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

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by Alexander Welsh

   No, no, no, no. Come, let's away to prison;
   We two alone will sing like birds i'th cage.
   When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down
   And ask of thee forgiveness (5.3.8-11).

Dickens's choice of the Marshalsea prison as the setting for this family's pretensions and the fealty of its one saving daughter was an inspired one, because the need to accept charity in any form was a consuming Puritan and Victorian fear (Welsh, 1986 [ 1971]: 86-100). It is not merely a failure of the work ethic in this case, for debtors are more likely to be found in the middle and privileged classes than among workers of such modest means that no one would extend them credit in the first place. Mr. Dorrit exudes an air of privilege along with a good deal of self-pity, and there is little sense that he ever earned what wealth he once had. The distress and disgrace of the inhabitants of the debtors' prison extend to those who wait upon them from outside, "the nondescript messengers, go-betweens, and errand-bearers of the place." In a notable passage Dickens describes "the shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness."

   All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and
   women; were made up of patches and pieces of other people's
   individuality, and had no sartorial existence of their
   own proper.... Mendicity on commission stooped in their
   high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned
   and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed
   their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty little
   ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic
   breathings (1.9.75).

A degree of shamelessness has become the necessary accouterment of such people, and Dickens begins to signal this condition throughout the novel as "the shadow of the Marshalsea wall."

Within the Marshalsea its Father holds court. Merely as the inmate who has been there the longest, William Dorrit enjoys a certain distinction, and he exploits this distinction for what it is worth: gratuities, or "testimonials" as he likes to say, from visitors who drop in or are brought to him by the simplest among the "Collegians," who look up to him as a sort of patron. The reader sees the Father of the Marshalsea through the eyes of the novel's middle-aged hero, Arthur Clennam, who is moved by the vaguest sense of family responsibility to seek out Little Dorrit at her "home" (still another ironic designation for the prison, like "college"). The daughter duly introduces her father, and within moments the latter has begun his routine: "you must know, Mr. Clennam, that it does sometimes occur that people who come here, desire to offer some little--Testimonial--to the Father of the place." Little Dorrit cringes, of course, but Clennam has already observed how she regards her father: "half admiring him and proud of him, half-ashamed for him, all devoted and loving" (1.8.68-69). Of this Cordelia figure we learn more and more. Her given name is Amy, but the hero, who has first encountered her sewing for his mother, and the narrator both prefer "Little Dorfit." The next visit to the father-daughter pair is also narrated from the hero's point of view: "What affection in her words, what compassion in her repressed tears, what a great soul of fidelity within her, how true the light that shed false brightness round him!" (1.9.80)