Recommended Reading
I'm glad that Little Dorrit, Dickens' sombre late masterpiece, is being televised (on BBC1), since this should win new readers for a novel which enjoys very high critical esteem, and which I myself love, but which has somehow never been among the more popular works in the Dickens canon. It's also true that Dickens adapts better to stage or screen than many novelists, as his imagination was highly theatrical. Even so, it's worth bearing in mind, in this television-obsessed age, that, without his authorial prose, - narrative, descriptive and rhapsodic, - his novels lack a whole dimension, like operas without the orchestra. There's still the story-line, of course, and the characters, with the words they speak and their mannerisms, but you miss the rich, quasi-Shakespearean current of metaphor which runs through it all and, as in Shakespeare, gives both plot and characters their full significance. Perhaps suggestive camerawork can do something to make up for the loss. Anyway, I'll be following this serial version with great interest.
Little Dorrit is very much a novel about prisons and prisoners of various kinds, from the debtors jailed in the Marshalsea - like Dickens' own father - to Arthur Clennam's mother in her spiritual bondage, not forgetting Mrs. Merdle's screaming parrot in its cage. Despite the elements of Dickensian comedy, the vision of London presented is as dark as in Blake's poem:
"I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban [i.e. curse],
The mind-forged manacles I hear."
The book is also very topical regarding money matters.
