Charles Dickens: A Life (46 page)

Little Dorrit
is the third in Dickens’s condition-of-England novels, and returns to the broad sweep of
Bleak House
. The centre of the story is again London, an almost unredeemedly gloomy London, with its ‘deadly sewer’, once a fine, fresh river, running through it, its overworked people denied natural beauty, its melancholy streets ‘gloomy, close, and stale’, its broken old houses on whose steps sit ‘light children nursing heavy children’, and smart, cheap new houses with absurdly got-up footmen and grooms lounging outside. The ‘crooked and descending streets’ below St Paul’s, between Cheapside and the river, lead down among warehouses and wharves through narrow alleys to the foul river and ‘Found Drowned’ bills. Everything offends the senses. The houses of the rich smell dismally of ‘yesterday’s soup and coach-horses’. The clothes of the poor are greasy. Old Nandy in his pauper’s uniform smells of all the other workhouse men. Mrs Flora Finching, once pretty and lovable, now middle aged, eats too much, weighs too much, talks too much and smells of lavender water and brandy. On Sunday evening the church bells sound ‘as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round’. Dickens dislikes so much of what he sees, hears and smells – partly the London of his childhood, partly London in the 1850s – that his jokes are almost all uncomfortable or bitter.

He maps out a great London patchwork around the river, St Paul’s and Cheapside, Barbican, Holborn and the Gray’s Inn Road; the Borough, Southwark Bridge with its three narrow cast-iron arches, built in 1819, where Little Dorrit goes to be quiet and sit looking at the water beneath; Covent Garden and Pentonville; Richmond and Hampton Court; Cavendish Square and Park Lane; and Westminster, where the government offices are. And he takes his cast from all these places – the workhouse, the prison, the theatre, the government offices, the crammed dwellings of the poor in Bleeding Heart Yard, Mayfair mansions, grace-and-favour residences and suburban villas. They are woven together in an elaborately constructed plot, some of it over-elaborate and strained at the seams. The pantomime villain Rigaud who hails from a Marseilles prison fails to convince at any point, and is more memorable for being given the first cigarette to appear in Dickens’s fiction than anything else.
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Many of the characters are sent on travels through France, to the Alps, Venice and Rome, but London and especially the Marshalsea and its surroundings are the heart of the book.
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The question of money also runs through it: how to make it, how to lose it, how to manage without it; when is it real, and when notional? Perennial questions. The Dorrit family is raised from prison and debt to great wealth, investments are made and lost, the financier Merdle maintains the lifestyle appropriate to his vast fortune through his beautiful cold wife and his terrifyingly superior butler, without ever enjoying himself. Mrs Merdle has perfected a conversational style in which she expresses her preference for a simple life – ‘A more primitive state of society would be delicious to me’ and ‘I am pastoral to a degree, by nature’ – but is bound by Society, she explains, to respect its values, which are neither primitive nor pastoral. Politicians, bankers, bishops and lawyers are all eager to attend the dinners given by the Merdles. Mr Casby, a landlord with the look of a benevolent patriarch, squeezes his poor tenants mercilessly through his rent collector. The amateur artist Henry Gowan, cousin to the Barnacles, condescends to marry the daughter of the middle-class Meagles and to overspend the generous allowance they give her while despising them as social inferiors. Arthur Clennam, the unheroic hero, has been brought up by a ferociously pious mother whose creed is ‘Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them.’ He discovers that his real mother, who died young, had been a poor singer training for the stage, and so dedicated to the world of art and imagination despised by his foster mother. Clennam is no businessman, and has to learn through adversity and loss where he may put his trust: not in business, not in government departments, not in religion, but only in the faithful human heart.

