Little Dorrit, Part Ten, chaps 33-36 (Sept. 1856)

Dear Serial Readers,

Halfway point, and now we see the binary plot: poverty, first half, riches, second half. I suspect all won't be so rosy with the riches, given the shoals of Barnacles out in the great ocean of London, given the many signs of William Dorrit's haughtiness.

Speaking of the Barnacles, who attend Pet's wedding in shoals, I realized that Darwin was publishing about barnacles just a year or two before Dickens wrote this. My friend Rebecca Stott has written a beautiful book, Darwin and the Barnacle, on Darwin's fascinating and protracted studies of these little sea creatures with a propensity to attach themselves everywhere possible and with the most bizarre shapes and sexual parts. I think this Slow Reading pace does make lots of space for speculating. Darwin certainly was a master of Slow Reading, a speculator of nature and natural histories. Pancks in this novel also speculates (the word "speculation" occurs early in chap 35) about the Dorrits of Dorchester connection--his researching here called "moleing"--"this new verb." Pancks' description of his process of moleing does sound similar to Darwin's painstaking work on barnacles over decades and on bringing to light his great discovery of descent via natural selection: "he had alternated from sudden lights and hopes to sudden darkness and no hopes, and back again, and back again." "Speculation" of course has a different meaning in relation to finance, and the word also appears in this chapter around the Ruggs family. By the way, Rebecca is currently writing a book, "Speculators," about evolutionary theories before Darwin!

But onto the grand finale of this number, and this first half of the novel: the release of the Dorrits from Marshalsea, a parade of pomp and circumstance. There are too many hints that wealth will not make Dorrit a better man, that his pride, arrogance, egoism will swell out of proportion in the midst of his new affluence. Dickens has many tales of men spoiled and perverted by wealth--Dombey before Dorrit (in order of publication). And Amy? What does her fainting that prevents her from changing that "ugly old shabby dress" mean? Rather than parading with the family through the prison gates, she's carried out by Arthur. She of all the Dorrits shows some ambivalence about this change of fortune.

All the editions I've looked at begin again with chapter one for the second part of the novel, so I'll use that too. But in case you have sequential chapters, I'll also indicate the number of chapters to read for the upcoming installment.

Next week: II, chaps 1-4 (4).

Serially speculating,
Susan