Assessments
Edited Critical by
Michael Hollington
VOLUME IV General Assessments since 1945: Biographical, Critical and Thematic
HELM INFORMATION
Selection and editorial matter O 1995 Helm Information Ltd. Helm Information Ltd. The Banks Mountfield near Robertsbridge East Sussex TN32 5JY ISBN 1-873403-13-5 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved: No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 7 Ridgemount Street, London WClE 7AE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Frontispiece: 'The Empty Chair', from Judy, 1870.
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O'NEUL LIBRARY BOSTON COLLEGE
The Dickens World: A View from Todgers
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DOROTHY VAN GHENT
The course of things demonically possessed is to imitate the human, while the course of human possession is to imitate the inhuman. This transposition of attributes, producing a world like that of ballet, is the principle of relationship between things and people in the novels of Dickens. The masks, the stances, and the shock-tempo are comic. The style which they have for their perspective is the style of a world undergoing a gruesome spiritual transformation. Things, like animal pets, have adopted the disposition and expression of their masters. The 'tightclenched' old bureau of a miser has a 'bad and secret forehead.' But this argues a demonic life in things; and as it takes a demon to know a demon, they have maliciously felt out and imitated, in their relationships with each other and even with people, the secret of the human arrangement. A four-poster bed in an inn is a despotic monster that straddles over the whole room, 'putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.' The animation of inanimate objects suggests both the quaint gaiety of a forbidden life and an aggressiveness that has got out of control. Even a meek little muffin has to be 'confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,' and a hat, set on a mantlepiece, demands constant attention and the greatest quickness of eye and hand to catch it neatly as it tumbles off, but it is an ingenious demon and finally manages to fall into the slopbasin. These continual broadsides of the pathetic fallacy might be considered as incidental embellishment if the description of people did not everywhere show a reciprocal metaphor. The animate is treated as if it were a thing. It is as if the life absorbed by things had been drained out of people
SOURCE
Dorothy Van Ghent, 'The Dickens World: AView from Todgers', h a n e e Reuiay LVIII, 1950, pp. 419-38.
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CRITICAL ESSAYS
who have become incapable of their humanity. Grandfather Smallweed, in Bleak House, has to be beaten up periodically like a cushion in order to be restored to the shape of a man. The ignominy is horrmng, suggesting unspeakable deterioration. Those who have engaged, as Grandfather Smallweed has, in the manipulation of their fellows as if they were things, th'emselves develop thing-attributes, like Podsnap, the capitalist, who has hair-brushes on his head instead of hair; while those who suffer the aggressiveness which is the dynamics of this economy are similarly trans formed, like the convict Magwitch, mechanized by oppression and fear, who has a clockwork apparatus in his throat that clicks as if it were going to strike, or poor little Twemlow, whose hosts put leaves in him like a diningtable, extending or depressing him according to the size of the party. The progressive keys of the transformation may be illustrated by those people who have wooden parts, Silas Wegg and Sarah Gamp's famous husband offering the examples. The wooden leg of Mr Gamp, 'which in its constancy of walkin' into wine vaults, and never comin' out again 'till fetched by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker,' has taken over the man. More ominous is the deliberate choice of a lower order of being, when the man takes over or becomes his member. (Lady Scadgers, in Hard Times, is 'an immensely fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher's meat, and a mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen years.' The lady is 'thinged' into her own leg, which is clearly the repository of all that butcher's meat.) In Silas Wegg, the humanity of the man with the wooden leg is so reduced to the quality of his appendage that he is expected to develop another leg of the same kind in about six months, if his development receive no untimely check. The inanimate member of the organism signifies spiritual necrosis, and Silas does in fact identify himself with his deceased member, which has been disposed of by the hospital porter to an articulator of bones. 'Now, look here, what did you give for me?' he demands, and he bargains for his leg in a grotesque parody of the Resurrection of the Body. The man with the wooden leg, however harmless in appearance, is ominous of something out of nature; he is death-in-life. The comedy of this is comedy with immense stylistic tension. Dickens told Forster that he was always losing sight of a man in his diversion by the mechanical play of some part of the man's face, which 'would acquire a sudden ludicrous life of its own.' His habit of seeing the parts of the body as separable and manipulable makes in his first writings for funny foolishness, as in the case of the tall lady, eating sandwiches, look aroundin Pickwick, who 'forgot the arch-crash-knock-children mother's head off--sandwich in her hand-no mouth to put it in.' Where it is put to use most seriously and spectacularly, it is a technique of surgical o division serving t characterize personality that has given itself over to deceit, thus dividing itwlf unnaturally into a marliptllatir~g and a
manipulated part, a me-half and an it-half. General Scadder, the agent of the land-swindle in Martin Chuulewit, has one sightless eye that stands stock still: 'With that side of his face he seemed to listen to what the other side was doing. Thus each profile had a distinct expression; and when the movable side was most in action, the rigid one was in its coldest state of watchfulness.' Pecksniff, warming his hands before the fire 'as benevolently as if they were somebody else's, not his,' has divided himself from his imagination of himself, and the image is one of mayhem and of a surgical graft. In Mr Vholes, the lawyer in Bleak House, deceit is not even a personal matter, as it is with Pecksniff. Mr Vholes is only a cog in the mechanics of Chancery, which has institutionalized the manipulation of living creatures as if they were not human but things. The norms of this hell enable Mr Vholes to do more violent physical damage on himself than Pecksniff, a kind of damage of which only the mediaeval and twentiethcentury imaginations have been thought capable. He 'takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk.' The more rugged criminals, among those who still move in respectable society, are radically cloven into two people, and it is but a question of point ofview from the eccentric appearance of Mr Flintwinch, in Little Dorrit, whose neck is so twisted that he looks as if he had hanged himself at one time, to the schizophrenia of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit, who, after his crime, is 'not only fearful for himself but of himself,' and half expects when he returns home to find himself asleep in bed. The ultimate development of this imagery of division is total transformation of the me-half into the it-half, as in the spontaneous combustion of Krook. Krook, not even a I~;u~ger-on the colossal deceit of Chancery, has established himself in a of husiness which is a parody of Chancery; he lives off the refuse paper of the court, and at the time of his decease hasjust found a promising speculation i l ) blackmail. Here personality has so developed its thing-constitution that it has become a purely chemical phenomenon, and the moment of Krook's clc-ath is the moment when his chemicals (largely gin) have finally c ol~summatedtheir possession of him. The nastiness of the image is ~)roportional the horror of the idea. A defiling yellow liquor is the last to 1 d' Krook, slowly dripping and creeping down the bricks. Krook's mortification is the savagely simple working out of the law of 1.o11version spirit into matter that operates in the Dickens world. In the of I ;IS(' of Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations, the decayed wedding cake olli.rs a supplementary image of the necrosis that is taking place in the I l ~ ~ r nagent. Miss Havisham is guilty of aggression against life in using the al~ two children. Pip and Estella, as inanimate instruments of revenge for her 1~t~okc.11 heart, and she has been changed retributively into a fungus. The ( ;rkv on the banquet table acts by homeopathic magic, like a burning effigy I l r , ;r doll sttlck with pins: 'when the ruin is complete,' she says, pointing to
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the cake but referring to herself, she will be laid out on the same table and her relatives will be invited to 'feast on' her corpse. But this is not the only conversion. The 'little quickened hearts' of the mice behind the panels have been quickened by what was Miss Havisham, carried off crumb by crumb. The principle of reciprocal changes bears on the characteristic lack of complex inner life< the part of Dickens's people; it is inconceivable on that the fungoid Miss Havisham or the spirituous Krook should have complex inner lives, in the moral sense. In the art of Dickens (distinguishing that moral dialectic that arises not solely from character but from total aesthetic occasion) there is a great deal of 'inner life,' transposed to other forms than that of character; partially transposed in this scene, for instance, to the symbolic activity of the speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies and to the gropings and pausings of the black beetles on Miss Havisham's hearth. In Balzac, environment is literally natural; in Dickens, environment is literally unnatural. Mme Vauquer's pension or Old Grandet's house in Saumur, as physical constructions, partake eminently of the harshness and constriction of the forms of life which they help to render intelligible, but there is never any doubt as to their natural limitations; formally they correspond to the human nature for which they provide the scene, and they set physical and in time spiritual bonds to the human development within them; but in no sense do they actively intrude upon the human. Their symbolic value lies in their natural rigidity. They are that beyond which the soul cannot go. In Dickens, environment constantly exceeds its material limitations. Its mode of existence is altered by the human purposes and deeds it circumscribes, and its animation is antagonistic; it fearfully intrudes upon the soul. The room occupied by Jonas Chuzzlewit at the time of the murder is charged with the tensions of a straining life-but not Jonas's life.
