Little Dorritt is not one of Charles Dickens’ best books. If anything, it is one of his most difficult books to read, as he goes into wild tangents within the prose. Characters speak in cryptic manners, such as Flora Finching, and the general twists and turns of the story with its voluminous characters. It was hard for me to keep up.
Yet, there is much beauty within the book, as all Dickens book. I loved his writing on the Department of Circumlocution who took pride on excessive bureaucracy; I loved the fallout on the death of Mr Merdle, which seems to me so realistic, even though Dickens admitted that nothing of the sort have happened in England. I loved the description of the Marshalsea prison conjured from the memories of Dickens when his own father was imprisoned there and he visited his father taking the same path Little Dorrit did. Maybe that still haunted him.
Dickens would write more books after Little Dorrit, some better. But it was here that he feared the loss of his imagination. He wasn’t that old when he wrote this, but he was living in constant panic that his creativity will flounder, and he was unsettled. I do think that this led to the book being overwritten at parts. But to understand the psychology behind it is to appreciate Little Dorrit more.
A passage relevant to our days: “The changes of a fevered room are slow and fluctuating; but the changes of the fevered world are rapid and irrevocable. (Page 907)” That use of the word irrevocable concerns me most.
