Dickens: Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens
(Nonesuch, 2008) [1857]
853 p.

The practice of throwing debtors into prison, where their means to repay the debt are greatly reduced, is nonsensical, and it must have seemed so to many at the time when debtors’ prisons were used. It seemed so to Dickens, whose own father was confined to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison when Charles was a lad. That early, humiliating experience for the Dickens family became, many years later, the background for this novel on the life and fortunes of the Dorrit family.

At the beginning of the novel Edward Dorrit, formerly a wealthy man, is thrown into the Marshalsea in the expectation that he’ll be out again in a day or two, but days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and months to years, and still he remains. His wife is with him, and his children, including the youngest, little Amy Dorrit — the little heroine, or, at least, the little centerpiece of our story — are born and brought up within the walls. When she becomes a young woman, Little Dorrit leaves the prison to take up humble work as a seamstress, but returns each night to care for her aged father, continuing to make the prison her home.

The main arc of the story’s first half relates how it comes about that an honourable London businessman, Arthur Clennam, befriends Little Dorrit and, with unprecedented tenacity, pursues the Dorrit case through the nation’s financial bureaucracy, with the happy result that the Dorrits are finally released from the Marshalsea.

In the second half the wheel of fortune continues to turn: what was down goes up, and what was up goes down, and soon enough it is Little Dorrit who finds herself in a position to help Clennam. Naturally, there is a romantic element complicating these negotiations.

Woven into the story are the nefarious doings of a French criminal attempting to blackmail Arthur’s family by threatening exposure of a family secret — an underwhelming secret, it must be said, which eventually comes out like a whimper.

Chesterton, in the introduction he wrote to the novel, calls the book “Dickens’s dark moment” on the grounds that “the main business of the story of Little Dorrit is to describe the victory of circumstances over a soul”, a very un-Dickensian project indeed, “not connected in any manner with the special thing that he had to say”. And there is something to this view: Chesterton highlights the contrast between David Copperfield‘s Mr Micawber, himself also a denizen of debtor’s prison, but ebullient and unbeaten in spirit, and Mr Dorrit, who is passive and overmastered.

But I’m not convinced that Chesterton’s argument is quite convincing as a criticism of the novel as a whole. After all, the title is not Mr Dorrit. His daughter escapes the fatalism that afflicts him, and this indeed is why the story follows her. Mind, her character poses different problems for the reader. She is so delicate that one worries she might dissolve in a light rain, a mere wisp of a character. But I am inclined to give Dickens the benefit of my doubt; he clearly intends her to be simple and good, from her top of her mild head right down to the tips of her mild toes.

There are an abundance of secondary characters in the story, many there just to develop sub-plots that have to intersect with the main story at crucial junctures before fading away. My favourite of these was Mrs Plornish, a Londoner with a knack for speaking Italian, or something bearing a distant resemblance to Italian, and an old woman known only as “Mrs F’s aunt” who sits tight-lipped in the corner until, at inopportune moments, she utters oracles.

A novelty of the book — not quite unprecedented in Dickens’ corpus, but not expected either — is the international setting. I’ve already mentioned the (at the risk of redundancy in triplicate) dastardly French villain, and on his trail we visit Calais and Marseilles, but we also follow the Dorrits to a sojourn in Venice and then to Rome, all of which is quite delightful, even if they all feel rather like a variant on Dickensian London.

The chief triumph of the book is Dickens’ satire on government bureaucracy in his invention of the Circumlocution Office, the great study and object of which is “HOW NOT TO DO IT”. If you love Dickens, but haven’t read Little Dorrit, you might enjoy reading the section in which he introduces the Circumlocution Office for the first time: here. Pure delight.

To my mind Little Dorrit ranks somewhere in the middle to low range of Dickens’ novels. I liked it better, I think, than Barnaby Rudge, and perhaps it could be considered a  competitor to Martin Chuzzlewit or even The Old Curiosity Shop. But I would be surprised to find a reader for whom it was a particular favourite.