The room in which he had shut himself up was on the groundfloor, at the back of the house. It was lighted by a dirty skylight, and had a door in the wall, opening into a narrow, covered passage or blind alley.. . . It was a blotched, stained, mouldering room, like a vault; and there were water-pipes running through it, which, at unexpected times in the night, when other things were quiet, clicked and gurgled suddenly, as if they were choking.
creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs,'-while the two-way law has also had the effect of converting their material environment into passion, complicated, lunatic, and uncontrollable: Coketown is a labyrinth of
narrow courts upon courts and close streets upon streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man's purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling, and pressing one another to death.
The description of Coketown is strongly felt because it represents an objective evil favored by industrialism; the image of a deformed, totemlike life in its chimneys and chimney-pots-'which, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it'-has an hallucinatory vividness; but more hallucinatory is the relatively innocent prospect from the roof of Todgers's boarding-house, in Martin Chuzlewit, a description which bears a curious resemblance to passages in M Sartre's La Nausie and other writings, where non-human existences rage with an indiscriminate life of their own.
The revolving chimney-pots on one great stack of buildings seemed to be turning gravely to each other every now and then, and whispering the result of their separate observation of what was going on below. Others, of a crookbacked shape, appeared to be maliciously holding themselves askew, that they might shut the prospect out and baffle Todgers's. The man who was mending a pen at an upper window over the way, became of paramount importance in the scene, and made a blank in it, ridiculously disproportionate in its extent, when he retired. The gambols of a piece of cloth upon the dyer's pole had far more interest for the moment than all the changing motion of the crowd. Yet even while the looker-on felt angry with himself for this, and wondered how it was, the tumult swelled into a roar; the hosts of objects seemed to thicken and expand a hundredfold; and after gazing round him, quite scared, he turned into Todgers's again, much more rapidly than he came out; and ten to one he told M Todgers afterwards that if he hadn't done so, he would certainly have come into the street by the shortest cut; that is to say, headforemost.
It is not only that the water-pipes serve to interpret Jonas's fears-as if they had tattle-tale tongues-but they appear to have been released, by the act which dehumanizes Jonas, into a busy life of their own. What is shocking is not their relevance to the murder but their irrelevance to it. On a larger scale, the same transposition of attributes has taken place in Coketown, in Hard Times, whose fortifications are more alive than the race they shelter. The Coketown 'hands' have been approximately reduced to those members for which they are named,+r, Dickenr nays, t h y are 'like the lower
Much of the description is turned upon the conservative 'seemed to be' and 'as if,' and the pathetic fallacy provides a familiar bourgeois security, but the technique changes in the middle, betrayed by a discomfort which the 'as if's' as no longer able to conceal. The prospect from Todgers's is one in which categorical determinations of the relative significance of objects--as of the chimney-pots, the blank upper window, or the dyer's cloth-have broken down, and the observer on Todgers's roof is seized with suicidal rlausea at the momentary vision of a world in which significance has been replaced by naked and aggressive existence.
