lady Dedlock’s scandal) are central to the novel’s plot, everything else being what I would call “detachable” – strands of plot that could almost exist on their own.

I have some theoretical objections to much of this.

There are, of course, the frequent coincidences, contrived to bring characters together – John Jarndyce is a good friend of Lawrence Boythorn whose property just happens to abut the Dedlocks’ property etc.etc. There is the plot device of many people noting how like Lady Dedlock young Esther is, but few of them making the obvious connection. My own view is that, unless mother and daughter really looked so alike that the connection was unmistakable, nobody would have noticed a likeness. Of course there are Victorian evasions. Has Sir Leicester Dedlock never had sexual intercourse with his wife? Has he not noticed that she is not a virgin and has stretch marks from her pregnancy? (These are 21st century speculations on my part, but I can’t help making them.) And where evasion is concerned, there is no confrontation of Sir Leicester with his Lady once he knows her past history, even if he “forgives” her. Surely this should have been a major scene in the novel, but was Dickens avoiding having to devise the plain speaking Sir Leicester might have had to use? I also wonder why Dickens has to ritually kill Lady Dedlock for her sins when she has, after all, produced somebody as wonderful as Esther Summerson, whose very name (“summer sun”) so clearly signals what a bringer of joy she is. And isn’t it a pity that Esther is finally paired with such an underdeveloped and uninteresting character as Allan Woodcourt?  Without miring myself in further plot details, I also find the solution to Tulkinghorn’s murder implausible.

But as I said, these are entirely theoretical objections to the novel, of the sort that students produce in undergraduate essays. The fact is, I was quite willing to accept the things I have listed as acceptable conventions for the era in which the novel was written. What makes much of the novel difficult to read, however, is what I would call its “clogged” nature.

As I said when reviewing Little Dorrit on this blog, I think Dickens sustains very well the idea of a prison as a dominating symbol  – of the constraints of social custom - in that novel. But in Our Mutual Friend, what could have been the dominating symbol of the river – as the uncertainty of life - is not sustained after the novel’s opening. Likewise, despite its famous opening, Bleak House does not sustain the image of fog as a symbol of the law’s impenetrability, delay and confusion. There is much dark imagery in the novel, of course, sometimes suggesting the dominance of the past (like the unending case in Chancery) – the “sick humour” of the slums; Krooks’ cat “Lady Jane” threatening to eat a corpse; the “Ghosts’ Walk”, with overt reminders of the past, at Chesney Wold; and the dark wood in which Esther and Lady Dedlock first fully acknowledge each other. But it is not the fog, or any other single symbol, that sustains the idea of confusion and delay.

  How Dickens does display complexity and confusion is by the plethora of characters he introduces. This is what I mean by the novel’s “clogged” nature. There are simply too many replicated characters. We have a delightful parody of misdirected charity in Mrs Jellyby, so why do we need the same point made by the (walk-on) character of Mrs Pardiggle? This “clogging” effect is especially true of the slum characters who jostle around “Nemo” (the pseudonym of Captain Hawdon, Lady Dedlock’s long-ago lover and the father of Esther Summerson). These slum characters are trying to find either material for blackmail or papers relating to the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Frankly, I became lost in the dealings of Krook, Snagsby, Guppy, Smallweed, Jobling (also called “Weevil”) and the rest of the gang. Indeed, I groaned when the avaricious Smallweed was introduced about halfway through the novel. In his grasping corruption, does he really add anything thematically to the novel which Krook hasn’t already displayed? Or did Dickens create him as a back-up, knowing that he was going to destroy Krook by spontaneous combustion? This is on top of the fact that (rather more relevant to his plot of the law’s delay) the novel has a profusion of lawyers -  more, I believe, than appear in any other novel by Dickens. “Conversation” Kenge of the firm of Kenge and Carboy; Snagsby; Tulkinghorn; Vholes etc. And did Dickens write another novel with so many (described or reported) death scenes? Tom Jarndyce commits suicide before the novel begins; “Nemo” dies of an overdose of opium; Krook by spontaneous combustion; Neckett (“Coavinses”) and Gridley of poverty; Richard Carstone of defeated hope; Tulkinghorn is murdered; Lady Dedlock of shame, exhaustion and – apparently – infection; and, of course, the heart-tugging death of young Jo the crossing-sweeper, who dies of smallpox.

Frankly, in reading this novel I was often confused by the dealings of so many characters and the introduction of so many subplots. (Do we really need bluff trooper Mr George turning out to be the son of the Dedlocks’ housekeeper???). Or is this simply another way of saying that I found the serial nature of the novel wearing, and missed that sense of “wholeness” that one finds in more tightly-constructed novels?

And yet (here comes a paradox) it is a curious fact that those parts of Bleak House I most relished were those that involved characters NOT essential to the plot as I have outlined it.

Thus Jo the crossing sweeper, with his “He was very good to me, he was.” And “I don’t know nothink about nothink.” Take or leave his rhetorical death saying the Lord’s Prayer, and sneer if you are of an Oscar Wilde disposition at his sentimental function in the novel, but it is still refreshing to hear his straightforward voice after all the obfuscations of other characters. The scene in which he leads Lady Dedlock through the slums is one of the novel’s highlights. Then there is Harold Skimpole, one of Dickens’ best satirical creations. I have met this sort of man – claiming to be a complete naïf while artfully sponging off other people and then taking no responsibility for the consequences. Scholars say he is based on the elderly Leigh Hunt (just as Boythorn is modelled on Walter Savage Landor) – but what is important is that he lives as hypocrisy incarnate, as convincing as Tartuffe. And I was engaged by Mr Bucket “of the Detective” – the bluff but devious police officer whose leading questions prise information out of dubious characters with the skill of a Maigret so that he ends up solving the problem of the murder of Tulkinghorn. For me, a favourite scene in the novel is the melodramatic one when Bucket scatters, with righteousness on his side, the opportunists who have come to sell information to Sir Leicester Dedlock. To this band of memorables, I am tempted to add Caddy Jellyby and her sulks as she resents fiercely her mother’s shows of charity which actually serve to neglect her family. Alas, Caddy Jellyby is a good and convincing portrait to begin with, but Dickens has to turn her into a more conventional figure of sentiment when she marries young Turveydrop – so I refuse to let her into my Pantheon of memorable characters in Bleak House. 

While I am eviscerating the novel in this fashion, let me comment on how unsettling I find Dickens’ mode of narration. Let nobody be so stupid as to imagine that Dickens was unaware of how innovative his style could be, and how consciously he experimented with different modes of narration. Most of Bleak House is narrated by an ominscient third-person who speaks in the present tense. So far, so (almost) conventional. But there are chapters in which Esther Summerson (addressing herself to whom?) writes in the first-person and in the past tense. There is a certain awkwardness here, as we are frequently told how wonderful and how morally blameless Esther is in her own artless words. I understand that we are meant to be charmed by her disclaimers and self-deprecation, but the effect is still jarring and artificial. For the life of me, I cannot see this as anything more than as an awkward precursor to the much better Great Expectations, all of which is (like David Copperfield) narrated in the first-person to great ironical effect. In Great Expectations, the theme of the oneness of society is better expressed in the tale of a gentleman dependent on a criminal than the tale of a haughty lady who happens to come into contact with a diseased slum-dweller while working out the consequence of her “sin”.

If you have read carefully, dear readers, you will have noticed that I have just systematically condemned Bleak House on many levels. But – here comes the paradox – I still think it is one of Dickens’ greatest achievements. Could it be that the confusions and the multiplicity of characters and the mixed modes of narration and all the things that my rational mind critcises are in fact all the things that make Dickens’ panorama of a whole society so convincing? A whole world is encompassed. Indeed, could all this muddle be the true continuation of the opening image of fog - the portrait of a confused and rudderless society? An immovable image of the tragic and complex nature of life lingers with me from this novel. It annoys me so much that I cannot get it out of me head. Is this what works of genius do?

