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

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by Alexander Welsh

   "Amy, my dear," he repeated. "Will you go and see if
   Bob is on the lock!"

   She was at his side, and touching him, but he still perversely
   supposed her to be in her seat, and called out, still
   leaning over the table, "Amy, Amy. I don't feel quite myself.
   Ha. I don't know what's the matter with me. I particularly
   wish to see Bob. Ha. Of all the turnkeys, he's as much my
   friend as yours. See if Bob is in the Lodge, and beg him to
   come to me."

   All the guests were now in consternation, and everybody
   rose.

The old man suffers a stroke that causes him no longer to register his surroundings and to imagine that he is back in the Marshalsea. The daughter's thoughts have never left the debtors' prison; now the father's return him there whether he wills it or not, and this hallucination remains with him for the rest of his days. He even launches into one of his old introductions of himself before the other dinner guests and doesn't fail to introduce Amy as well: "My child, ladies and gentlemen. My daughter. Born here!" Emphatically, the narrator breaks in: "She was not ashamed of it, or ashamed of him." The embarrassing social scene is Little Dorrit's opportunity to fend once more against his shameful state. She nurses him for ten whole days while he continues to imagine himself back in the prison; she humors him by pretending to pawn his watch and cuff links, a familiar recourse "equivalent to making the most methodical and provident arrangements." At last there comes over his face "a deeper shadow than the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall," and he dies (2.19.541-44). Like King Lear and Gloucester, two old men, William Dorrit and his brother Frederick, die natural deaths a few days apart and away from home.

For all that, the true protagonist of the novel is the younger man, Arthur Clennam: that "grave dark man of forty" who has been "more than twenty years in China" and inexplicably lacks "will, purpose, hope" (1.2.14-17). The long novel of 20 monthly parts is Clennam's quest romance, and he is not named Arthur for nothing. (Or the man from China: as a naive stranger he serves as a common satirical device to expose the local custom--most notably in Little Dorrit the Circumlocution Office or government bureaucracy, but also imprisonment for debt and a debilitating social snobbery found everywhere.) Even seemingly tangential mysteries, such as the story of Miss Wade and the sinister manifestations of the criminal Rigaud-Blandois, can ultimately be explained only with reference to the hero's quest. Clearly for Dickens it is very important not only that Amy's love for Arthur be realized but that this hero actually experience something like the fate of the Father of the Marshalsea. In his very first visit to the prison (the chapter is entitled "The Lock"), Clennam fails to heed the visitors' bell and is locked in for the night. Subsequently, as he and Amy get to know one another and discuss her care for her father, she ventures to ask, "If you were in prison, could I bring such comfort to you?" (1.22.217). Just before the end of book 1 and the turnabout in fortune of the Dorrits, these two have another conversation (painful for Amy, who is now fully conscious of her love for Clennam) about his disappointment that he has been unable to attract a still younger woman, whom he has met on his way home from China. The experience has made him wiser, he tells Amy. "Being wiser, I counted up my years, and considered what I am, and looked back, and looked forward, and found that I should soon be grey." Still more painfully, he apologizes to her: "Don't mind me, who, for the matter of years, might be your father or your uncle. Always think of me as quite an old man" (1.32.321-23). Thus the hero, in a sort of midlife crisis, is already ashamed of being old.