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CRITICAL ESSAYS
It has so often been said that Dickens's point of view is that of the undernourished child roving London streets at night, that one hesitates to say it again, although with no reference to biography. The point of view is hallucinated and often fearful, as the insecure and ill-fed child's might be. It is not childish. The grotesque transpositions are a coherent imagrnation of a reality that has lost coherence, comic because they form a pattern integrating the disintegrated and lying athwart the reality that has not got itself imagined. Everything has to be mentioned-like the 'strange solitary pumps' found near Todgers's, 'hiding themselves in blind alleys, and keeping company with fire ladders1-for, assuming that there is coherence in a world visibly disintegrated into things, one way to find it is to mention everything. Hence the indefatigable attention to detail. No thing must be lost, as it is doubtless essential to the mysterious organization of the system. The system itself is assumed to be a nervous one, and for this reason Dickens's language has its almost inexhaustible vitality and vivacity, inasmuch as its predications about persons or objects tend to be statements of metabolic conversion of one into the other.
The changes are still wrought out of the broad common intuition of the connections between moral and physical phenomena, often using the ancient image of the bacillus-like physical reality of the evil spirit. The moral atmosphere of the Merdle swindle, in Little Dom't, is treated in terms of a malignant physical infection, that, disseminated in the air they breathe, lays hold on people in the soundest health. On the other hand the physical plague that arises out of the slum district of Tom All Alone's, in Bleak House, and that creeps to the houses of the great, is itself a moral plague, the conditions for it having been created by moral acquiescence. Its ambiguity is enforced by the conversion of the slum-dwellers into vermin parasitee'a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing . . . evil in its every footprint.' The Transformation of spiritual into physical being is reversed by an imagery of inferno, which translates the physical fact as a spiritual one: the crowd . . . hovers round the three visitors, like a dream of horrible faces, and fades away up alleys and into ruins, and behind walls; and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place. This is Hell, and however verifiable on earth, is 'unnatural' in nature. It is rendering of representative of Dickens's method, which is a scr~~pulot~a nature gone wrong in all its parts.
I
Imperceptibly, by changes that are themselves psychologically valid, the atoms of the physical world have been impregnated with moral aptitude, so that it is not inconsistent that at the crisis of plot, a giant beam should loosen itself and fall on the head of the villain. Stephen Blackpool, returning home and thinking of the drunken wife whom he will find there in her filth and madness, has 'an unwholesome sense of growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty light turn red. . . .' Gaffer Hexam, coming from the river where he has been at his usual business of trolling for corpses, is shunned by the other river-men when they suspect him of improving his occupation by manufacture of the commodity on which he lives, and he says fiercely as he looks around, now over this shoulder, now over that, 'Have we got a pest in the house? Is there summ'at deadly sticking to my clothes? What's let loose upon us? Who loosed it?' Pip, standing waiting for Estella in the neighborhood of Newgate, and beginning dimly to be aware of his implication in the guilt for which that establishment stands, has the same sensation of a deadly dust clinging to him and tries to beat it out of his clothes. Still not without psychological validity is the minute change from the subjective atmosphere of guilt, or the apprehension of evil, which seems to be reflected in the physical world, to its actualization in the behavior of physical things, as in those mysterious rustlings and tremblings which frighten Affery in Little Dorrit, 'as if a step had shaken the floor, or even as if she had been touched by some awful hand,' which are the real warnings of dissdlution in the worm-eaten old house and of its final providential collapse on Blandois, when he is alone in it in the purity his of evil. Considered in this way, Dickens's use of physical coincidence in his plots is consistent with his imagination of a thoroughly nervous universe, whose ganglia spread through things and people alike, so that moral contagion, from its breeding center in the human, transforms also the non-human and gives it the aptitude of the diabolic. Coincidence is the violent connection of the unconnected; but there is rio discontinuity in the Dickens world, either between persons and things, or between the private and the public act. What connection can thrre be, Dickens asks, between proud Lady Dedlock and Jo the outlaw with the broom: 'What connection can there have been between many pc-ople in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides o great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!' f What brings Lady Dedlock and Jo together, from opposite sides of great ~ l ~ lis the bond between the public guilt for Jo and the private guilt h, 01 Lady Dedlock for her daughter, these two offering to each other-as I I S I I ~ ~ Dicken+the in model of parental irresponsibility, and the models coalc.acing when the woman who has denied her child, and the diseased I*)y to whom society has been an unnatural father, are laid side by side
