A King Lear of the debtors' prison: Dickens and Shakespeare on mortal shame

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by Alexander Welsh

Precisely because these nineteenth-century novelizations--and there are striking examples in the oeuvres of Balzac, Hugo, and others besides Dickens--are endeavors of "low-mimetic" realism, their didacticism addresses humanity more generally. Retrospectively, they view the strengths and especially the weaknesses of King Lear as those of any older person (Welsh, 1984). Incapable of governing, Shakespeare's Lear nevertheless wishes to retain the title of a king and the attention due to a father as well. "I pray you, father, being weak, seem so" (2.2.390) is the response he begins to hear from Regan and Goneril. The orphaned Nell's grandfather, who prides himself on his caring for her, is a compulsive gambler who imagines he can win her fortune by borrowing or even stealing enough to stake at cards: the two are soon reduced to begging. Paul Dombey's master passion is the family pride he has invested in the House of Dombey; but the business has been undermined by the fraudulent practices of the manager James Carker, whose treatment of his upright brother mimics Edmund's treatment of Edgar in King Lear, and who threatens to cuckold the head of the firm for good measure. The shame endured by these tragic figures is evident: even Nell's grandfather, crazy as he is, knows enough to conceal his gambling habit. But Dickens's singular contribution to the series is William Dorrit, the father of Little Dorrit and known in his circle as the Father of the Marshalsea, the prison for debtors on the south bank of the Thames where Dickens's own father had been incarcerated for some months when the writer was a boy.

Not too much need be made of the autobiographical significance of the Marshalsea. The prison had been torn down by the time of the writing of Little Dorrit, and Dickens had memorialized his own father with a much lighter touch as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield (1849-50). John Dickens in fact died after the autobiographical copperfield was completed, and the traces of this epochal event in the writer's life were diffused in the darkening tone of all the subsequent novels, similar to the darkening of Shakespeare's production after Hamlet and the death of John Shakespeare. Rather, Dickens's stroke of genius in Little Dorrit was to render his Lear figure this time as a prisoner for debt. Imprisonment for debt was common in England in the early nineteenth century, as it was in this country. It resulted from an action brought by the unpaid creditor: not a very practical scheme, since the debtor was thereby deprived of livelihood, but effective nonetheless because of the public shaming of the prisoner and his family, who still had to find means to support themselves or beg for money outright. Visitors to the Marshalsea could come and go during daylight hours; when they had nowhere else to live, wives sometimes accompanied their husbands there. Hence Little Dorrit, in the novel, came to be born there; and that distraction from the prison routine led to inmates' calling Mr. Dorrit the Father of the Marshalsea, a title he clings to with something like royal prerogative in the face of his seemingly interminable degradation. At the same time the novelist is able to imagine a diurnal basis for the contentment with Cordelia that her father envisioned at the end of the play: