Book Review: Little Dorrit (by Charles Dickens)

Born and raised in a debtor’s prison, with a broken father, a haughty sister, and a thoughtless brother, Amy Dorrit’s patient, gentle character is still able to find happiness in serving others.  But when her father inherits a vast estate and is suddenly freed, her old life is relentlessly swept away—the old friendships and simple pleasures as well as the old hardships and trials.  How will Amy cope with the wealth that instantly spoils the rest of her family?

Little Dorrit is no afternoon read—it’s long, rivalling Bleak House, War and Peace, or The Count of Monte Cristo.

Given its length and Dickens’ literary writing style, Little Dorrit would be hard for younger readers to wade through, but readers 15+ would likely enjoy the book.  Readers is a key word though—if you don’t like reading much, Little Dorrit is not the book for you!

Jump straight to the bottom to avoid spoilers and catch my brief conclusion along with a link to the ebook, or read on through for the details!

The Plot [spoiler alert!]

In typical Dickens fashion, Little Dorrit has a host of characters, far too many for an outline!  I’ll start with the title character and see who demands a place in a summarized story of her life.

Amy Dorrit is born in an English debtor’s prison—not only born there; she’s lived there all her life.  Her father, not a very money-wise man, got in debt shortly before her birth and has stayed in debt ever since.  But although Amy’s older brother Edward (Tip) and her sister Fanny have grown up with a sense of injustice and a determination to get what they can from the world while looking down at it from over their noses, Amy is humble, hardworking, and generous.

Amy helped Fanny get a job at a dancing hall where the sisters’ uncle works, and she’s tried many times to help Tip to a job—but Tip doesn’t stick with anything.  On her own account, Amy is a seamstress—and among her clients is Mrs. Clennam.

Mrs. Clennam is a paralyzed invalid, head of a commercial house in a small-wealthy way.  Her husband worked and died in China—and now that his father is dead, Arthur Clennam is coming home.

But home isn’t very homelike to Arthur—with his mother’s rigid, unsympathetic figure to welcome him and with the consciousness that his decision to leave the family business will not be favorably received.  Under the circumstances, the friendship he makes on the trip back to England with Mr. and Mrs. Meagles—and with their beautiful daughter Minnie—is a welcome relief.

Sure enough, Mrs. Clennam gives Arthur the cold shoulder when she learns that he has decided to leave the business.  Although he begs her to still confide in him and let him help her—Arthur, based on some words of his father, suspects some particular secret, some case when perhaps the Clennam business did a monetary wrong and never made reparation—Mrs. Clennam refuses to let him know any details.

Arthur, trying to figure out what his father’s mysterious words meant, notices Amy Dorrit and wonders why his mother hires her; it seems out of character.  He discovers where she lives and worries that his mother might have had something to do with Mr. Dorrit’s imprisonment.  Through an unintentional combination of circumstances he sets Mr. Pancks, a workaholic with a constant eye to putting this and that odd scrap of information together, to work trying to decipher the ins and outs of Mr. Dorrit’s case.

In the process, Mr. Pancks discovers a vast property to which Mr. Dorrit—the imprisoned debtor!—is of all people the rightful heir.  He follows out his discovery and it leads to Mr. Dorrit not only leaving the debtor’s prison, but being elevated suddenly to a position of significant wealth.

At first this has a bewildering effect on Mr. Dorrit personally.  But he resolves to rise to his new position—and unfortunately, to him that means forgetting, and doing his best to make others forget, everything about his past.  Everything—literally everything, the good as well as the bad, lessons that should have been learned as well as the hardships that are well over.  But Amy cannot forget, or want to forget, the many good things of her early life, nor the lessons of caring friendliness that it taught her.  Still less can she forget Arthur Clennam and his kindness.  While the rest of the family struts around in the highest levels of society, trying to pretend that they’ve always been there, Amy feels a little lost.

