Little Dorrit (Annotated)

by Charles Dickens

He was as good-natured a dancing-master as ever danced to the Insolvent Court,

Maybe one reason he came to the insolvent court, or The Marshalsea?

it took him a matter of ten weeks to set to his creditors,

How did he, since he refused to accept payment from The Child?

'Nothing—whatever it is—seems to have done anybody much good who comes here,'

the Father of the Marshalsea gradually developed a new flower of character.

the Child of the Marshalsea had always upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction that they were all idle beggars together.

'Fanny is not going to live with us just now, father. She will be here a good deal in the day, but she is going to live outside with uncle.'

Fanny, and all the children, need liberated from the prison environment.

Amy,

First mention of The Child's name.

it may be as well for her not quite to live here,

Wherever he went, this foredoomed Tip appeared to take the prison walls with him,

An internal imprisonment

she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates, outside of which she had never slept in her life.

Under one arm he carried a limp and worn-out case, containing some wind instrument;

William Dorrit's brother with his clarionet?

daughter Amy may have mentioned that I am the Father of this place.'

There is much William does not know.

the pale face with a new solicitude stealing over it.

What islands the object of Amy's "new solicitude"?

'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.'

they were lazily habituated to her, as they were to all the rest of their condition.

The source of Amy's imprisonment. Also the imprisonment of Frederick, Tip, and Fanny.

Who could be in prison a quarter of a century, and be prosperous!'

A fundamental flaw of prisons.

People are not bad because they come there. I have known numbers of good, persevering, honest people come there through misfortune. They are almost all kind-hearted to one another.

The cage door opened, and when the small bird, reared in captivity, had tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut again; and then he came away.

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.

True with modern governments.

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments

they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it.

Not much has changed since Dickens' time.

the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it.

the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion.

It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything.

indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

the express image and presentment of How not to do it.

I can give you plenty of forms to fill

he fully understood the Department to be a politico-diplomatic hocus pocus piece of machinery

long stone passage and the long stone staircase.

Mr Meagles.

The ever practical Mr Meagles, from Marseilles (reference Chapter 2).

Stiltstalking,

Stalking from high on stilts?

what the Barnacles had to do, was to stick on to the national ship as long as they could.

if the ship went down with them yet sticking to it, that was the ship's look out, and not theirs.

my experience of these things does not begin with myself. It has been in my way to know a little about them from time to time. Mine is not a particular case. I am not worse used than a hundred others who have put themselves in the same position—than all the others,

had learnt How not to do it.

It is always possible that he had, and has, good in him if one did but know how to find it out.

there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them—none.

his moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache.

Monsieur Rigaud, from prison in Marseilles (Chapter 2). This descriptor from Location 328.

ill-looking man,

observed the nose coming down and the moustache going up,

Rigaud was a criminal, she said, who had k...

the law could not prove it against him to its satisfaction.

Unable to prove his guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt."

The landlady of the Break of Day looked at him again, and felt almost confirmed in her last decision. He had a fine hand, though, and he turned it with a great show.

an expression that might have resolved her doubts, and brought her to a lasting conclusion on the subject of his good or bad looks

had fully made up his mind that the guest was an ill-looking fellow.

Submitting himself to the old tone of condescending authority,

A habit of submitting out of fear.

seemed not quite convinced that it was a surpassingly desirable arrangement.

John Baptist seems an honest but weak man.

society has deeply wronged since you last saw me.

Narcissistic

it is my character to govern.

Control more than govern.