A web of words

Today, a collection of links on, mostly, literary matters:

• Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating story about one man’s efforts to read a collection of burned papyrus scrolls recovered from Pompeii. These scrolls are so damaged that they cannot be unrolled, and Brent Seales is putting high tech imaging to use to try to peer inside them. Whether he will finally succeed or not is uncertain, but it’s a great story.
• A few months ago I heard an interview with a medievalist, Rachel Fulton Brown, about her most recent book, Mary and the Art of Prayer, which I thought sounded excellent. I was surprised to discover, poking around, that she is at the center of a brouhaha, in the resistance, over incursions of identity politics and all its works into medieval studies departments. You’d think such departments might be sleepy backwaters, immune from the tender ministrations of the politically ambitious, but apparently not.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous in the annals of psychology. I am a little surprised to learn, therefore, that it ought to be taken with a giant grain of salt, and may in fact have been fraudulently presented to the public. Ben Blum writes a fascinating analysis at Medium.
• When I wrote, a few months ago, about my first encounter with the poetry of Catullus, I made particular mention of his short epic, “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis”. Writing at the LA Review of Books, Daisy Dunn takes a more detailed, and more appreciative, look at this remarkable poem.
• At The New Yorker, Brian Phillips writes in praise of the children’s novels of Joan Aiken. We have The Wolves of Willoughby Chase at home, but I am unfamiliar with her other books, which sound delightful.
• In a similar vein, Michael Dirda recommends a mostly forgotten children’s book by Walter de la Mare, whom I know only through his poetry, and that only slightly.
• Speaking of children’s books, there are plenty of people investing plenty of time and money to keep your children’s eyes on screens instead of books. Richard Freed describes the powerful science and technology being leveraged to ensure kids become addicted, and Nicholas Tampio reviews the effects this screen time, at home and at school, is having on children. Essential reading for parents.

Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

On the Nature of Things
T. Lucretius Carus
Translated from the Latin by Ronald Melville
(Oxford, 1997) [c.55 BC]
xxxviii + 275 p. Second reading.

“    My purpose is
With the sweet voice of Pierian song
To expound my doctrine and as it were to touch it
With the delicious honey of the Muses;
So in this way perchance my poetry
Can hold your mind, while you attempt to grasp
The nature of the world, and understand
The great design and pattern of its making.”
(I, 943-50)

Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura is one of the great epic poems of the ancient world, and, as is claimed in this volume’s introduction, “perhaps the greatest didactic poem ever written in any language”. It is a work plump with fascinating scientific theories, and one with interesting and influential philosophical ideas also; it is, arguably, the latter that account for much of its continuing appeal.

We know little about the author, and the securest dating of the poem derives from a reference to it in a letter of Cicero; it was probably first published in around 55 BC.

The poem consists of about 7400 lines of Latin hexameter, and is divided into six books. The overall argument of the poem is to present and defend the natural philosophy of the Epicurean philosophical school.

Lucretius’ basic metaphysical principles and atomistic physics are described in the first two books; the middle books are devoted to the human person, soul and body; and the final two treat the development of human societies before culminating in an ambitious (if, alas, mostly wrong) naturalistic account of dramatic natural phenomena like lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, and disease.

Lucretius is famous for his spirited and resourceful defence of atomism. The idea is not original with him — that honour is usually bestowed upon the Greek Democritus, of course — but he presents it seasoned “with the delicious honey of the Muses”, a sweetener intended to help the medicine go down. For him, atoms are small, indivisible, infinite in number, eternal, and indestructible. From these characteristics he derives two overarching metaphysical principles which govern all that follows. The first is that atoms do not come into being:

“We start then from her [nature’s] first great principle
That nothing ever by divine power comes from nothing.”
(I, 148-9)

and the second is that they do not pass out of being:

“    nature
Resolves all things back into their elements
And never reduces anything to nothing.”
(I, 215-7)

Thus the picture he presents us with is that of a world composed of an infinite number (though a finite variety) of indestructible material bits in motion. These bits, he argues (against Aristotle), are surrounded by a void. The existence of this void he rather deftly deduces from the fact of translational motion, for if there were no void it would be impossible for atoms to move from one place to another, their being impeded by the presence of other atoms. And these two categories, atoms and the void, exhaust his ontology:

“…apart from void and matter no third substance
Can remain to be numbered in the sum of things,
Neither one that falls within the range of senses
Nor one that mind can grasp by reasoning.”
(I, 445-7)

Thus for Lucretius, as for his intellectual descendants, such things as mathematical objects, moral principles, and immaterial souls have no reality.

