And They All Fall Down, Except The Virtuous:
Institutional Failures In Dickens’ Little Dorrit
From Reality to Fiction and Back Again
Angela Mosesso
Nauset Regional High School
N. Eastham, MA
2010 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain
The Industrial Revolution created, amongst other things, the need for an improved
banking system and for governmental agencies to fulfill minor tasks such as approving patents to
major tasks such as financing war. Such nameless, faceless institutions lent themselves to
anonymity, especially convenient for individuals within who were corrupted by greed and power.
Whether they clogged up the gears of machinery within the government, or swindled innocents
who invested their hard-earned money, these corrupted individuals hid themselves under the
guise of “Nobodies” unwilling to take individual responsibility for their actions. Neither
government nor banking nor private enterprise can function successfully when the individuals
within their hierarchical ranks will not assume moral authority. It was true in Victorian London
and still holds true in the global marketplaces of today. Dickens satirically describes in his
chapter from Little Dorrit entitled “Containing the Whole Science of Government” how
machine-like government had become in his day: “Whatever was required to be done, the
Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceivingHOW NOT TO DO IT…Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day,
keeping the wonderful, all sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion.” (L.D.
67) Virtually, the government itself was its own mechanism, with no individuals taking
responsibility at the helm. However, Dickens reveals in the partnership of Doyce & Clennam
individuals of integrity living by Christian ideals who do not ultimately fall whereas the
“Nobodies” of the world do because they lack strong moral foundations.
Charles Dickens knew firsthand about swindlers, frauds, and a public that could easily be
duped, but he knew, too, about individuals with industrial genius who were held back from their
creations because of inept governmental agencies. He also knew about the top echelon in the
governmental hierarchy, which would not take responsibility for the thousands of senseless
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deaths in Russia. In Household Words of August 30, 1856, he wrote a satirical essay called,
“Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody,” in which he blamed “Nobody” for the horrors of the
Crimean War:
…it was Nobody who made the hospitals more horrible than language can
describe, it was Nobody who occasioned all the dire confusion of Balaklava
harbor, it was even Nobody who ordered the fatal Balaklava charge…Yet, the
nature of the last tribunal expressly appointed for the detection and punishment of
Nobody may, as a part of his stupendous history, be glanced at without
winking…Surely, this is a rather wonderful state of things to be realizing itself so
long after the Flood, in such a country as England. Surely, it suggests to us with
some force, that wherever this Nobody is, there mischief is and there danger is….
But, it is the great feature of the present epoch that all public disaster in the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is assuredly, and to a dead certainty,
Nobody’s work.
In his novel Little Dorrit, Dickens satirizes the real swindlers John Sadleir, MP, and
George Hudson in his fictionalized character of Mr. Merdle; mocks the real Home, Colonial, or
Treasury Office as the Circumlocution Office; yet upholds the real genius inventor Charles
Babbage as his model for the industrious inventor, Daniel Doyce, who is frustrated by the
government’s attempts to thwart his invention. Arthur Clennam, however, the hero of Little
Dorrit is Dickens’ own creation to reveal a man of honor, integrity, and self-sacrificial love,
ultimately a fitting partner not only in business with Daniel Doyce but in love with Amy Dorrit.
Arthur Clennam, business partner to Daniel Doyce, tries to help him patent his machine after
Doyce’s attempts have failed over the last dozen years, bravely, Clennam goes to the
Circumlocution Office only to be covered over by the Barnacles. After all, Doyce, “had so many
things to think about…figures and wheels, and cogs and levers, and screws and cylinders, and a
thousand things,” so his business partner tries to ease the process, fully comprehending the mind,
patience, and care it took the inventor to create such a machine:
Daniel Doyce faced his condition with its pains and penalties attached to it, and
soberly worked on for the work's sake. Clennam, cheering him with a hearty
cooperation, was a moral support to him, besides doing good service in his
business relation. The concern prospered, and the partners were fast friends.
But Daniel could not forget the old design of so many years. It was not in reason
to be expected that he should; if he could have lightly forgotten it, he could never
have conceived it, or had the patience and perseverance to work it out. So
Clennam thought, when he sometimes observed him of an evening looking over
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the models and drawings, and consoling himself by muttering with a sigh as he
put them away again, that the thing was as true as it ever was.