 Could somebody please sort this paradox out for me?

 

Note on cinema: Like all but one of Dickens’ novels (Barnaby Rudge), Bleak House has a number of times been made into a TV serial but has never been produced as a film for the cinema, if we except a few primitive versions way back in the silent era. I have seen two of the BBC television serials of Bleak House – and given that Dickens wrote his work as serial parts, this was probably the right format for dramatisation of the novel. I was impressed by the 1985 8-part version, and especially by Diana Rigg’s performance as Lady Dedlock, although Denholm Elliott was a little too haughty for the humane John Jarndyce. The 2005 version of Bleak House, chopped into 15 episodes, was not quite up to the same standard. Gillian Anderson was a less impressive Lady Dedlock although Carey Mulligan was perfectly cast as Ada Clare. The main trouble with the 2005 version was that it was consciously aimed at the soap-opera audience. The many episodes were aired in the early-evening, with the aim of catching those who most often watch East Enders or Neighbours. Continuity suffered with all the necessary cliff-hangers at the end of each episode.  

 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“LITTLE DORRIT” by Charles Dickens (first published in monthly parts December 1855 – June 1857; first published in book form 1857)

            Back in February 2012, when I gave a public lecture in the Auckland Central Library to mark the 200^th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, I stated that I had over the years read all of Dickens’ novels with the sole exception of Little Dorrit. Later I realized that this wasn’t quite true, as I had not read Barnaby Rudge either; so Barnaby Rudge is waiting for me to conquer some other day. But recently, recuperating from an illness that had me hospitalised for a month, and having much time on my hands, I at last got around to reading Little Dorrit.

            What a wonderful and what an infuriating experience it was! Little Dorrit renewed my acquaintance with some of the things I love about Dickens and many of the things that irritate me. Written between 1855 and 1857, it came in Dickens’ work after Bleak House (his second greatest novel) and before Great Expectations (his masterpiece). Apparently it was immensely popular on its first appearance. In fact its monthly parts sold in much greater numbers than the monthly parts of David Copperfield. But nowadays, I believe, “the common reader” (i.e. everybody except academics and specialists) tends to rank Little Dorrit, with Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend as one of Dickens’ heavier, gloomier and more challenging novels – and hence to be avoided when you have the option of frolicking or melodramatising with Vincent Crummles or the Artful Dodger or Quilp or Mrs Leo Hunter or Sidney Carton or Betsy Trotwood instead. Little Dorrit is also one of Dickens’ longest novels (800 pages in the Penguin edition and nearly 1200 pages in the larger-print Complete Works of Dickens, both on my shelves).

            As always, let me orient you with the briefest of plot summaries.

Although Dickens drew on more recent events for some of his inspiration, the novel is set in the late 1820s, thirty years before Dickens was writing, at a time when large numbers of people (including Dickens’ father) were still being incarcerated for debt. The practice had largely died out by the 1850s and the Marshalsea debtors’ prison had been decommissioned.

            After 20 years working in India, Arthur Clennam, in his early 40s, returns to England with a heavy sense of family guilt. Before his late father died, he said some things which suggested that the Clennam family may have been responsible for the financial ruin of the Dorrit family. But when, back in London, Arthur Clennam asks his vindictive, puritanical, widowed mother about this, she angrily denies any knowledge of the matter. Nevertheless, the Dorrits are imprisoned in the Marshalsea. The old widower William Dorrit has been there for over 23 years, and so is known as “the Father of the Marshalsea”. He lives in prison with his older children “Tip” (Edward) and Fanny, and with his younger daughter Amy, aged 22, who was born in the prison and is known through most of the novel as Little Dorrit. Arthur Clennam socialises with the Dorrits, tries to alleviate their circumstances and tries to find out how their fortunes can be restored. It is soon evident to the reader (but apparently not to Arthur) that Little Dorrit is in love with Arthur. At the end of the first of the novel’s two long parts, entitled “Poverty”, William Dorrit’s wealth is suddenly restored to him and he and his family leave the prison.

