Little Dorrit

by Charles Dickens

ALTRO!”* returned John Baptist, closing his eyes and giving his head a most vehement toss. The word being, according to its Genoese emphasis, a confirmation, a contradiction, an assertion, a denial, a taunt, a compliment, a joke, and fifty other things, became in the present instance, with a significance beyond all power of written expression, our familiar English “I believe you!”

“I am a”—Monsieur Rigaud stood up to say it—“I am a cosmopolitan gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss—Canton de Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born in Belgium. I am a citizen of the world.”

Europe is a small corner of the world

its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. “Heaven forgive me,” said he, “and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!”

“I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that his watch should be sent straight to you.”

“It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish. When he could only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me ‘your mother.’

Affery, woman,” said Mr. Flintwinch, with a friendly grin on his expressive countenance, “if you ever have a dream of this sort again, it’ll be a sign of your being in want of physic.* And I’ll give you such a dose, old woman—such a dose!”

Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her.* Smite thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven.*

As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal, and shades of color in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs. Clennam’s demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.

The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership, of which he knew no more than that he had invested money in it; by legal matters of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there, suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible could be made of his case.

A—well—a—it’s of no use to disguise the fact—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.” To see her hand upon his arm in mute entreaty half repressed, and her timid little shrinking figure turning away, was to see a sad, sad sight. “Sometimes,” he went on in a low, soft voice, agitated, and clearing his throat every now and then; “sometimes—hem—it takes one shape and sometimes another; but it is generally—ha—Money. And it is, I cannot but confess it, it is too often—hem—acceptable.

It was evident from the general tone of the whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out.

A swift thought shot into his mind. In that long imprisonment here, and in her own long confinement to her room, did his mother find a balance to be struck? I admit that I was accessory to that man’s captivity. I have suffered for it in kind. He has decayed in his prison; I in mine. I have paid the penalty.

If ever pride were innocent, it was innocent in Little Dorrit when she grew boastful of her father.

She appeared to have acquired, in her infancy, some awful impression of the might of this formidable Mr. Tite Barnacle of Grosvenor Square, or very near it, and the Circumlocution Office, which quite crushed her when she mentioned him.

If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault-full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office.

In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

It being one of the principles of the Circumlocution Office never, on any account whatever, to give a straightforward answer, Mr. Barnacle said, “Possibly.”

he fully understood the Department to be a politico diplomatico hocus pocus piece of machinery, for the assistance of the nobs in keeping off the snobs.

Give him a lot of forms!” With which instruction to number two, this sparkling young Barnacle took a fresh handful of papers from numbers one and three, and carried them into the sanctuary, to offer to the presiding Idols of the Circumlocution Office.

It was opened presently by a woman with a child in her arms, whose unoccupied hand was hastily re-arranging the upper part of her dress. This was Mrs. Plornish, and this maternal action was the action of Mrs. Plornish during a large part of her waking existence.

Indeed, she was so proud of the acquaintance, that she had awakened some bitterness of spirit in the Yard, by magnifying to an enormous amount the sum for which Miss Dorrit’s father had become insolvent. The Bleeding Hearts resented her claiming to know people of such distinction.

“I beg your pardon,” said Clennam, “I fear you did not hear me announced?” “No, sir, I did not. Did you wish to see me, sir?” “I wished to pay my respects.” Mr. Casby seemed a feather’s weight disappointed by the last words, having perhaps prepared himself for the visitor’s wishing to pay something else.

“There was a time,” said Mr. Casby, “when your parents and myself were not on friendly terms. There was a little family misunderstanding among us. Your respected mother was rather jealous of her son, maybe; when I say her son, I mean your worthy self, your worthy self.”

He knew that some of these specks even represented Christopher as capable of harboring designs in “that head,” and as being a crafty impostor. Other motes there were which showed him as a heavy, selfish, drifting Booby, who, having stumbled, in the course of his unwieldy jostlings against other men, on the discovery that to get through life with ease and credit, he had but to hold his tongue, keep the bald part of his head well polished, and leave his hair alone, had had just cunning enough to seize the idea and stick to it.

whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a Dog-stealer will annually be found embodying all the cardinal virtues, on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs (thereby planting thorns of confusion in the breasts of the more observant students of nature), so, in the great social Exhibition,* accessories are often accepted in lieu of the internal character.

much as an unwieldy ship in the Thames river may sometimes be seen heavily driving with the tide, broadside on, stern first, in its own way and in the way of everything else, though making a great show of navigation, when all of a sudden, a little coaly steam-tug will bear down upon it, take it in tow, and bustle off with it; similarly, the cumbrous Patriarch had been taken in tow by the snorting Pancks, and was now following in the wake of that dingy little craft.

Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now.

When a man says he’s rich, you’re generally sure he isn’t.

“First, he wants some water,” said he, looking round. (A dozen good fellows dispersed to get it.) “Are you badly hurt, my friend?” he asked the man on the litter, in Italian. “Yes, sir; yes, yes, yes. It’s my leg, it’s my leg. But it pleases me to hear the old music, though I am very bad.”

“From the unhappy suppression of my youngest days, through the rigid and unloving home that followed them, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother’s welcome, my intercourse with her since, down to the afternoon of this day with poor Flora,” said Arthur Clennam, “what have I found!” His door was softly opened, and these spoken words startled him, and came as if they were an answer: “Little Dorrit.”

The brown, grave gentleman, who smiled so pleasantly, who was so frank and considerate in his manner, and yet in whose earnestness there was something that reminded her of his mother, with the great difference that she was earnest in asperity and he in gentleness.

Because, before you took your own part, I thought you ought to have taken the part of Arthur’s father. Arthur’s father! I had no particular love for Arthur’s father. I served Arthur’s father’s uncle, in this house, when Arthur’s father was not much above me—was poorer as far as his pocket went—and when his uncle might as soon have left me his heir as have left him. He starved in the parlor, and I starved in the kitchen; that was the principal difference in our positions; there was not much more than a flight of breakneck stairs between us.

You are a determined woman, and a clever woman; and when you see your purpose before you, nothing will turn you from it. Who knows that better than I do?” “Nothing will turn me from it, Flintwinch, when I have justified it to myself. Add that.” “Justified it to yourself? I said you were the most determined woman on the face of the earth (or I meant to say so), and if you are determined to justify any object you entertain, of course you’ll do it.”

Thinking of her, and of the possibility of her father’s release from prison by the unbarring hand of death—the only change of circumstance he could foresee that might enable him to be such a friend to her as he wished to be, by altering her whole manner of life, smoothing her rough road, and giving her a home—he regarded her, in that perspective, as his adopted daughter, his poor child of the Marshalsea hushed to rest.

And so at home he had established himself in business, and had invented and executed, and worked his way on, until, after a dozen years of constant suit and service, he had been enrolled in the Great British Legion of Honor, the Legion of the Rebuffed of the Circumlocution Office, and had been decorated with the Great British Order of Merit, the Order of the Disorder of the Barnacles and Stiltstalkings.

Clennam went back to his room, sat down again before his fire, and made up his mind that he was glad he had resolved not to fall in love with Pet. She was so beautiful, so amiable, so apt to receive any true impression given to her gentle nature and her innocent heart, and make the man who should be so happy as to communicate it, the most fortunate and enviable of all men, that he was very glad indeed he had come to that conclusion.

The effect of this cheering discovery happened to be, that while he seemed to be scrupulously finding good in most men, he did in reality lower it where it was, and set it up where it was not; but that was its only disagreeable or dangerous feature.

“Egod, sir,” returned Young Barnacle, “He said he wanted to know, you know! Pervaded our department—without an appointment—and said he wanted to know!” The stare of indignant wonder with which Young Barnacle accompanied this disclosure, would have strained his eyes injuriously but for the opportune relief of dinner.

If Clennam had not decided against falling in love with Pet; if he had had the weakness to do it; if he had, little by little, persuaded himself to set all the earnestness of his nature, all the might of his hope, and all the wealth of his matured character, on that cast; if he had done this, and found that all was lost; he would have been, that night, unutterably miserable. As it was—— As it was, the rain fell heavily, drearily.

In this affair, as in every other, Little Dorrit herself was the last person considered. Her brother and sister were aware of it, and attained a sort of station by making a peg of it on which to air the miserably ragged old fiction of the family gentility.

It was an instinctive testimony to Little Dorrit’s worth, and difference from all the rest, that the poor young fellow honored and loved her for being simply what she was.

I have impressed upon Amy during many years, that I must have my meals (for instance) punctually. Amy has grown up in a sense of the importance of these arrangements, and you know what a good girl she is.” The brother only sighed again, as he plodded dreamily along, “Hah! Yes, yes, yes, yes.”

No, gentlemen, no; let them not misunderstand him. His brother Frederick was much broken, no doubt, and it might be more comfortable to himself (the Father of the Marshalsea) to know that he was safe within the walls. Still, it must be remembered that to support an existence there during many years, required a certain combination of qualities—he did not say high qualities, but qualities—moral qualities.

it appeared to him that his—hem!—sister was not called upon to understand the young man too distinctly, and that she might lead him on—I am doubtful whether lead him on was Captain Martin’s exact expression; indeed I think he said tolerate him—on her father’s—I should say, brother’s—account.

All this time he had never once thought of her dress, her shoes, her need of anything. No other person upon earth, save herself, could have been so unmindful of her wants.

One solid stationary point in the looseness of this gentleman’s character, was, that he respected and admired his sister Amy. The feeling had never induced him to spare her a moment’s uneasiness, or to put himself to any restraint or inconvenience on her account; but, with that Marshalsea taint upon his love, he loved her. The same rank Marshalsea flavor was to be recognised in his distinctly perceiving that she sacrificed her life to her father, and in his having no idea that she had done anything for himself.

Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the ways of theatres as of the ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a furtive sort of door, with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed of itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated to approach it;

It was the family custom to lay it down as family law, that she was a plain domestic little creature, without the great and sage experiences of the rest. This family fiction was the family assertion of itself against her services. Not to make too much of them.

Perhaps he inherits that misfortune. I am very impressible myself, by nature. The weakest of creatures. My feelings are touched in a moment.” She said all this, and everything else, as coldly as a woman of snow;