To show no sympathy with so much endeavour, and so much disappointment,
would have been to fail in what Clennam regarded as among the implied
obligations of his partnership. A revival of the passing interest in the subject,
which had been by chance awakened at the door of the Circumlocution Office,
originated in this feeling (LD 130).
However, Ferdinand Barnacle admonishes Arthur Clennam to leave governmental
agencies to their own workings, to avoid throwing any monkey wrenches into the inner
mechanisms of the Circumlocution office, which he and generations of Barnacles have made into
an institution of, as Dickens says, how NOT to get it done. “Everybody is ready to dislike and
ridicule any invention. You have no idea how many people want to be left alone. You have no
idea how the Genius of the country…. tends to being left alone. Believe me,…our place is not a
wicked Giant to be charged at full tilt; but, only a windmill showing you, as it grinds immense
quantities of chaff, which way the country wind blows.”
Arthur Clennam, horrified and
dismayed, answers in return, “If I could believe that…it would be a dismal prospect for all of
us.” Dickens certainly wants to show us that the only way to make the system work so that it
will not be a “dismal prospect for all of us” is for each human to accept moral responsibility for
his own actions, not to be a “Nobody.”
In his preface to Little Dorrit, Dickens “excuses” his excessive imagination in his
character creations by saying, “If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the
Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an
Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence
to good manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Enquiry at Chelsea.”
The Circumlocution Office was “modeled after the supervised Commissariat which was
responsible for mismanaging logistical support during the Crimean War-ineptitude and bunglingrigidity, insensitivity, and irresponsibility-led to suffering and death for thousands and thousands
of British troops in the Crimea.” (Philpotts-Companion) Dickens satirizes “a governmental
department as in the Colonial Office, the Home Office, or the Treasury Office, based on the
incompetence and corruption of the Civil Service, already criticized in the damning NorthcoteTrevelyan report of 1853, fully exposed by the disasters of the Crimean War a year later.”
(Philpotts “C.S.”) Charles Dickens had written about the need for administrative reform, saying
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that “the official system is upside down, and the roots are at the top. Begin there, and the little
branches will come down right.” (Dickens “C.P.”)
Is it any wonder that in Little Dorrit, begun in 1855, the same year that “he joined the
Administrative Reform Association and made a strong speech in its support” (Philpotts), Dickens
would have implosions, rotten hierarchical structures crumble down, including banking
speculations represented by Mr. Merdle and governmental agencies, represented by the
Circumlocution office? Who is spared and held as exemplars of righteous human behavior are
those of integrity, honesty, and nobility, the partners of Doyce and Clennam, and of course Amy
Dorrit, herself, the titular hero.
Originally, Dickens was to name his novel, Nobody’s Fault, to satirize the “failure of
individual responsibility” stemming from John Arthur Roebuck, chairman of the select
committee of the House of Commons, investigating the administration of the Crimean War in “a
Court of Enquiry at Chelsea” who concluded “that the whole system of administration, rather
than individuals as such was to blame for mismanagement…The Chelsea Board acquitted the
military leaders in the Crimean campaign blame for supply and administrative problems.”
(Philpotts) Thus, originated Dickens’ conception of the Circumlocution Office, a governmental
machinery designed to take any genuine human effort and genius to improve life, specifically
Daniel Doyce’s new invention, and to be sure that such industrial inventions are crushed under
the shoal of Barnacles who, through nepotism, inhabit the office for generations. In Dickens’
article “Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody” he attacked “My Lord’s impaneled chorus [which]
cries “there is no imposter but Nobody; in him be the share and blame!” (145). Dickens
criticizes the “facetious investigations which serve as blind for continued inaction and neglect”
(Philpotts). Using his disgust for the government’s lack of responsibility, he created a satire to
reveal the impact on all levels of society when such “Nobodies” are allowed to run the country.
