Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (October 2008)

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The following description authored by David Timson

Dickens was full of ideas for this, his eleventh novel, as he started work on it, and was convinced that he had a ‘capital name’ for it – Nobody’s Fault.

However, try as he might, he couldn’t settle to the writing of it: there were too many distractions. For instance, Dickens always loved amateur theatricals, and he was keen to produce and act in a new melodrama by his young friend Wilkie Collins called The Lighthouse, which was to be performed in the school- room at Tavistock House (Dickens’s home) by his family and friends. Dickens characteristically threw himself into every aspect of the production: scenery, special effects, lighting and, of course, his own full-blooded acting, which often reduced the audience to tears. Meanwhile the manuscript of his new novel lay untouched.

He took up the threads again in Folkestone, where he went for the summer of 1855, seeking peace and quiet to concentrate on the book. The novel was taking a long time to take shape and Dickens was afraid he might be losing his imaginative powers. He was having difficulty finding a theme that would draw the book together.

Though he set the book in the 1820s, it was the issues of the 1850s he wished to address. The book’s origins are to be found in his disgust at the appalling administration of the Crimean War (1854–56). He made speeches against the Prime Minister Palmerston and his administration. Hundreds of British soldiers had died, not through the conflict of war, but through neglect and lack of essential supplies from the British Government. The original title Nobody’s Fault had become the official response to the disaster, and this was Dickens’s way of exposing the crippling bureaucracy and red tape that hampered the Civil Service and prevented Britain from becoming an efficient modern nation. The Fictional Circumlocution Office was born:

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it.

The background theme of the novel is the atrophying of the British nation as the result of outmoded political institutions, and the apathy that breeds in a society which never moves forward. Over the whole book Dickens casts a dirty and dingy pall; the odour of decay pervades every character. Against this gloomy background, Dickens developed his narrative: the story of a middle-aged man (Arthur Clennam) who finds inspiration and escape from his own personal apathy in the simple but devoted spirit of a young woman willing to serve and help others at the expense of herself. Dickens works hard to show that an inert society can be re-vitalised by the example of individuals: Doyce working single-handedly for the betterment of British industry and the conditions of the working-man; Mr Meagles’s kindness and generosity of spirit; Pancks rebelling finally against the rent-racketeer Casby; and Little Dorrit herself, of course. So important did this young woman – born in the Marshalsea itself – become, that Dickens changed the title of the book to Little Dorrit, though ‘Nobody’s Fault’ is heard as the recurring cry throughout the book.

Dickens’s restless energy, which he had displayed in Collins’s amateur theatricals, continued throughout his creation of the novel. For instance, the latter part was completed during a prolonged stay in Paris. ‘One is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It is much better to go on and fret than stop and fret,’ he wrote manically to his friend Forster at this time. It shows how closely he associated himself with the theme of his novel: action rather than atrophy. To be continually on the move avoids the inevitable – becoming a prisoner of one’s own personality and past – and Dickens was a man haunted by his past.

As with his other novels, Dickens could not help drawing on his own eventful life when creating the characters and narrative of Little Dorrit. The sombre shadow of the Marshalsea Prison looms over the whole book, and is a testament to the deep effect the place had on Dickens as a child, when his own father John Dickens was imprisoned there for debt. Mr Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea, is based on Dickens’s insolvent father. He had presented an affectionate and humorous portrait of him before, in the character of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, but in Mr. Dorrit, Dickens shows his father’s darker side:

Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but, being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.

Through his father’s fecklessness young Dickens became very familiar with the Marshalsea and it is in the detailed descriptions of the prison’s interior that he reveals to us the misery indelibly stamped on his youthful consciousness. ‘The walls and ceiling were blackened with flies,’ he remembers, and later recalls a child’s fancy gazing on the harsh prison walls: ‘Many combinations did those spikes upon the wall assume, many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself into, many golden touches fell upon the rust, while Little Dorrit sat there musing. New zigzags sprung into the cruel pattern sometimes, when she saw it through a burst of tears...’.

Flora Finching, the first love of Arthur Clennam, is a fictional portrait of Dickens’s own first love Maria Beadnell, whom he met twenty years after their youthful romance, and who had, like Arthur’s sweetheart, ‘blossomed’ in the intervening years: ‘Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow.’

In Flora Finching, Dickens creates one of his most humorous characters, despite being bitterly disillusioned by the changes he saw in Maria, Flora’s original. For like Flora, she was a prisoner to her youthful self.

In a sense, every character in this book is a prisoner of him or her self. There is a long chain of prisoners who in their turn imprison those nearest to them. Dorrit suppresses the freedom of Little Dorrit by relying on her for everything; even the great Mr Merdle is a prisoner of the very society he has helped, as a great financier, to perpetuate. He escapes through suicide, when it is revealed that he ‘was simply the greatest forger and the greatest thief that ever cheated the gallows’. Merdle’s fall brings about Arthur Clennam’s, who had invested with him. Arthur, the self-deprecating hero of the novel, is another man trapped within himself. He is dominated by Mrs Clennam. His youth was destroyed by her perverted religion and his young manhood wasted working in the stultifying family business abroad. He returns to England an empty submissive shell; all spontaneity gone. He has not the spirit to propose to Pet, the beautiful daughter of Mr Meagles, and is unaware of the love of Little Dorrit until the end of the book.

The inhabitants of Bleeding-Heart Yard are in their turn imprisoned by poverty, cripplingly low wages and extortionate rents. They cannot escape the treadmill of mindless drudgery, or soul-destroying unemployment. Whose fault is it? Nobody’s, is the general conclusion once again. Rents charged on people with no means to pay is one of the curses of capitalism, and Dickens’s exposure of this oppressive system in the 1850s, though stopping short of demanding the reform of society itself, laid a foundation on which Karl Marx could draw for his socialist writings of the 1860s. Instead, Dickens, as a creative writer, chose to side-step politics and be true to humanity. He sends Arthur and Little Dorrit out into the world to endure its realities, and not to change it. They will live a good and uneventful existence where whatever happens will be, in their eyes, ultimately – nobody’s fault.

About the Author: Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Landport, then a little suburb of Portsmouth, on Friday 7 February 1812. His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at that time attached to Portsmouth dockyard; in 1814 he was transferred to London, and in 1816 to Chatham, where the boy, already a great reader, got some schooling. In 1821 the family fell into trouble; reforms in the Admiralty deprived the father of his post and the greater part of his income; they had to leave Chatham, and went to London, where they lived in a mean house in Camden Town. But not for long. The father was arrested for debt and consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years old, and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford Market, where he labeled the blacking bottles, with other poor boys. Not only were his days passed in this wretched work , but the child was left entirely to himself at night, when he had four miles to walk to his lonely bedroom in Camden Town. On Sundays he visited his father in the prison; and presently they found him a lodging in Lant Street close by. On his father’s release they all went back to Camden Town and the boy was sent again to school, an academy in the Hampstead Road for three to four years. When he was taken from school no better place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor. Meanwhile, however, his father had obtained a post as reporter for the Morning Herald, and Charles resolved, also, to attempt the profession of journalist. He taught himself shorthand and frequented the British Museum daily to supplement some of the shortcomings in his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a reporter at Doctor’s Commons; but all his ambitions at this time were for the stage. It was not until he was twenty-two that he succeeded in getting permanent employment on the staff of a London paper as a reporter. In this capacity he was sent about the country a great deal. In December 1833 the Monthly Magazine published his Dinner at Poplar Walk Other papers followed but produced nothing for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print. However, they did Dickens the best service by enabling him to prove his ability and he soon made arrangements to contribute papers and sketches regularly to the Evening Chronicle, continuing to act as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven a week. The Sketches by Boz were published in the beginning of 1836, the author receiving £150 for the copyright; he afterwards bought it back for eleven times that amount. In March that same year appeared the first number of The Pickwick Papers; three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, the editor of the Evening Chronicle. She bore him seven sons and three daughters between 1837 and 1852, three of whom, predeceased him; in 1858 husband and wife separated. Success having come his way Dickens allowed himself no rest. In fulfillment of publisher’s engagements he produced Oliver Twist (1837–39, in Bentley’s Miscellany which Dickens edited for a time), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and Master Humphrey’s Clock, a serial miscellany which resolved itself into two stories, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). Thereafter a great part of Dickens’ life was spent abroad, especially notable being his visits to America in 1842 and 1867–68, his stay in Genoa in 1844–45 and at Lausanne in 1846 and his summers spent in Boulogne in 1853, 1854 and 1856. Meanwhile there came from his pen an incessant stream: American Notes (1842), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), The Christmas Tales – viz. A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1843, 1846 and 1848); Pictures from Italy (1845), Dombey and Son (1846–48), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–53), The Child’s History of England (1854), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855–57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), The Uncommercial Traveller (1861), the Christmas numbers in Household Words and All the Year Round, Great Expectations (1860–61), Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870, unfinished). To this long roll must be added public readings (1858–70), both in this country and in America, private theatricals, speeches, letters innumerable, pamphlets, plays, the conduct of a popular magazine – first (1850) called Household Words and then (1859) All the Year Round. Nevertheless he had taken irreparable toll of his vitality, and he died suddenly on 9 June 1870 at Gadshill, near Rochester (the place he had coveted as a boy and purchased in 1856), and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The general style of Dickens was virile and direct. He had full command English, reinforced by sympathy and humour, by drollery as refreshing as it was unexpected and by a fierce indignation against wrong. Critically his work is easily assailed, but of its popularity there can be no doubt, for it has conquered the whole English-speaking world.

About the Performer: Anton Lesser has played many of the principal Shakespearean roles for the RSC and performed contemporary drama, notably The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter. Appearances on TV include The Cherry Orchard, The Mill on the Floss and The Politician’s Wife.