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LITTLE DORRIT

By Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

Preface to the 1857 Edition

BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY

1. Sun and Shadow

2. Fellow Travellers

3. Home

4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream

5. Family Affairs

6. The Father of the Marshalsea

7. The Child of the Marshalsea

8. The Lock

9. little Mother

10. Containing the whole Science of Government

11. Let Loose

12. Bleeding Heart Yard

13. Patriarchal

14. Little Dorrit's Party

15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream

16. Nobody's Weakness

17. Nobody's Rival

18. Little Dorrit's Lover

19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two or three Relations

20. Moving in Society

21. Mr Merdle's Complaint

22. A Puzzle

23. Machinery in Motion

24. Fortune-Telling

25. Conspirators and Others

26. Nobody's State of Mind

27. Five-and-Twenty

28. Nobody's Disappearance

29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming

30. The Word of a Gentleman

31. Spirit

32. More Fortune-Telling

33. Mrs Merdle's Complaint

34. A Shoal of Barnacles

35. What was behind Mr Pancks on Little Dorrit's Hand

36. The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan

BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES

1. Fellow Travellers

2. Mrs General

3. On the Road

4. A Letter from Little Dorrit

5. Something Wrong Somewhere

6. Something Right Somewhere

7. Mostly, Prunes and Prism

8. The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that 'It Never Does'

9. Appearance and Disappearance

10. The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken

11. A Letter from Little Dorrit

12. In which a Great Patriotic Conference is holden

13. The Progress of an Epidemic

14. Taking Advice

15. No just Cause or Impediment why these Two Persons should

not be joined together

16. Getting on

17. Missing

18. A Castle in the Air

19. The Storming of the Castle in the Air

20. Introduces the next

21. The History of a Self-Tormentor

22. Who Passes by this Road so late?

23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional Promise, respecting her

Dreams

24. The Evening of a Long Day

25. The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of Office

26. Reaping the Whirlwind

27. The Pupil of the Marshalsea

28. An Appearance in the Marshalsea

29. A Plea in the Marshalsea

30. Closing in

31. Closed

32. Going

33. Going!

34. Gone

PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION

I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two

years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its

merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read

as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have

held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can

have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable

to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and

with the pattern finished.

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 Inquiry at Chelsea. 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 other 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 an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence

that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of

the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But,

I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts,

if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing

like them was ever known in this land. Some of my readers may have an

interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea

Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this

present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard,

often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then

almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however,

down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to

'Marshalsea Place:' the houses in which I recognised, not only as the

great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose

in my mind's-eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. The smallest

boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered

a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old

uses, and was very nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I

judge him to be) came by his information, I don't know; he was a quarter

of a century too young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed

to the window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her

father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who

tenanted that apartment at present? He said, 'Tom Pythick.' I asked him

who was Tom Pythick? and he said, 'Joe Pythick's uncle.'

A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used

to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for

ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of

Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very

paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard

to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that

the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms

in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of

many miserable years.

In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many

readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have

still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and

confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I

added to that, May we meet again!

London May 1857

BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY

CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern

France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in

Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been

stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there.

Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses,

staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road,

staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be

seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their

load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air

barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour,

or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two

colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not

pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never

mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at

their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or

day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese,

Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks,

descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles,

sought the shade alike--taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too

intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great

flaming jewel of fire.

The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of

Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist,

slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere

else. Far away the staring roads, deep in dust, stared from the

hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable

plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the

monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped

beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy bells,

in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did

their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened;

so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or

grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly

over rough stone walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like

a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in

the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.

Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep

out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and it shot in like a

white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of

the twilight of pillars and arches--dreamily dotted with winking lamps,

dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and

begging--was to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the

nearest strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever

shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with

occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious

drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling

in the sun one day. In Marseilles that day there was a villainous

prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the

obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected

light as it could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men,

a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a

draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of draughts,

made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two

or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats

and other unseen vermin, in addition to the seen vermin, the two men.

It received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars

fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be

always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave.

There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom

of it was let into the masonry, three or four feet above the ground.

Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with

his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the

opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to

admit of his thrusting his arm through to the elbow; and so he held on

negligently, for his greater ease.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the

imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all

deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard,

so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air

was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb,

the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have

kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the

Indian ocean.

The man who lay on the ledge of the grating was even chilled. He jerked

his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one

shoulder, and growled, 'To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that

never shines in here!'

He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he

might see the further down the stairs, with much of the expression of

a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together,

were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in

his, and they were sharp rather than bright--pointed weapons with little

surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; they glittered,

and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a

clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome

after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much

as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and

tall in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at

all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy

state, but shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating

(seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was

unusually small and plump; would have been unusually white but for the

prison grime. The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a

coarse brown coat.

'Get up, pig!' growled the first. 'Don't sleep when I am hungry.'

'It's all one, master,' said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not

without cheerfulness; 'I can wake when I will, I can sleep when I will.

It's all the same.'

As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown

coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it

as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back

against the wall opposite to the grating.

'Say what the hour is,' grumbled the first man.

'The mid-day bells will ring--in forty minutes.' When he made the

little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain