5 - Amy Dorrit's prison notebooks

Summary

Little Dorrit reads very differently from the other novels of Dickens's late career: it moves through a concentration of characters, of space, and of detail; it relies on a series of separate but oddly similar focal points (the prison, the Circumlocution Office, Arthur Clennam's labyrinthine search for his family history); and as Lionel Trilling noted, it bears an uneasy relationship to realism, depending on the abstraction of something that “is an actuality before it is a symbol.” But the feeling of intense concentration depends as well on constant reversals and inversions: formally, it seems to move through parable and paradox, for just as its characters seem to stand for more than they are, so, too, do they seem to embody contradictory positions. The central contradictions of the novel circle around the confusions of persons and property, of having and owning, of possessing and being possessed – of property and love, which characters seem to treat interchangeably.

The novel does the opposite: following the impulse of the daughter's plot from Dombey and Son on, it takes renunciation and dispossession as the condition of love, making social redemption as well as personal salvation a result of the daughter's choice of “nothing” as her portion. But it cannot carry further the plot of Bleak House, where the daughter's paternal disinheritance led her back to the mother and away from the father's word; it is as if Dickens saw a narrative dead end in the emptying out of John Jarndyce's bleak house, and sought to bring back the daughter's patrimony – but here, with a vengeance.