Atoms move about, bumping into one another and combining in new ways to make new things. He uses a nice metaphor to describe this process, one particularly apt for use by a poet writing poetry:

“Moreover in my verse it matters much
How letters are arranged and linked with others.
The same denote sky, sea, land, rivers, sun,
The same denote crops, trees, and animals,
And, if not all, by far the greater part
Are alike; but the position decides the meaning.
So with real things, when the combination of their atoms,
Their motions, order, forms, shapes, and positions
Are changed, the thing itself must change.”
(II, 1013-21)

Because he believes that the number of atoms is infinite, and that this process has been taking place for infinite time, he does not shrink from the conclusion that our world itself came to be out of just such chance encounters:

“The seeds of things
In random and spontaneous collision
In countless ways clashed, heedless, purposeless, in vain
Until at last such particles combined
As suddenly united could become
The origins always of mighty things,
Of earth, sky, sea, and breeds of living creatures.”
(II, 1058-62)

Thus, step by haphazard step, the world around us has taken shape. Perhaps the most famous section of the poem, in Book V, is that in which he traces for us the slow development of the world from its origins to the establishment of early civilizations: the production of animals, the origins of speech, the discovery of fire, the origin of religion (which he, oddly, considering his other principles, attributes to apparently genuine visions of the gods), the beginnings of metallurgy and agriculture, the advent of music, and the building of cities. The atomic theory he puts to use in a variety of creative ways: to explain sense perception, and the laws of optics, for instance. It is interesting that this broadly evolutionary view of history does not include any conception of the evolution of life; for Lucretius, animal species are distinct and unchanging (V, c.920).

By the same reasoning which leads us to view our world in this way, we conclude that other worlds, too, have and will come to be. Moreover, turning the coin over, they will eventually fall apart again, just as our world one day will:

“So death rightly comes, when by constant flow
All things are thinned, and all things, struck from without
By an increasing hail of blows, succumb;
Since at the end great age finds food to fail,
And without ceasing bodies from outside
Beating on things subdue them and destroy them.
So shall the ramparts of the mighty world
Themselves be stormed and into crumbling ruin
Collapse.”
(II, 1139-47)

The naturalness with which his minimalist ontology — atoms and the void alone — leads to this final, whimpering destruction of all that the we know and love accounts for his dousing it with “the delicious honey of the Muses”, even if, perhaps, we doubt that we could be wholly convinced to part with our inheritance even for so sweet-seeming a mess of pottage.

As with many of his modern descendants Lucretius’ forthrightness about the ultimate fate of everything is paired with a strange lacuna. He is quite explicit that his ultimate purpose in writing this poem — his moral purpose — is to provide peace of mind, to teach his reader the art of “being undisturbed”. He aims at this in part by providing naturalistic explanations for unusual and frightening natural phenomena, so as to free the minds of his readers from the anxiety induced when they are experienced as signs of divine displeasure,

“Proceeding to set free the minds of men
Bound by the tight knots of religion.”
(IV, 7-8)

And Lucretius, following “the first who dared / Raise mortal eyes against” religion — namely, Epicurus, the hero of his tale — understands that a central part of achieving this peace of mind must be coming to peace with death. He therefore argues at length, in Book III, that the Epicurean universe in which only atoms and the void exist is necessarily one in which:

“… we may be certain that in death
There is nothing to fear, that he who does not exist
Cannot feel pain”
(III, 866-8)

There is a dignity in this paradoxical conviction that the way to avoid losing all is to definitively lose all, that the creature’s fear can be overcome by its accepting its total self-destruction, fear and all. Perhaps we are impressed by the vision of a philosopher who attends quietly to truth even as the world around him is consumed in a great conflagration. We may feel the persuasive power of Lucretius’ belief that

“True piety is for a man to have the power
To contemplate the world with quiet mind.”
(V, 1199-1200)

If we do feel that persuasive power, we ought to honour it, on the likelihood that there is some good in it. And Lucretius puts our good will to the test when he yields no quarter to those who, though not fearing death, wish nonetheless to extend their lives for as long as possible, for what difference, he argues, could longevity possibly make?

“Live though you may through all ages that you wish,
No less that eternal death will still await,
And no less long a time will be no more
He who today from light his exit made
Than he who perished months and years ago.”
(III, 1090-4)

Perhaps we respond to this detachment by doubling-down on our admiration: here is a man who truly wears his metaphysical hairshirt with Roman fortitude. Or perhaps we doubt that a philosophy that can so readily relativize the value of life is worth our uncritical adherence. The shelter, after all, which the Epicurean seeks from the metaphysical black hole that devours his world is his own interior life: his untroubled mind, his calmness in the face of disorder, his contemplation of truth. Yet do these things survive the destruction that lays all else to waste? Not in the long run — Lucretius tells us that much — but in the short? Now? It is here, I think, that the armour is pierced most effectively. The Epicurean moral universe, like our less systematic but substantially similar reigning view today, is underpinned by the presumed reality of human freedom, which imparts to all the Epicurean virtues a nobility and even a reality they cannot otherwise possess. There is no virtue in patience if one is not free to be impatient — indeed, there is no virtue of patience if there are only atoms and the void. Likewise for courage, and for prudence, and for all the virtues, and for the very notion of virtue as a moral quality, and for moral qualities tout court. Take his mandorla of freedom from him and you take all; yet his own principles do just that.

Famously, Epicurus, and Lucretius after him, tries to save human freedom in his system by introducing “the swerve” — an apparently random motion which atoms make from time to time to prevent the universe’s being deterministic:

“While atoms move by their own weight straight down
Through the empty void, at quite uncertain times
And uncertain places they swerve slightly from their course.”
(II, 217-9)

But this was feeble, being both arbitrary and inadequate to the purpose.

We therefore find, I think, that the Epicurean materialist metaphysics, like the modern one, consumes the metaphysician, leaving no-one to live out his moral ideal. We are left only with random motion and ultimate dissolution. And this, I think, even by Epicurean standards would be a counsel of despair.

**

I enjoyed re-reading this poem, which I first read at least 20 years ago. In the Roman reading project in which I am presently engaged it was my first sustained dose of Roman philosophy — just Greek philosophy at second hand, admittedly, but who among us can do better? — and I found a good deal to engage with. It is true that the very notion of a great poem about natural science seems slightly quixotic, rather like singing a Mass in honour of, say, Charles Darwin. But one soon forgets this genre-busting aspect, and falls into enjoyment of the poem on its own terms.

The translation of Ronald Melville I found good apart from the title (“On the Nature of the Universe”), which might well be a more fitting translation of De Rerum Natura on some grounds, but to which I nonetheless prefer the traditional English title (“On the Nature of Things”). I do harbour a regret that I didn’t splurge for Anthony Esolen’s translation, not least because I expect his commentary would have been superior to that found in this Oxford edition. But this, admittedly, is speculation, and I suppose that, in a Lucretian spirit, I could moderate my regret by meditating on the Epicurean counsel that, whatever translation I chose, “eternal death will still await”.

Feast of St Hildegard

Today is the feast of St Hildegard of Bingen, our most recent Doctor of the Church, and one of our most musical saints.

Of all her exceptionally beautiful pieces it is hard to choose just one, but here is O Frondens Virga, performed by Chanticleer.

Sancta Hildegard, ora pro nobis.

Howells: Roman Holidays

Roman Holidays, and Others
William Dean Howells
(Harper & Bros., 1908)
302 p.

I’ve now been to Rome a half-dozen times, and certain features of the city have become familiar: the crowds of tourists in certain locations (and not in others), the traffic, the security checks, the wondrous art and architecture, the sense of the wide sweep of history being somehow simultaneously present. I’ve been a visitor often enough to wonder what it was like to be a visitor in earlier times, and I have made a point, in a desultory way, of looking for travel memoirs about the city, especially if written before the age of mass air travel. H.V. Morton stands on our side of that watershed, but still long enough ago that the experience was a different one. Then there was Henry James, and Charles Dickens before him.

Recently I learned of this memoir, written in 1908. William Dean Howells was a figure previously unknown to me, but he was apparently well-known in his day, having been a prolific author and literary critic, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and even called — perhaps not entirely as a pun — “the Dean of American Letters”. He was 70 years old when he went to Italy, intent on revisiting sites he had first seen when, as a young man in his 20s, he had first travelled in la bella paesa. On this trip, as recounted in this book, his itinerary included Genoa, Naples, Pisa, and even (en route to home) Monte Carlo, but the lion’s share of his time, and the lion’s share of his book, were devoted to Rome.

It was certainly a different time. Remarks on the qualities of Roman horses and carriages no longer have the practical value they were intended to have. He notes the introduction of elevators in some buildings, of indoor heating, and of electric lighting in hotels which has brought an end to “that rivalry between the coming guest and the manager to see how few or many candles can be lighted”. In fact, he is so interested in these matters, and in the details of where an American traveller might best lodge, and which cafés are “the resort of all the finer sort of afternoon tea-drinkers”, that in the early going I came close to throwing him and his book from the Tarpeian Rock.

But this would have been precipitous, and it is good that I resisted the temptation, because as the book proceeds it opens up. Howells himself, it turns out, is a genial host, unhurried and gently witty, with a winsome air of self-depreciation (as when he excuses his failure to visit many of the churches of Rome by asking “What right had I, a heretic and recusant, to come staring and standing round where the faithful were kneeling and praying?”) but a willingness to press a moral point when he thinks it justified (as when he observes a beautiful view in Monte Carlo by noting that “beyond the Casino seaward were the beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic growths, where people might come out and kill themselves”). And some of his advice really might be still practical for a select clientele: “If I were buying piazzas in Rome I should begin with the Navona”.

If part of the attraction of such a memoir is in seeing what has changed, it is equally true that it is cheering to see what has not. Naturally the major sites were substantially then as they are now. But the constancy extends even to smaller matters, such as the prevalence of cats at the foot of Trajan’s Column (which was the first odd thing I noted on the first morning of my first visit to Rome), the unsettling strangeness of the Capuchin ossuary off Piazza Barberini, and the notable difference in quality between Italian trains and French (which I experienced when I had to switch trains, as he did, at the border town of Ventimiglia).

Howells’ aesthetic judgments are not always sound. We can, perhaps, in a spirit of charity, understand why he might say of the outsized baroque statues in St Peter’s that

they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must generously grieve

but it is harder to comprehend how he could say of Rome’s magnificent churches that they are “each less lovely than the other” — this, I note with some relief, being a judgment offered alongside the admission, already noted, that he didn’t go into many of them. (Actually, if we are considering exteriors only, there is some justice in his judgment.) His approving remarks about Santa Maria Maggiore — that it is “far richer than any gold could make it in the treasures of history and legend, which fairly encrust it in every part” — averted at this sensitive juncture another temptation to send the book plummeting to its death.

The book does have weaknesses, then, foremost among them being, to my mind, Howells’ lack of interest in the religious significance of anything he sees, but, in the end, Howells went to Rome because he loved Rome, and because the city repaid that love, and on this strength the book can win the hearts of readers who feel the same. The special allure of the city is at least partly captured in a remark he makes about the Spanish Steps, but which has wider application:

It is beauty that rather makes the heart ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling yourself so.

*

This is not the first travel memoir about Rome that I would recommend — all of the authors I mentioned at the top are preferable — but Howells is not without his charms, and for seasoned travellers he might well be just the thing.

**

For another, markedly superior, appreciation of this book, consider reading John Byron Kuhner’s essay: “Romesick with William Dean Howells”.

On the silver screen

A few film-related links today:

• Writing at The Weekly Standard, John Simon gives a primer on the films of Ingmar Bergman. I believe I’ve seen about a half-dozen of Bergman’s films, and many of those Simon recommends as good entry points are yet unseen by me. Like Bresson, I’ve found Bergman a tough nut to crack; sitting down to watch him sometimes feels too much like homework. But, as always in such cases, I willingly shoulder the blame, and I’m planning to follow-up on some of Simon’s suggestions, homework or not.
• I have no similar difficulties with the films of the Coen Brothers, from whom the most recent news is that their forecast mini-series, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, has now been converted into a feature film instead. This is disappointing, as I’d been curious to see what they would do with the extra time and scope that the mini-series format would provide, but, on the other hand, a new film from the Coen Brothers could never be simply disappointing. I look forward to it.
• I’ve also been looking forward, for over a year now, to Terrence Malick’s new film, Radegund. Rumours were circulating that it might premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, but the festival’s line-up has now been announced and I am sobbing quietly, in voiceover.
• It is also rather sad to note that I have lived in and around Toronto for almost 20 years and have never been to a single TIFF screening.
• Also at The Weekly Standard, Tim Markatos has written a fine appreciation of Dreyer’s classic film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and of other cinematic treatments of St Joan’s life. I’ve actually seen quite a few of these, including Rossellini’s, Bresson’s, and Rivette’s — but I’ll not contest the critical consensus that Dreyer’s is the best.