In his character of Arthur Clennam, financial partner to the inventor Daniel Doyce,
Dickens shows the models of men who will take individual moral responsibility for their actions,
unlike the Merdles and Barnacles of the world. Dickens himself wrote in Household Words of
June 9, 1855 an article entitled, “Cheap Patriotism” a month after he had begun Little Dorrit to
show how if the blame falls at all, it is always on the shoulders of those on the bottom of the
hierarchy:
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It is surprising what I have, in my time, seen done in our Department in the
reforming way— but always beginning at the wrong end—always stopping at the
small men…always showing the public virtue of two thousand a year MP at the
expense of the wicked little victim, two hundred a year. (434)
The failure of individual responsibility in the government as represented by the Barnacle
family is also reflected in the corruption of the banking system represented by Mr. Merdle. In his
preface, Dickens continued his “disclaimer” that his novel had any basis in real events:
The historical events to which, if I might make so bold as to defend that
extravagant conception, Mr. Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the
Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two
equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the
preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and a
expressly religious design, it would be a curious coincidence that it has been
brought to climax in these pages, in the days of a public examination of late
Directors of a Royal British Bank. (Preface ix)
Dickens, emphasizing the “failure to prevent financial predators in England from doing
serious damage,” created Mr. Merdle to show the serious damage that the fraudulent
business practices of Sadleir and Hudson had upon all classes in the British Isles (Philpotts).
The railway speculation promoted by George Hudson who thought that he was above the
law and had “raised the dividend of the Eastern Counties railway from 2 to 6 percent just before
preparing the financial statements and then altered the accounts to justify the payments”
(Kindleberger) and the bank failure caused by John Sadleir, MP, who ultimately poisoned
himself on Hampstead Heath, were “deceit [ful] and illegal practices [which] seriously harmed
vast numbers of ordinary people, including small farmers, traders, clerks, assistants, police
officers, and co. who have lost their little accumulation from the thrift of many years”
(Philpotts).
As much as Dickens embodies the corruption of the government through the Barnacles
and the corruption of banking practices through Mr. Merdle, it is in the partnership of Doyce and
Clennam that we see men who take responsibility for their actions, not “Nobodies” but
“Somebodies” who may make errors in judgment but who are willing to serve punishment and
atonement for them. In essence, Dickens recreates the Nobodies as Barnacles and Merdles to
show that as much as they try to dodge any individual responsibility, they will fall down because
they lack a moral foundation, yet the integrity and Christian love demonstrated by the partners
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Doyce and Clennam withstand such calamitous corruption by their combined force of individual
integrity.
Dickens fictionalizes Sadleir, “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, and at the same time, the
most successful swindler that this [Britain] or any other country has produced” (Kindleberger) in
the form of Mr. Merdle: “He’s a man of immense resources-enormous capital-government
influence. They’re the best schemes afloat. They’re safe. They’re certain.” He then compares
the power of Merdle’s bank speculations to an epidemic: “Bred at first, as many physical
diseases are, in the wickedness of man, and then disseminated in their ignorance, these
epidemics, after a period, get communicated to many sufferers” (LD 375-376). The Barnacles
help to fan the air with the name of Merdle to spread the epidemic: “waving Mr. Merdle
about…as Gigantic Enterprise, the Wealth of England, Elasticity, Credit, Capital, Property, and
all manner of blessings (LD 447), As the epidemic of speculation fever reaches its height,
Dickens warns, “The famous name of Merdle became, every day, more famous in the
land…nobody had the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which this object of worship was
made, to be other than the commonest of clay, with as clogged a wick smoldering inside of it as
ever kept the image of humanity from tumbling to pieces” (LD 358).
By the time the epidemic spreads, even the upright and rational man, Arthur Clennam,
believes that it is in the best interest of his partnership with Doyce and for their business, Doyce
& Clennam to invest in Merdle’s bank, to speculate, only to find, as all do, from the greatest to
the least among them, that Merdle was a fraud, who, using a tortoiseshell pen knife, slices his
wrists in the Baths:
For, by that time it was known that the late Mr. Merdle’s complaint had been,
simply Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread
adulation, …the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the
Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgment within some ten or
fifteen years, at most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful public
benefactors…the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the
wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a
bath and disappeared-was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that
ever cheated the gallows (LD 459).
Just as the real John Sadleir and George Hudson through their fraudulent schemes hurt all
classes of people in England, so, too, did the fictional Merdle have such an impact:
Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his
insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would
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have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of
women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this
mighty scoundrel (LD 459).
Ferdinand Barnacle, commenting on Mr. Merdle’s bank swindle, mocked the public’s
ability to learn from this experience:
The next man who has as large a capacity and as genuine a task for swindling,
will succeed as well. Pardon me, but I think you really have no idea how the
human bees will swarm to the beating of any old tin kettle; in that fact lies the
complete manual of governing them (LD 478).
The saving grace for Arthur Clennam, who takes full responsibility for his speculation in
Merdle’s bank, and publicly notifies all debt-holders that he alone is to blame, ultimately, going
to the Marshalsea Debtor’s prison, is his partner, Daniel Doyce, whom Arthur has earlier
convinced to go to St. Petersburg to have his invention accepted and running.
Dickens describes Doyce’s early life to explain his life-long apprenticeship to reach the
level of achievement to create his machine and to show at what sacrifice and love’s labour he
learned his trade:
Then it appeared that he was the son of a north-country blacksmith, and had
originally been apprenticed by his widowed mother to a lock-maker; that he had
‘struck out a few little things’ at the lock-maker’s, which had led to his being
released from his indentures with a present, which present enabled him to gratify
his ardent wish to bind himself to a working engineer, under whom he had
labored hard, learned hard, and lived hard, seven years. His time being out, he
had ‘worked in the shop’ at weekly wages seven or eight years more; and had
then betaken himself to the banks of the Clyde, where he had studied, and filed,
and hammered, and improved his knowledge, theoretical and practical, for six or
seven years more. There he had had an offer to go to Lyons, which he had
accepted; and from Lyons had been engaged to Germany, and in Germany had
had an offer to go to St. Petersburg, and there had done very well indeed (LD
122).
After such a laborious apprenticeship, Doyce wants to return to England and make himself
useful there: “But what is a man to do: if he has the misfortune to strike out something
serviceable to the nation, he must follow where it leads him…It’s put into his head to be made
useful.” To England’s great discredit, Doyce “had been enrolled in the Great British Legion of
Honor, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the Circumlocution Office, and had been with the great
British Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings.” All of his
ingenious endeavor on his machine is tied up in red tape by the Circumlocution Office.
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Dickens based the industrious inventor Daniel Doyce on Charles Babbage, who “argued
that a large difference engine could do the work undertaken by teams of people saving cost and
being totally accurate…the forerunner of the modern electronic computer” (Babbage biography).
However, what stopped Babbage in his tracks was the government, much like the
Circumlocution Office gumming up the works for Daniel Doyce’s machine, which “Dickens
introduced…as a way of satirizing the British Treasury and its dealings with Babbage over the
funding of the Difference Engine no. 1” (Hook).
For eight years from 1834 to 1842 the government would make no decision as to
whether to continue support. In 1842 the decision not to proceed was taken by
Robert Peel’s government…Babbage had every reason to feel aggrieved about his
treatment by successive governments. They had failed to understand the immense
possibilities of his work, ignored the advice of the most reputable scientists and
engineers, procrastinated for eight years before reaching a decision about the
difference engine, misunderstood his motives and the sacrifices he had made,
and…failed to protect him from public slander and ridicule (Babbage biography).
Dickens knew Babbage firsthand and the governmental and financial difficulties with
which he was burdened. “It is not only that Dickens knew Babbage very well; the people twisted
up by the [Circumlocution] Office give the clue: ‘Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers,
sailors, petitioners…’The first two categories can hardly be accidental, even if the mechanician
is Daniel Doyce himself…but the picture Dickens draws is recognizably that of Babbage who
had been seeking an answer from the Government since 1834. After describing Doyce’s
experience and portraying the Barnacles, Dickens generalizes spelling out the consequences of
the OFFICE for the country’s future…Here Dickens seems to be making himself their
[Engineers] spokesman, as he did for so many oppressed or neglected groups in society”
(Hyman).
Not only do the Nobodies swindle the public financially, have them go to war senselessly
and be slaughtered needlessly, but they also manage to stop the most industrious and inventive
geniuses of the day. In Dickens’ time in order to get patents, there were ten separate steps that
the patent seeker would personally have to see to including, “signatures, countersignatures,
warrants from different offices or functionary…. The ‘most disheartening’ feature was that the
movement of documents from one office to the next was entirely the responsibility of the
applicant or his agent” (Philpotts “Civil Service”, 160) Dickens fictionalizes the reality of an
inventor trying to get a patent for his machine:
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This Doyce …is a smith and engineer. He is not in a large way, but he is well
known as a very ingenious man. A dozen years ago he perfects an invention…of
great importance to his country and his fellow creatures. I won’t say how much
money it cost him, or how many years of his life he had been about it, but he
brought it to perfection…He addresses himself to the Government. The moment
he addresses himself to the Government, he becomes a public offender! …He is
treated…as a man who has done some infernal action…he is a man with no rights
on his own time, or his own property. How, after interminable attendance and
correspondences, after infinite impertinences, ignorances, and insults, my lords
made a Minute, number three thousand four hundred and seventy-two, allowing
the culprit to make certain trials of his own invention at his own expense. How
the trials were made in the presence of a board of six, of whom two ancient
members where too blind to see it, two other members were to deaf to hear it, one
other ancient member was too lame to get near it, and the final ancient member
was too pig-headed to look at it. How there were more years; more
impertinences, ignorances, more insults…. (LD 77-78).
All of this “activity” culminates in “How the Circumlocution Office, in a Minute, number
eight thousand seven hundred and forty, saw no reason to reverse the decision at which my lords
had arrived.” The case for Doyce, of course, was no decision at all except to “leave it alone for
evermore, or to begin it all over again” (LD 77-78).
The real Charles Babbage never lost hope for his analytical engine, but he did not live to see it
fully operational or accepted. The fictional Daniel Doyce, however, leaves England to go to St.
Petersburg, where not only is he able to have the machine function, he is able to make money
from it:
A certain barbaric Power with valuable possessions on the map of the world, had
occasion for the services of one or two engineers, quick in invention and
determined in execution; practical men, who could make the men and means their
ingenuity perceived to be wanted, out of the best materials they could find at
hand; and who were as bold and fertile in the adaptation of such materials to their
purpose, as in the conception of the purpose itself. This Power, being a barbaric
one, had no idea of stowing away a great national object in a Circumlocution
Office…With characteristic ignorance, it acted on the most decided and energetic
notions of How to do it; And never showed the least respect for, or gave any
quarter to, the great political science How not to do it…. In short, they were
regarded as men who meant to do it, engaging with other men who meant it to be
done (LD 434).
In short, by leaving behind the machinations of the Circumlocution Office in England,
Daniel Doyce finds success in his invention: “You won’t have occasion to trouble the
Circumlocution Office any more. Let me tell you, Dan has done without ‘em!” (LD 532)
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Dickens characterizes the English men working in the Circumlocution Office as ancients who
can neither see nor hear, and ultimately whose purpose is in How not to get it done; whereas the
“Barbaric powers” overseas, in presumably St. Petersburg, see and appreciate the genius of the
invention of Daniel Doyce and get it functioning, men of the future, not tired Barnacles who
cling to the machinery of government.
It is through Doyce’s success abroad that he can return home and save his partner, Arthur
Clennam, from the Marshalsea Prison. It is within the business and personal relationship
between Doyce and Clennam that Dickens extols the necessary values of honesty and integrity
without which the business of the world cannot function. Dickens may have been influenced by
Carlyle’s idea in “Signs of the Times” “of what happens to men who have grown mechanical in
head and in heart, as well as in hand and the subsequent results upon others. Not for internal
perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, “for
Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle.” Such type of men would be the
Nobodies such as Mr. Merdle and The Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office. However, on the
other end of the spiritual spectrum, Dickens demonstrates another concept of Carlyle’s: “only in
the right combination of the two…Dynamic and Mechanism…undue cultivation of inward or
dynamical province leads to idle, visionary impractical courses…undue cultivation of the
outward must…destroy Moral force.” Dickens suggests that Doyce & Clennam are the perfect
blend of Dynamic and Mechanism to make into practical reality the inner Christian ideals,
including atoning for one’s mistakes. In the final calamity that befalls Clennam when he
speculates, losing the money for Doyce & Clennam, does Dickens make these spiritual realities
very prominent, although throughout the novel he has embodied them in Miss Amy Dorrit’s
equal responses to both poverty and riches: Christian charity towards all.
When Arthur first discovers that Merdle’s bank failed, he thinks only of the impact on his
partner, Daniel Doyce, away in St. Petersburg:
‘If the money I have sacrificed had been all my own, Mr. Ruggs,’ sighed
Clennam, ‘I should have cared far less.’
‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mr. Rugg, ’You surprise me. That’s singular, sir. I have
generally found, in my own experience, that it’s their own money people are most
particular about. I have seen people get rid of a good deal of other people’s
money, and bear it very well; very well indeed.’
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When Mr. Rugg urges Arthur Clennam to look after himself first and to avoid going to the
Marshalsea Prison, Arthur responds with patience and brotherly love towards his partner, Doyce:
‘The question is the usual plain, straightforward common-sense question. What
can we do for ourself? What can we do for ourself?
‘That is not the question with me, Mr. Ruggs,’ said Arthur. ’You mistake it in the
beginning. It is, what can I do for my partner, how can I make reparation to
him?’(LD 462)
Arthur Clennam accepts the blame of what he had rashly done in speculating in Merdle’s
Bank, and publicly exonerates his partner, Daniel Doyce, from any wrongdoing. “I must take the
consequences of what I have done…The writs will find me here.” And so, Arthur Clennam is
brought to the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison, accepting atonement for his business mistakes. It is
while there, Amy Dorrit’s home for twenty years, that he fully understands Amy Dorrit’s
sacrifice and compassion and ultimately her love for him. However, brought down so low, he
feels that he cannot be an equal partner to her in life.
Dickens brings home full circle the virtues of the Daniel Doyce in his partnership with
Arthur Clennam, who returns home, victorious with his invention abroad and financially able not
only to rescue Arthur out of debtor’s prison but also to continue his partnership with him
unscathed. He tells him, “There was an error in your calculations. I know what that is. It affects
the whole machine and failure is the consequence.” With Arthur’s return to life and his
partnership in Doyce & Clennam, he can return Amy’s love on equal footing.
Amy Dorrit’s words to Mrs. Clennam, who has kept the secret of her son’s birth from
him her whole life and has subsequently become crippled both in mind and in body, is the
essence of Christian philosophy which extols the basic virtues in the novel, embodied by Arthur,
Daniel and Amy herself:
Be guided only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all
who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion
for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all rest away, and do
everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction in
His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for
no other footsteps, I am certain! (LD 513)
Shortly, after, Mrs. Clennam who finally tells the truth about Arthur’s birth, witnesses her
house, the House of Clennam implodes, a house built on lies and deceptions. Earlier, Dickens
had Mr. Merdle destroy himself after his bank fails, and he warns throughout the novel the
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dangers that the Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office set into being for the whole country:
“Look to the rats young and old all ye Barnacles, for before God they are eating away our
foundations, and will bring the roofs on our heads!” (LD 107) He also admonishes the whole
country of the inherent disasters that will befall England with its reliance on such machinations
of government “that Brittania herself might come to look for lodging in Bleeding Heart yard,
some ugly day or other, if she over-did the Circumlocution Office.”
Banking failures, readiness for war without the necessary planning or exit strategies, inventive
people stymied by a mechanistic society and the general public who can’t remember yesterday’s
news let alone the warnings of what is to come, these issues are no different today than in
Dickens’ day and his answer still holds true even more within a global economy: individuals
must take responsibility for their own actions if industry and society are to function; otherwise,
we all fall down together. However, Dickens’ theme of the power of sacrificial and redemptive
love permeates the novel through the partnerships of Doyce and Clennam and through Arthur
and Amy Dorrit’s love, ending it on a positive note:
The beauties of the sunset had not faded from the long light films of cloud that lay
at peace in the horizon. From a radiant centre, over the whole length and breadth
of the tranquil firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars,
like signs of the blessed later covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown
of thorns into a glory (LD 513).
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15, 2010. <www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/signs1http>.
Dickens, Charles. “Cheap Patriotism.” Household Words. June 9, 1855. 433-435.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. London & Felling-on-Tyne: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.
Dickens, Charles. “Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody.” Household Words. August 26, 1856.
Hyman, Anthony. Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer. Princeton: Princeton Press.
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Hook, Diana H. et al. Origins of Cyperspace: a library on the history of computing. Novato,
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Hobshaum, Philip. A Reader’s Guide to Charles Dickens. London: Thames & Hudson, l972.
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Kindleberger, Charles. Manias, Panics and Crashes. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2005.
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