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in the same churchyard to be consumed by the same worms, physical nature asserting the organicity which moral nature had revoked. What brings the convict Magwitch across 'great gulfs' to the boy Pip is again a profoundly implicit compact of guilt, as binding as the convict's leg-iron which is its recurrent symbol, and again the model is that of parental irresponsibility-although the terms shift subtly here, and it is sometimes Magwitch, the criminal foster-father, who is the abused child, and Pip, the corrupted child, who bears the social guilt for Magwitch. The multiplying likenesses in the street as Magwitch draws nearer, coming over the sea, the mysterious warnings of his approach on the night of his reappearance, are moral projections as real as the storm outside the windows and as the crouched form of the vicious Orlick on the dark stairs. The conception of what brings people together-the total change in the texture of experience that follows upon the private or the public act, the concreteness of its effect on the very atoms of external matter, as upon the heart, so that physical nature itself collaborates in the drama of reprisal-is deep and valid in this book. It is, however, the same conception of linked changes in the universe that, clumsily in David Copperjield, allows Steerforth's body to be washed up on the sands of Yarmouth just at David's feet. The sea itself has not remained neutral. It is for this reason that the river is so effective a symbol in these novels, appearing in almost every story in closely observed, vivid, and obsessive detail. It is the common passage and the actual flowing element that unites individuals and classes, and it has a malignant potentiality that impregnates everything upon it4iscolored copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit. The corpse is shunted there secretly at night; but the river has a terrible capacity to act, and it will turn suddenly upon the ghoul, reach up, crush him, suck him under, converting him into the commodity he has been engaged in producing; and at obscure intervals along the banks are those night-stations of the law, with nets and pumps, and with bookkeepers employed to docket the ordinary apparition-'a face, rising out of the dreaded water.' Lizzie Hexam, waiting at the riverside for her father's return, feels in the tidal swell breaking at her feet, without her seeing how it had gathered, the rush of her own thoughts, dim before her like the great black river. In Great Expectations, in a finely lucid atmosphere of fairytale, Dickens uses a kind of montage to represent an organization of reality crossing spatial and temporal determinations, superimposing them in a moral present; as in the scene in which Estella walks the casks in the old brewery. Estella's walking the casks is an enchanting ritual dance of childhood (like walking fence-rails or railroad-ties), but inexplicably present in the tableau is the suicidal figure of Miss Havisham hanging by the neck from a brewery beam. Accompanying each appearance of Eetclla--who is the star and j w e l of Pip's great expectations, wearing jmelr in her hair and on her
breast ('I and the jewels,' she says)-is a disturbing ghostly suggestion of the same kind, an unformed dread; the star shudders in the wind from over the marshes; Pip tries to strike the dust of Newgate from his clothes as he sees her face in a coach-window; her slender knitting fingers are suddenly horribly displaced by the marred wrists of a murderess. This duality of vision is paralleled by a psychological duplicity. In the sense that one implies the other, the glittering frosty girl and the decayed and false old woman, Miss Havisham, are not two characters but a single one, a continuum (representing the tainted wish, the unpurchased good); as the boy Pip and the criminal Magwitch form another continuum. This bears on the commonplace of criticism that Dickens was usually unable, as Edmund Wilson puts it, 'To get the good and bad together in one character,' a criticism which holds in a world of neutral and simple matter, with its qualitative and quantitative disjunctions, and where character alone feels the stress of spirit; but in Dickens's nervous world, one simplex is superimposed upon or is continuous with another, and together they form the complex of good-in-evil or of evil-ingood. Pip carries Magwitch (his 'father') within him, and the apparition of the criminal is the apparition of Pip's own guilt. Similarly Joe Gargery, saintly simpleton of the folk, and the journeyman Orlick, dark beast of the Teutonic marshes (who comes 'from the ooze'), as the opposed extremes of spiritual possibility, form a spiritual continuum that frames and gives meaning to the others. Two kinds of crime form Dickens's two chief themes, the crime against the child, and the calculated social crime. They are formally analogous, their form being the treatment of persons as things; but, on the usual principle of inherence that obtains