            In the second part, entitled “Riches”, old William Dorrit is now immensely wealthy and, with his family, does the Grand Tour of the Continent. Arthur Clennam for some time has his eye on another woman (and is sometimes pestered by a woman in whom he is not interested). But in Little Dorrit’s long absence, Arthur begins vaguely to realise how much he values her and how emotionally attached he has become to her. The crisis comes very late in the novel. Arthur Clennam himself is financially ruined, and ends up in the Marshalsea prison. Little Dorrit visits him there and becomes his loving nurse when he falls sick. After first testing his integrity (he is not interested in her for her money), she declares her love openly and he declares his. Dickens rewards them, of course, by having them marry.

            It turns out that, as Arthur suspected, his vindictive mother was involved in some very shady business, but it was not what Arthur thought it was. (The denouement of the novel which reveals this is very complicated. At the end of the 1967 Penguin edition which he edited, John Holloway feels compelled to add an appendix explaining to readers, who haven’t understood the text, what Mrs Clennam has been hiding.)

            As far as “plot” goes, Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit are the core of this novel. But anybody who has read Little Dorrit will realise what a travesty my synopsis so far has been.

            In the first place, in terms of the novel’s ideas and morality, old Wiliam Dorrit is at least as important as Arthur or Amy. In jail, in poverty, “the Father of the Marshalsea” still has absurd pretensions to gentility and nobility. He regards himself as a gentleman and the other inmates of the Marshalsea as his social inferiors. When they charitably help him by giving him money, he pretends that this is his due as “Testimonials” to his superior character and social class. He refuses to recognise that his two daughters really support him by going out to work – Fanny by going on the stage and Amy by being a seamstress. (His son “Tip” is a nitwit who cannot stick to any job.) In Old Dorrit, Dickens is attacking the false-genteel and the life-long delusions class distinctions bring; for once he is out of jail Old Dorrit absurdly pretends that he has never been so degraded as to be a prisoner, and he loses his temper with one member of his circle who mentions his imprisonment. Yet he cannot escape from what has formed him. Just before Old Dorrit dies, in one of Dickens’ great coups de theatre, the old man’s mind breaks down in front of the assembled guests at a banquet and he addresses them as if they are his fellow prisoners in the Marshalsea. His mind is still imprisoned. Indeed, by its lust for money and status, and by its pretensions, conventions and falsity, all of society is depicted as one large prison in this novel. As I opined in my comments on this blog about Our Mutual Friend, the imagery of fog in Bleak House and the imagery of the river and the dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend are not carried through consistently in those novels. But in Little Dorrit the imagery of prisons and imprisonment is as insistent as a drum beat. The novel opens in a prison in Marseilles. Mrs Clennam is an invalid and speaks of her condition as an imprisonment. The Marshalsea dominates much of the action. When the Dorrit party visit a monastery on their Grand Tour, some interpret it as a prison. And in the second part of the novel, Little Dorrit repeatedly sees the sights of Europe as being less “real” than memories of the Marshalsea. Many scholars have pointed out that, before he began writing this novel, Dickens planned out carefully every turn of the plot and every relationship between characters. “Society-as-prison” was an intentional part of this plan.

            Apart from Old Dorrit and the imprisonment motif, the other reason not to reduce this novel to Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit is the obvious fact that it has a large cast of characters and many, many subplots. There is Arthur’s entanglement with the Meagles family and his partnership with the inventor Daniel Doyce. There are the malign schemes of the French criminal Rigaud (who often goes by the alias Blandois) and the innocence of his sometime companion, the Italian Giovanni Battista Cavalletto. There is the Casby family which includes the widow Flora Finching. There is Miss Wade and her odd relationship with the Meagles’ ward Harriet (nicknamed “Tattycoram”). There is the  millionaire financier Merdle and his circle. And of course there is a host of comic or grotesque supporting characters, typical of this author, such as young John Chivery, son of the turnkey at the Marshalsea, who is hopelessly in love with Little Dorrit; or Mrs Clennam’s scoundrelly and scheming servant Flintwinch. It is also typical of Dickens to include a feeble-minded “holy innocent” in the form of Little Dorrit’s companion Maggy, a grown woman with the mind of a ten-year-old. (For other such lovable innocents, think of Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Dick in David Copperfeld, or, I understand, Barnaby Rudge himself.)