The Dorrits’ first act was to “go abroad,” and there Fanny renews the acquaintance of a brainless but in the main good-hearted youth who had first admired her as a dancer.  This youth is the step-son of the “man of the age,” Mr. Merdle, a rather dull and unsocial man himself, but immensely wealthy and head of a multitude of enterprises.  Mrs. Merdle remembers Fanny distinctly from the days when she bribed her to ignore her son’s attentions when she was a dancer, and knows perfectly well that Fanny would make the most tormenting daughter-in-law that ever was.  Fanny doesn’t care much for Edmund (this is the step-son’s name), but the idea of torturing Mrs. Merdle appeals to her intensely.  To Amy’s dismay, she accepts Edmund’s proposal just before Edmund returns to England to accept a position in the Circumlocution Office that Mr. Merdle, at the instigation of his wife desperate to rush Edmund away from Fanny, has obtained for him.

I flatter myself that was a fittingly roundabout way to introduce the Circumlocution Office; now I’ll have to pause and explain what it is.  This is the place where “How Not To Do It” has been reduced to a science, where even the most important and urgent business can be buried under years’ worth of paperwork.  In short, this is Dickens’ satire on bureaucracy, and he draws it out pretty strong—though not too strong, by any means.

By the by, another person the Dorrits meet abroad is (of all people) Minnie.  I don’t expect you to remember her, but if you were to happen to scroll up you’d notice that I hinted that Arthur Clennam enjoyed her society.  However, though Minnie doesn’t dislike Arthur, she happened to be already in love with one Mr. Gowan (a rather worthless young artist, remotely related to the Barnacles, head family of the Circumlocution Office).  The long and short of it is that by the time Amy makes Minnie’s acquaintance she’s Mrs. Gowan, and Arthur has had to bear his disappointment as best he might—with Amy’s sympathy, though not exactly with her regret.

Amy and Minnie become good friends, but other than that, Amy finds little to enjoy in her new life and a good deal to alarm her.  Fanny’s marriage could certainly be worse, but it doesn’t promise to be an especially happy one, Tip is rather on the dissipated end of things, and her father rejects everything that looks like a return to the old days—hinting to Amy that he’s very pleased with her sister’s match and hopes she will make an equally advantageous one.  More than that, Mr. Dorrit is evidently himself falling into the clutches of the widowed Mrs. General, engaged as travelling companion for Fanny and Amy, but fast worming her way into a more permanent position.  He takes a trip to London to see Fanny and Edmund settled and returns with every intention of proposing to Mrs. General.

But Mr. Dorrit has reckoned without his age.  Shortly after returning, he attends a party thrown by Mrs. Merdle, where he totally forgets where he is and makes a spectacle of himself, addressing the company with one of his old debtors’ prison speeches.  Amy—no more ashamed of him now than then—helps him home and watches over his last hours.

Mr. Dorrit’s death is of little enough concern to anyone but Amy—but another death happens about this time that has far greater repercussions.  Mr. Merdle, the wealthy capitalist, commits suicide.  And the reason he does so is that his schemes were all a fraud and are now collapsing, to the ruin of millions of duped investors.

Among those now ruined is Arthur.  He feels especially bad for his partner (currently working in another country), who had trusted him with the management of the finances of his company.  Arthur pays as much of his debts as he can and goes to the debtors’ prison—the same prison that had been Mr. Dorrit’s home for so many years.

Here we’ll have to step back a moment to recall the old suspicions Arthur had about his mother.  It turns out that he was right to smell a rat when he caught his mother being nice to Amy Dorrit.  In fact, Mrs. Clennam had long ago suppressed a will made by her father-in-law in Amy Dorrit’s favor.  The wherefore of this is complex, but basically; Arthur’s mother (Mrs. Clennam) is not actually his mother—Mr. Clennam, Arthur’s father was already secretly (and presumably not altogether legally) married to another woman when Mrs. Clennam married him.  This was unknown to Mrs. Clennam (of course) and Mr. Clennam, in terror of his father, was not willing to risk exposure; he sent his first wife away.  But she was already pregnant with Arthur.  Mrs. Clennam was furious when she learned of it all, but she struck out a compromise whereby Arthur would stay with his father and herself on condition of never seeing his biological mother again.  Said biological mother got decidedly the short end of the stick for a situation which was far more her misfortune than her fault—and eventually Arthur’s grandfather relented of his part in the story and tried to benefit her.  But she was already dead—and the best thing he found to do was to bequeath a small fortune to the youngest daughter of her kind landlord.  That kind landlord just so happened to be Mr. Dorrit’s brother—and he just so happened to not have children.  So the small fortune reverted to Amy.

But, Mrs. Clennam does not want the story to get out, so she suppresses the will, never tells Arthur that he’s not her child, and squares matters with her conscience by hiring Amy as a seamstress.  To do her justice, she didn’t know how poor Amy actually was.

So why bring up this family skeleton now?  Well, it turns out that a notorious brigand has got his fingers on the suppressed will, and blackmail is the name of his game.  Mrs. Clennam at first doesn’t believe that he has the will, but eventually her partner in business admits that he didn’t destroy the will when Mrs. Clennam told him to.  Long story short, the brigand has deposited a sealed copy of his knowledge with Amy Dorrit.

Which requires a bit of explanation, so here’s a not-so-quick digression: Arthur Clennam is in prison, right, and there he discovered what an idiot he was for not having married Amy a long time ago.  I’ve done a bad job so far of keeping tabs on Amy’s love story, but basically she’s loved Arthur ever since she got to know him, but Arthur always thought of himself as twice as old as her (which he was) and in love with Minnie (which, maybe, he also was), and, in short, was an idiot after the most approved fashion.  Besides the idiot thing, Arthur’s character, although upright and brave enough in a passive way, is not very sturdy or actively courageous—he’s more of a dreamer.  Stuck in his narrow prison with very little hope of ever coming out, he goes into a decline and becomes sick.

Meanwhile Amy has returned to England after her father’s death.  She finds Arthur and takes care of him through his sickness.  So that’s why the brigand deposits a copy with her—and he gives her instructions to give it to Arthur at a certain time if he hasn’t personally reclaimed it by then.

So, back to Mrs. Clennam.  Learning from the brigand of the exposure impending if she fails to pay his blackmail, she takes a bold step.  Although she’s been an invalid for years, she manages to get up, leave her house, and walk to the debtors’ prison where she rightly expects to find Amy.  Amy would have given her the copy, but in a surprising turn of events, Mrs. Clennam tells Amy to open and read it.  She asks (and of course receives) Amy’s forgiveness.  The two return to the house together, only to find it in the act of tumbling to the ground as long years of disrepair catch up to it.  The brigand is conveniently buried in the ruins, Mrs. Clennam returns to her invalid state, and Amy chooses not to tell Arthur the story.

For the rest, Arthur tells Amy he could never marry her, because he’s so poor and she’s so rich, but turns out Amy’s father had invested all their money with Mr. Merdle, so she’s not so rich—and Arthur’s business partner returns from an overseas business venture that went extremely well, so Arthur’s not poor either.  And so they marry, and live happily ever after.

Fanny, on the other hand, is not half as pleased to find that she’s broke as Amy was—but she consoles herself with the fact that Mrs. Merdle is now totally dependent upon her charity.  Edmund’s job in the Circumlocution office is plenty for their needs, if not for their wants.  So they too do well enough.

I admire the plot of Little Dorrit very much; it’s thoroughly cohesive and also sufficiently unpredictable—though not in a cliff-hanging way.  It wraps up very well and very satisfactorily.

Amy is an admirable character, though a touch more spirit could have improved her—and I even like her sister Fanny in a way.  Many of the secondary characters that I haven’t mentioned or just briefly touched were great in their own ways—Mr. Pancks, Flora Casby, Cavalleto, and Mr. and Mrs. Meagles especially.  On the other hand Arthur is not exciting by any stretch of the imagination and is occasionally a bit pathetic—not more than a “good enough” character.

One other character I want to mention is Miss Wade.  She intersects with the plot at various points, in the character of an old lover of Mr. Gowan’s, a contact of the brigand’s, and so forth.  Miss Wade is the exact opposite of Amy—she puts the worst possible construction on everybody’s motives.  While I think the idea of including a total contrast character in a novel like this is an intriguing one from a literary point of view, it strikes me as something that ought to be done very subtly—otherwise it doesn’t feel natural.  Miss Wade doesn’t feel natural at all to me.

