The Little Dog Laughed

Little Dorrit is a good big thick book that'll keep you going for a few hours. Or weeks. Dickens was paid by the word and so wrote many words to be paid for. Yet I only felt the book really dragged when we are giving an insight into Miss Wade's history through a letter. It's a fascinating history of a woman who prides herself on seeing through any affection offered to her by others, and drives anyone who feels affection for her to tears with her fanatical jealousy and conviction that she, not they, is the victim. Yet dumping it all on the reader in a letter that doesn't forward the plot is clunky. It's beneath Dickens, who so often is a careful stylist.

I can't help feeling that Dickens could have brought out this backstory through showing rather than telling, but for some reason chose to shove it all into this info-dump instead. Clearly he wants the reader to understand and perhaps even sympathise with Miss Wade, who is not, it has to be said, a particularly sympathetic character on the face of it. By labelling her a "self-tormentor" he's indicating clearly that all her troubles are of her own making. She's the antithesis of the self-sacrificing, modest, and faithful Little Dorrit; a woman who seeks faithfulness from others without giving it herself, who demands love but is unable to give any, not even to herself. She represents, perhaps, an alternate path that Little Dorrit could have taken, had Dickens not reserved her for perfection.

Miss Wade is reminiscent of the character of Miss Dartle in David Copperfield, who is however described much more vividly and comes off the page as a whole person, one who has an identity beyond her unrequited love for the undeserving Steerforth. She cannot subdue her pride to become a Little Dorrit but equally she has too much common sense to imitate Miss Wade. The scene where she spurns the wretched Emily carries enormous narrative power, not least because the reader wants her to be better than that. She is jealous, as Miss Wade is jealous, and jealousy is an emotion that Dickens has Arthur Clennam subdue in his dealings with Pet and the equally undeserving Henry Gowan. Jealousy should be fought, not submitted to. It is an emotion that can arise in anyone; it's what you do about it that counts. Miss Wade and Miss give in to it and torment themselves and others. Clennam fights it, and wins the heart of Little Dorrit after he is disappointed in his hopes of Pet.

It's interesting to contrast Pet and Little Dorrit, both of whom lavish their affection, service and duty on undeserving objects. Henry Gowan keeps Blandois by his side merely because Pet dislikes and fears him, and everywhere he goes allows it to be believed that he married Pet against his family's wishes, rather than against HER family's wishes, as is actually the case. He is careless of her just as Little Dorrit's father (and brother and sister) are careless of her. They are in many ways sisters under the skin. Pet is another 'there but for fortune go I' parallel with Little Dorrit. With no less merit, but without, perhaps, the teaching of suffering and the exposure to the world that Little Dorrit experiences, she is ill-equipped to see the virtues of an Arthur Clennam and is taken in by the "flash and glare" of Henry Gowan instead. She will not be as unhappy as Miss Wade, but nor will she be as happy as Little Dorrit. Virtue that has survived trials deserves a better reward than virtue that has never been tried, perhaps?

In many ways, Little Dorrit is an annoying character. She's so good. When her father unreasonably flies at her in anger, she begs *his* forgiveness. She is aware of his faults, his weakness, his pretence of gentility, his inability to do anything to save his family from the Marshalsea, or even keep them in relative comfort without begging and carefully overlooking her and her sister going out to work. At several points in the novel it's difficult to avoid banging your own head with the book and wishing she would show a little more gumption and a little less self-repression and self-sacrifice. Dickens' idea of the ideal woman is one no real woman could ever live up to. Totally selfless. Totally devoted. Totally doormat. Ugh. And yet Little Dorrit also has a determination to do right that, if encouraged, could make her overnight into a suffragette or at least a devotee of some cause or other. Slight, small, soft-spoken, she has a centre of steel, contrasting with Mrs Clennam, Arthur's mother, who is steel outside and in.

There are words to be written about the contrasting characters of the women in this book and the way Dickens uses them to point each other up. I just wish he'd been a little more subtle with Miss Wade.