Dickens had a habit or reducing his minor characters to one particular tic or peculiarity. This habit is well on display in Little Dorrit. Pancks, the rent-collector for Mr Casby, is always introduced puffing and moving determinedly forward like a tug-boat. “Mr F’s Aunt” speaks in non-sequiturs and furious outbursts (“There’s milestones on the road to Dover.”). Mrs Merdle’s parrot ironically interrupts her conversations. Affery, evil Flintwinch’s long-suffering wife, “dreams” things rather than witnessing them. The criminal Rigaud is rarely mentioned without some reference to his moustache becoming entangled in his nose.

There is one major character in this novel who seems more like the full-blown comic caricatures of Dickens’ earlier novels than the more sombre leading characters he produces here. This is Flora Finching. She is the woman with whom Arthur Clennam thought he was in love when they were both in their early twenties, and before he went to India. When he meets her (she now widowed) twenty years later, she is eager to resume their attachment. But he finds the charming and beautiful young woman of his memories has become a fat and foolish middle-aged woman still trying to woo Arthur as if she were a coquettish teenager. Analyse the humour of the Flora Finching scenes, and you will find that it is essentially very cruel. After all, seen objectively and without Dickens’ caricature, Flora’s only fault is to have grown older and to no longer match Arthur’s nostalgic memories. (All biographers now point out that Flora Finching was based on Maria Beadnell, an old flame of Dickens’ youth whom he met years later and judged to be a fluttering, twittering fool.) Yet, cruel or not, Dickens’ humour is very funny. Flora speaks in endless stream-of-consciousness sentences which are probably the most inventive monologues in the Dickens canon since Mr Jingle’s verbless utterances in The Pickwick Papers. [Note of interest – the role of Flora Finching was played in Christine Edzard’s 1987 film of Little Dorrit by the formidable British actress Miriam Margolyes. As a feminist, Margolyes said this character would have made her very angry if she were not laughing so hard – so infectious is Dickens’ humour even when he is being cruel.]

I said near the beginning of this overlong notice that Little Dorrit renewed my acquaintance with some of the things I love about Dickens and many of the things that irritate me.

It is now time for me to draw up my balance sheet.

When he does it well, Dickens’ descriptions of place are still dazzling. To give one example from early in the novel, when Arthur Clennam (in Part One, Chapter 3) comes back to his mother’s home after twenty years, Dickens sets the scene on a grim, cheerless English Sunday (strictly ruled by observance of the Sabbath, unlike Continental Sundays). It is almost Kafkaesque in its menace and certainly foreboding.

When Dickens lets rip with direct satire, his observations are as fresh as if they were penned yeaterday. His great invention in Little Dorrit is the Circumlocution Office, a huge government department run by incompetent career civil servants, whose main function is to oppose and hold up any progressive or humane measure by finding ways “how not to do it”. As I read the Circumlocution Office passages, I couldn’t help wondering if it had been studied by the writers of the 1980s British sitcom “Yes, Minister”, in which the main function of civil servants is to block whatever elected government ministers want to do. In the characters of Mr Merdle and his arriviste followers,  Dickens makes a savage attack on those who fawn on millionaires simply because they are rich through sharp investments, regardless of whether they have contributed anything to the public good. As often as not, such plutocrats turn out to be swindlers and frauds, as Merdle does. Apparently Dickens based this character on a contemporary case, but one can think of modern parallels in our neoliberal age. Then there is Mr Casby, the type of a man who pretends to be a benefactor of the poor, but whose main aim is to squeeze poor people for their rents.

One of Dickens’ best pieces of social criticism in this novel is his attack on Calvinist hellfire morality, in the person of horrible Mrs Clennam, whose fervent religion seems to consist mainly of her calling the wrath of God down upon her enemies. This is balanced in the novel by Little Dorrit who, in the closing chapters, quite specifically reveals that her sense of charity and public service is based on adherence to the forgiving Jesus, as opposed to the perversion of Christianity which Mrs Clennam represents. Dickens, who often satirised fervent Evangelicals and who had no major attachment to organised religion, never came closer to articulating an underlying Christian morality.

Another major element which I admire in this novel is the more nuanced characterisation of the major characters than is evident in many of Dickens’ earlier novels. Here there is a subtlety and a roundedness to the chief characters, the best of whom are allowed to have their faults and the worst of whom have their redeeming features. To give some brief and inadequate examples: Arthur Clennam is a decent, admirable man, but Dickens has the insight to see that much of his romantic interest in Meagles’ daughter “Pet” (Minnie) is fuelled by his jealousy of “Pet’s” successful suitor, the charlatan artist Henry Gowan. Meagles himself seems set up in the opening chapters to be the type of a foreigner-hating English chauvinist. Yet, despite bowing to convention and fashion on occasions, he is essentially a decent and well-intentioned man.

Most interesting to me is the character of Miss Wade. If we read Part Two, Chapter 21 carefully, we find Dickens coming as close as a Victorian author could to implying that she is a lesbian. Dickens frames her as a sinister figure, in the way she encourages the Meagles’ discontented ward Harriet (“Tattycoram”) to run away from the Meagles, and then takes control of the girl. Yet when Miss Wade confronts Mr Meagles in Part One, Chapter 27, we can’t help noticing how right she is when she points out that the Meagles have patronised Harriet, belittled her and made her feel a slavey. Later, Dickens inserts a chapter of self-confession by Miss Wade, allowing us to understand how she has become the person she is.

            Yet, for me, there is the debit side of this novel.

As in all Dickens’ long, serially-published novels, no matter how well-planned in advance they may have been, there are times when the author seems to be dragging matters out simply to keep readers hooked for the next instalment. In Little Dorrit he titillates readers by showing us loaded guns which aren’t fired until we have ploughed through what would now be the length of an ordinary novel – so there are long and wearisome waits for the payoff. For example, the evil Rigaud is introduced in the very opening chapter, but we do not hear of him again until Chapter 11, and it is an even longer wait to discover what he has to do with any other major character in the novel. Similarly, the relationship of Miss Wade and “Tattycoram” is introduced in the novel’s second chapter, but it does not surface again until Chapter 27.

            Dickens does not here perpetrate on readers the narrative trick that infects the main plot of Our Mutual Friend, but there is an element of what I would call “evasion” in this novel. Important things are simply not explained. In a thoughtful long essay on Dickens which he wrote in 1939, George Orwell praised Little Dorrit for introducing Dickens’ most credible, non-caricatured working-class family (the family of the jobbing plasterer Plornish). But he also pointed out that Dickens’ real knowledge of industry and technical processes was very limited. So in Little Dorrit we have a big issue made of Daniel Doyce’s great invention, the development of which is held up by the obfuscating Circumlocution Office. Apparently the invention is so novel  that it will change the nature of industry, and Arthur Clennam goes into partnership with Doyce to advance it. Yet we are never told what exactly this invention is. And if it seems unfair to accuse a novelist of not being able to come up with a new technical invention, it has to be noted that it is never even made clear in what general area of industry this invention would be useful. Just as “evasive” is the sudden reversal of fortune near the end of Part One (Chapter 35), where the good Pancks proves that Old Dorrit is heir to great wealth. How is it that, over the 23 years of Old Dorrit’s imprisonment, nobody ever discovered this obvious fact before, or that Old Dorrit wasn’t aware of it himself – or at least got somebody to investigate the possibility? It simply suits Dickens’ plot that this improbability happens when it does. It is to me as irksome as the convenient (but highly symbolic) accidental death of the criminal Rigaud in the final chapters, when Mrs Clennam’s house collapses on him. It has been shown that Dickens carefully prepared for this event by consistently throughout the novel describing Mrs Clennam’s house as unstable, creaky and decaying. Even so, it is too neat a way to polish off a villain.

            What I find most alienating in this novel, however, brings me back to the matter of Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit themselves. I understand that Little Dorrit is meant to represent the charity, altruism and goodness that contrast with a corrupt, imprisoning, money-driven society. I understand the concept of the “meta-novel” working by symbols rather than strict realism. But, to put it crudely, Little Dorrit is too good to be true – and her goodness is of a sort which may have appealed greatly to Victorians but which is much harder for us to swallow. I find myself agreeing with the critic George Wing, who spoke of her “naïve sanctity”. On one level, the youngest of three siblings who cares for her aged (and deluded) father is reminiscent of Cordelia looking after, and ultimately forgiving, King Lear. But then the whole point about Cordelia was that, in the very opening scene, she told her father forthrightly the truth about himself – that he was relying foolishly on flattery. Little Dorrit cares devotedly for her aged father, but she never tells him the truth. Indeed she participates in the fiction that he is not being supported by his daughters’ work, and thus sustains his class delusions. There is about her a dire submissiveness. Of course the left hand should not know what the right is doing. Of course Little Dorrit should be modest enough not to boast of her acts of charity. But this submissiveness really serves only to perpetuate her father’s snobbery and self-importance. I grant that I am making a 21^st century judgement here, but there were times when I wished (anachronistically) that she could be more assertive, more frank, less of a symbol than a real person.

            And then there is that matter of her relationship with Arthur Clennam. Remember Arthur (the same Arthur who ridicules another woman for having grown to his own age) is in his 40s – as was Dickens when he wrote this novel – and Amy Dorrit is in her early 20s, thus half his age. I am not decrying May and September love, but Arthur Clennam’s attraction to Amy plays to the image of the strong, protective older man and the younger, fragile child-woman whom he protects. There are for me too many details such as the following (from Part One, Chapter 32): “He saw her trembling little form and her downcast face, and the eyes that drooped the moment they were raised to him….” Yes, the trembling little form (for her littleness is always emphasised) of a silent-movie heroine. Typically, Amy swoons and is carried out of the prison by Arthur Clennam when she learns that her father has had his fortune restored. In Book Two there is some mitigation of this fragile image when Dickens gives us a few chapters consisting of the letters Amy writes to Clennam from Europe, and we get to see a more mature mind revealed. Even so, my crude and evil-thinking mind sees reflected in all this the middle-aged Charles Dickens deserting his middle-aged wife (who had borne him ten children) and setting up a teenaged actress as his mistress. Little Dorrit is an older man’s idolisation of his lost youth.

            Oops! I’ve crossed a line here, haven’t I? I’ve started passing judgements on the author rather than on the book, which is a very naughty thing to do. I plead that I was driven to it by the fact that I am as repelled from the figure of Little Dorrit as I am impressed by the figure of Lizzie Hexam in that much less satisfactory novel Our Mutual Friend. Back in the 1950s, Lionel Trilling said that Little Dorrit was “one of the most profound of Dickens’ novels and one of the most significant works of the nineteenth century.” On thematic grounds there might be reason to agree with this verdict. But on aesthetic grounds it does not reach the heights and the eponymous character is unbelievable.

Cinematic footnote: For many reasons, Little Dorrit is one of the least-filmed of Dickens’ novels. Basic research tells me there were three film adaptations way back in the silent era, and there was a German film adaptation in 1934. BBC television has serialised it only once or twice (most recently in 2008). Apart from this, the only film adaptation for the big screen was Christine Edzard’s 1987 film which I saw on its first release. It was organised as two separate three-hour parts, Edzard’s inventive idea being that one part told the story from Arthur Clennam’s point of view, and the other part covered the same events from Little Dorrit’s point of view. It had a very large cast of familiar British actors (Derek Jacobi as Clennam; Alec Guinness as Old Dorrit etc.) Now that I have read the novel, however, I realise that even its six hours were not enough to include all of Dicken’s subplots. The important plot concerning Rigaud and the plot concerning Miss Wade and “Tattycoram” were completely absent.