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
2 comments:
Yes, the spotlight turns on money, money, money in Chapter 33: the Bohemians “worship” Merdle’s wealth, and fall “flat on their faces”; the talk about Society’s “requirements” benefitting the marrying man; and Mrs Merdle’s allowance that “…Society is perhaps a little mercenary…” You think? I think the strongest hint that wealth may not turn out to be the most auspicious circumstance for the Dorrits is the reference to the parable of the camel and the needle’s eye.
I love Susan’s note about Darwin and barnacles and the parallels with Pancks’ language. And I enjoyed Panck’s lengthy description of “moleing.”
For a while, I was reading from a remote location and calling up “Little Dorrit” at onlineliterature.com, where there is no Chapter 36! I thought I just missed it, at first, but I double-checked, and it isn’t there.
I've finally caught up with our "slow reading" schedule, and I am so happy to be posting again.
(Please forgive me if I go over ground that has already been discussed in previous weeks!)
This last installment of the first book certainly creates a dramatic break with definite closure. I also found it curious that Amy Dorritt leaves the Marshalsea unconscious--carried out by the benevolent Clennam in her shabby old clothes. It strikes me that Dickens is setting up a strong parallel to Amy's birth into the prison. I wonder if we'll see her "reborn" into the world of riches in the next installment.
I was also intrigued by the emphasis (perhaps even over-emphasis) on father-daughter relationships in this first half of the novel. Arthur is stressing again and again that Little Dorrit should see him as a father, and Amy is often described as childlike (a bit like Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, perhaps), but there's also a romantic subtext going on (at least I see one). I wonder if this will develop more fully now that Amy is no longer impoverished. And if so, will it end like the Esther/Jarndyce mis-match in Bleak House? Or rewrite it?
Finally, on a tangential note, I was reading a post on the last episode of "Lost" and it resonated in interesting ways with our serial reading experience: "Lost showed that we don't just like clipped, quick stories that resolve in one sitting.... Instead, there's tremendous appeal for some in a story that keeps going, with twists, turns, mysteries, revelations, character development, and so forth along the way" ("'Lost' made fans think and scratch their heads" from philly.com). This sounds to me like Dickens all over again!
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