To sum up, the plot of Little Dorrit is incredibly complex yet impressively resolved.  Although I felt that some of the characters—including the main ones—were a little lacking, there were lots of great secondary characters to make up for that.  I give it:

9/10

The Point

One of the points of Little Dorrit is a critique of government bureaucracy.  I appreciate the way this critique fits naturally into the book, with the Circumlocution Office and its official tardiness having a large role to play in the developing plot.  Dickens does a good job pointing out the absurdity of bureaucratic protocol.  With minor changes, this point is just as relevant today as it was in his time—if not more so.

The other point of the book—and the more central point—is an analysis of the right uses of wealth—or rather, of the wrong uses of wealth.  The biggest example is the Dorrits themselves, who gripe all their days (with the exception of Amy, of course) over not being wealthy, and then are completely unable to get true happiness out of wealth when it comes.  Mr. Merdle, too, risks and ultimately loses everything he has for wealth, and gets no happiness out of it.  Arthur and Amy, with their more correct perspective on wealth, are far happier even when in poor circumstances, content with what little they have and happy whenever they can be of service to others.

With the huge contrast between the Dorrits before and after they became wealthy (a contrast that divides the book into two sections), a clear moral emerges: happiness does not depend on riches.

Besides this, there is also a lot of emphasis on Mrs. Clennam’s hypocrisy—while she prides herself on being upright and an instrument of judgment (against Arthur’s father), in reality she has only done what her own vindictive spirit prompted her to do.  There’s a great contrast between this and Arthur’s forgiving, gentle disposition.  I’ve been trying to find a way to connect this somehow with the previous moral, but they don’t seem to intersect.  As a reader who likes to see the main moral of a book weave its tendrils into every little corner in unsuspectedly clever ways, I’m a bit disappointed that I can’t see that here.

I would be remiss if I did not also mention a motif that shows up throughout Little Dorrit: travelers through life moving to meet and act and react upon each other.  This introduces a bit of a sense of flux, of constant motion, and in this motion—in the wheels that turn and make the Dorrits first poor, then rich—that make the Merdles first rich, then poor—that grant Mrs. Clennam her vengeance, then turn it upon her own head—in this state of flux, finding something solid to inform a wise and happy life means turning away from the bustling of human affairs (particularly money affairs) and finding some quiet way of helpfulness, finding a way to love and be loved.  This could be paradoxically expressed as recognizing the unreality of reality and instead practicing the impractical dreams of love and nobleness in the highest sense.  I say all that very glibly, but this is more my interpretation of a slight feeling the motif left me with, rather than anything explicit or even implicit in the book.

To summarize: Little Dorrit is a great critique of bureaucracy and also a vivid illustration of the futility of wealth.  The moral regarding wealth is not integrated as clearly with other morals of the book (such as a condemnation of Mrs. Clennam’s hypocrisy or the traveler motif) as I would have liked; but it is certainly a great moral and is powerfully shown through the rising and falling of the Dorrit family’s fortune.

7/10

The Style

I’ve described Dickens’ style plenty of times (see links below), so I won’t go into much depth here—but I did enjoy the unusual but highly realistic style Dickens used for Flora Casby’s dialogue in Little Dorrit—and there were several other characters with their own unique way of speaking, making the personality filled dialogues of Little Dorrit really shine.

For the rest, you’ll have to give Dickens your full attention if you expect to understand him, but his unique turn of phrase and wide vocabulary will definitely reward you.

I notice that I habitually give Dickens’ style 7/10—except when I want to bring down the overall score a notch but can’t bring myself to lower the score on plot or point.  This is one of those times, so:

6/10

Conclusion

7.3/10

Little Dorrit is one of those books that I wish I liked better than I do.  The plot is brilliant and exciting, the main points—especially the truth that happiness does not depend on wealth—are very good, and Dickens’ style is intriguing as always.  But for me Little Dorrit just doesn’t cut it with the main characters—while I like Amy Dorrit, she’s not quite as awesome as she should be, and Arthur is even less inspiring.  That said, I certainly recommend reading the book, though it’ll take a lot more than one rainy afternoon or even a rainy week to get through it—maybe a whole rainy month!

You can find Little Dorrit for free as an ebook on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/963

Already read Little Dorrit and have opinions of your own to share?  Let me know what you think in the comment section below!

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