here, they are also inherent in each other, whether the private will is to be considered as depraved by the operation of a public institution, or the institution as a bold concert of private depravities. The correspondence of the two is constantly suggested. In Littb Dorn't, for example, where old Dorrit's exploitation of his daughter supplies the main substance of the story, the crime against the child is a private type of the public morality represented by the Merdle swindle and by the ineffably criminal business of the Circumlocution Office. (The name Merdle may be a play on both merde and murder. Having murdered public welfare on a grand scale, then murdered himself with a penknife, Mr Mcrdle is discovered as 'certain carrion at the bottom of a bath.') In the same book, Arthur Clennam lives under an oppressive conviction that his fither has committed a crime; without knowing what it is, he feels that the taxpiation of it is part of his inheritance: 'there was some one with an satisfied claim upon his justice.' The suggestion is strong here that the public and the private guilt spring from each other, or from the same root: that the 'father' is the social mechanism, informed by the corrupt individual will. In Bbak H o w , the public crime is the operation of
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Chancery, and clearly Chancery is the 'father' of Richard Carstone, as the slum of Tom-All-Alone's is the 'father' of the pariah Jo. Generally, in the Dickens novels, the public and private crimes are infinitely serial (a fact which grves the later plots their elaborately epicyclic character), in a series that can never be really closed, but only cut off, for which reason the plot resolutions are as nominal as the resolution of Tartuffe or 1Xvare; for, seen thus serially, the crimes are actually bottomless. The bottomless permutation of the crimes of the fathers and institutionalized crime is felt in the passage describing the neighborhood of Arthur Clennam's grim home. Somewhere, hidden in the corner of a deskdrawer, or behind the frame of a portrait, is the secret of his own father's crime, and the whole neighborhood is tainted by it.
The dim streets by which he went, seemed all depositories of oppressive secrets. The deserted counting-houses, with their secrets of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the banking-houses, with their secrets of strong rooms and wells, the keys of which were in avery few secret pockets and a very few secret breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill, among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he could have fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness to the air.
It is somewhere behind, overlooking but not to be looked at, like the Chief Butler, who undoubtedly is in the secret. One is seated at the table in the act of drinking, and one sees him through the wine-glass, the glazed fixedness of his cold and ghostly eye. One tries to recall having met him in prison, for his distant attention argues previous acquaintance, but his face is unfamiliar. His relationship with the Law is identified in the person of Jaggers, the criminal lawyer in Great Expectations, chief butler of Newgate, whose office is wholly pertinent to one's own case (for he is the Father's lieutenant) but also wholly ambiguous, and whose manner is 'expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it.' The prevailing anxiety, still exceeding its occasions, is felt in the 'maze,' the 'labyrinth,' and the 'wilderness' of Dickens's streets. To find Todgers's
you groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod these devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but that to anticipate them was hopeless.
Though the plot may discover the secret of the portrait-frame or of the deskdrawer, that is, though it may particularize this or that crime, there is left over a pervasive anxiety about things in hiding, indefinitely and obscurely webbed, as if the permutation of public and private crimes constantly created a new and autonomous mystery, like the secret transforming principle of the concentration camp. The prison-symbol in Littb Donit is a deliberate attempt to organize these perceptions; and when old Dorrit, in his mad speech of welcome at the Roman reception, says, 'Welcome to the Marshalsea! The space is-ha-limited-limited-the parade might be wider; but you will find it apparently grow larger after a time-a time, ladies and gentlemen . . .' the words carry an equivocal sense which refers them beyond certain evident particular meanings (as that, among the elegant guests, there are cheats and forgers; or that the economy of the great world demands a prison-like suppression of the human quality) to another that is less tangible, a mysterious impotence in the face of that inevitable adjustment to the narrowness of the parade, a distracted hopelessness that will seize on the specific reference (industrialism in Coketown, big business in the city) but that is not exhausted by the specific. Little Dorrit, it is said, 'began with sorrowful unwillingness to acknowledge to herself, that . . . no space in the life of man could overcome that quarter of a century behind the prison bars.' There is, one feels, a crime behind a crime, created by or creating the of other, and making of the earth a foul and pestilent congregd...