Mrs Merdle keeps a pet parrot who punctuates her talk with screams and screeches of sardonic-sounding laughter, like an alter ego signalling her real meaning to the listener. Flora Finching, once Clennam’s sweetheart, now a widow with romantic delusions and an inability to talk coherently, is given speeches of baroque intricacy and absurdity, wonderfully funny until they become rather too much of a good thing. The wittiest and saddest scene in the book is the one in which William Dorrit, in prison, entertains his old friend Nandy from the workhouse and his new friend and benefactor, Arthur Clennam, to tea. Dorrit condescends to Nandy and apologizes for him behind his hand. ‘Union, poor old fellow. Out for the day,’ he explains to Clennam, who has just sent Dorrit ten pounds, without which there would have been no tea. Making Nandy sit on the windowsill to take his tea, Dorrit gives a running commentary on his defects to Clennam, saying his hearing and his legs are going, his memory is weak, and that he ‘rusts in the life he leads’ – a description equally applicable to himself. And after Nandy has left, gently escorted by Little Dorrit, Dorrit remarks on his being ‘A melancholy sight … though one has the consolation of knowing that he doesn’t feel it himself. The poor old fellow is a dismal wreck. Spirit broken and gone – pulverized – crushed out of him, sir, completely!’ Dorrit is so cheered by being in a position to condescend that he goes to his prison window like royalty, and when other inmates of the prison look up ‘his recognition of their salutes just stopped short of a blessing.’
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The scene comes to mind again later when, after Mr Dorrit has left the Marshalsea Prison and is travelling grandly abroad, rich and well dressed, and attending a magnificent dinner party in Rome, he falters, becomes confused and asks who is on the lock and where the turnkey is, begs for alms and reveals himself as what he was for so long, the Father of the Marshalsea. It is a highly dramatic scene, but it comes across as true and tragic, faultlessly done. Dorrit is dying, and naturally reverts to the place where he had spent twenty-five years of his life. If occasionally the narrative wears thin or grows confused, it also offers some of the best moments in all Dickens’s writing – for instance when Mr Merdle, on a sinister errand, borrows a pen-knife with a tortoiseshell handle from his daughter-in-law Fanny, who watches him from her balcony as he goes on his way. It is a hot evening and she is pregnant and bored: ‘Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed of several Devils.’
²⁷
As indeed he is.

The last number of
Little Dorrit
appeared in June 1857. A few weeks before, Dickens had revisited the site of the Marshalsea. He described the visit in his preface to the bound edition, saying he had not been there since it was closed, and that he found some houses which preserved the great block of the former prison. He talked to a small boy in the street outside, and, pointing to the window of the room where, he says, Little Dorrit was born and her father lived, he asked the boy if he knew the name of the present tenant. The boy replied, ‘“Tom Pythick.” I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, “Joe Pythick’s Uncle.”’ It’s a wonderful story, and much better than the readers of the introduction knew. The boy’s confident naming of the Pythicks is set against Dickens’s imagined Dorrits. The real link with the place, his father’s imprisonment in 1824, is left out, as is the small boy who used to visit him there.
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The memory of John Dickens remained powerful in his mind, and his own relationship with him, made up of exasperation, love and rage; and it may be that Amy Dorrit, who forgives her corrupt father even when he behaves cruelly and shamefully towards her, overlooks all his failings and gives him unconditional love and support, becomes a way of dealing with the anger he had felt against his father and that he wished to set entirely aside after his death. If she is, to a degree, an emblematic figure, she may be seen as his own perfected, ideal self, the child who is never angry with his flawed father.

He was forty-five when he finished
Little Dorrit
, his eleventh novel, in May 1857. It ends with a wedding between a hero in his forties with a sad history, Arthur Clennam, and Little Dorrit, young enough to be his daughter – indeed, ‘He took her in his arms, as if she had been his daughter.’ The final sentence of the book describes them leaving the church to take up ‘a modest life of usefulness and happiness’, and is beautifully thought through: ‘They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.’
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For him there was no such happiness, no inseparable beloved, no blessing on his life. There were duties and preoccupations, with his children’s careers and education, with the running of the Home in Shepherd’s Bush and the editing of
Household Words
; and there were always new plans to be made, a new house, a trip abroad, a play to put on. By good chance the house he wanted to buy at Gad’s Hill belonged to a contributor to
Household Words
, the writer Eliza Lynn Linton, who had inherited it from her father. It was inspected and negotiated for, and sold to him in March 1856 for £1,700.

Other distractions in his life during the
Little Dorrit
period were two women who caught his imagination in different ways. The first was Caroline Maynard, calling herself Mrs Thompson, whose younger brother Frederick wrote to Dickens in the autumn of 1854, asking for advice and help. She had paid for him to be articled to an architect when she was the mistress of a gentleman, but after nine years with him his business failed and he abandoned her. She had a small child and no income, and she turned to prostitution. Her brother, unable to continue his training, lived with her in a small house in Bute Street, off the Brompton Road – the same house in which she received her clients – and he was in despair, himself earning a pittance only as a draughtsman, and wanting to rescue her from her way of life. She was in her thirties, and when Dickens first saw her he described her as ‘rather small, and young-looking; but pretty, and gentle, and has a very good head’.
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This was to Miss Coutts, whom he consulted about how they might be able to help her. He said how strongly he had been impressed by the brother’s story: ‘his perception of his sister’s disgrace, and undiminished admiration for her, and the confidence he has grown up in, of her being something good, and never to be mentioned without tenderness and deference – is a romance at once so astonishing and yet so intelligible as I never had the boldness to think of.’
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At once Dickens saw the situation as it might be used in fiction, even if a fiction he would never write.

Dickens called on her at Bute Street in December, when she told him she would willingly go to South Africa as long as she could take her child. He wanted Miss Coutts to meet her and after his return from Paris he arranged for a meeting at the Home in February 1855. There was no question of her becoming an inmate, since the Home did not take mothers with children; besides which, said Dickens, ‘her manner, character and experiences, are altogether different.’
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Miss Coutts had meanwhile sent another adviser, a clergyman, to visit Caroline, and he observed that she was well dressed, kept a maid and seemed ‘by no means destitute’. He felt she had been softened by a life of luxury and would not be able to maintain herself by needlework, or face the life of an emigrant to the Cape or Australia, and noted that her father had been a drunkard, her mother was a nurse in the Kensington Workhouse, and her younger sister ‘a milliner alas! of damaged reputation’. She was not after all so different from the girls at the Home.
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The suggestion that she might emigrate was not pursued.

When the clergyman called on her again he learnt that her mother had died, and this time he suggested Miss Coutts might consult with Dickens again about how best to help her. In March, Dickens invited both brother and sister to visit him at Devonshire Terrace, putting the question ‘What am I to do?’ to Miss Coutts before their visit. Miss Coutts evidently suggested some course of action that Caroline could not accept, and Dickens wrote to Coutts again, saying, ‘There is, of course, an end to it,’ adding that he believed Mrs Thompson to be perfectly truthful and that ‘she will recover herself somehow yet.’

But it looks as though Miss Coutts changed her mind and did set her up as a lodging-house keeper, presumably in a part of London where she was a stranger and could pass as a widow.
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To disappear and transform yourself into a different person was something to interest Dickens the novelist, but nothing more is heard of her until the following May (1856), when he told Miss Coutts he had seen her, and that her letting of lodgings had not succeeded well enough for her to continue with it. She had given notice that she was leaving the house, and she would sell her furniture and use the money to emigrate with her little girl and her brother to Canada, where Dickens was confident she would find work as a housekeeper or some similar honest occupation. He did what he could to ease their journey by contacting the Canada Railway, and after this their story goes blank. Caroline Maynard, or Thompson, goes down in history as having stirred his imagination and kept his interest for over eighteen months. She had been persistent in seeking his help and in trying to remake her life in London, and she raised her own fare to Canada. She had also shown him another sort of prostitute from the girls at the Home and the bedraggled, ill-spoken creatures portrayed in his books. He noted that she could even do accounts.