Thank you for correcting the text in this article. Your corrections improve Papers Past searches for everyone. See the latest corrections.

This article contains searchable text which was automatically generated and may contain errors. Join the community and correct any errors you spot to help us improve Papers Past.

Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image
Article image

REVIEW

(From the Examiner). Little Dorrit. By Charles Dickens, Bradbury and Evans.

Of all Mr. Dickens's novels, " Little Dorrit" is perhaps the one that takes the highest aim. We are among those who read the first chapter eighteen months ago, and the last chapter but yesterday. During the publication of the tale in, monthly numbers we have enjoyed it much and grumbled at it much. It is complete, and what was dark is clear to us, what matter was confused we find

As many arrows, loosed several ways, Fly to one mark.

In this novel Mr. Dickens has thought more of his single volume than of his twenty parts, resisting most completely the temptations which lead to the final hurt of many a book published in fragments. "Little Dorrit" has been the less appreciated for this reason as fugitive reading, but it will be only the more appreciated as a permanent addition to our libraries. We do not hold it to be either Mr. Dickens's best or his worst work, but, as we have said, we believe it to be of all others, as to its aim, the highest, and, we may add also, as to its manner of construction, the one. that is most characteristic of his genius. Its aim, from which never a shaft diverges, is to show the beauty—even the sublimity—of a simple, unaffected,-and unselfish doing of all duties, great and little; the ugliness and baseness of the qualities that are antagonist to this. "Little Dorrit is the subject of the novel, and she means Duty, as in Spenser Una means Truth or Duessa Falsehood. The wonis Do It begin and end, possibly not by accident,"her very name. Her character, .the character of Duty, runs as a golden thread through ' the whole story. The tale is divide!—no scheme could be simpler—into two parts, Poverty and Wealth. Through poverty and wealth the golden thread of Duty runs, ever the same. Little Dorrit is tried by endurance of the lowest depth of want, hopeless confinement in a debtors' prison, and is then submitted to the test of an abrupt change from want'to wealth. The golden thread runs on without a break, without a bend. Little Dorrit is then tried with gold, and afterwards submitted to the test of an abrupt fall from wealth to poverty. She mounts up to heaven, she goes down again into the depths, but her soul is ( not; melted because of trouble. The even line r^fiiyty^ever is turned to the ri»ht hand:or.tll^he^9ft:"" Then, again, we have; in Little Dourit's character the natareof:.Du%,--the forgetfulness of self, the thoughtfulness for others, the constant patience, the noiseless endeavour to be straightforward and right, in little as in great things, and the habit of doing everything, in the most kindly manner. Selfish relations do not weaken in her heart the filial tie. She is laughed at, patronised, nominally held in low esteem, but she wins more or less of love and reverence from all, and, in an hour of need, even those who affect to laugh at her rely upon the wisdom of her counsels. x

Around the path of Little Dorrit, whose life shows us how duty is done, are grouped illustrations of the way in which it is left undone. There is the Circumlocution Office, specially beiit on the solution of its problem, How Not to Do It. There is Mr. Merdle, doing nothing in the world of commerce, yet contriving to amass a fortune—but no stable fortune—by the force of selfishness, by pushing his way on rather than working it on, totally regardless of all claims of duty. There is Mr. Casby, doing no duty in life, but subsisting blandly on a reputation for benevolence, while he can get even extortion done on his behalf by a paid deputy. There is Miss Wade, doing no duty in life, but tormenting herself with a selfish delusion by which she is made useless to society. There is Tattycoram, needing the same wholesome lesson, and receiving it at last in homely words of truth .from Mr. Meagles. There is Mrs Clranam, wasting her years as a victim to that intense form of selfishness which gets from a misread Bible justification of its evil passions, and professes to leave duty* undone in the name of God. There is Henry Gowan, a painter who gives no toil to his calling, a man who has no purpose before him, who is not to be made happy by the fairest gift of fortune, and upon whose married life there may come, the shadow of Blandois of Paris. As Little Dorrit represents in the book the Angel of Duty, so in Blandois we have the Demon of Selfish Idleness. His smile that is a sneer, and his white hands that never have been applied to labour, are the con* stantly recurring emblems of his character in passages of personal description. He is a gentleman for whom others must work, to whom others must give way, who regards none as certainly as Little Dorrit regards all. If Little Dorrit be the Una, he is the Duessa of the tale.

We do not not mean for a moment to assert that in writing this novel or any other of his novels Mr. Dickens has proposed to himself to construct an allegory as complete in all details as that in any book of Spencer's 'Faerie Queene.' Upon that principle no novel of modern life could possibly he written. But Mr. Dickens, as most readers have felt, is at once poet and story-teller. Many of his paragraphs happen indeed to be really written in good verse, though it is not in metrejbhat their poetry consists. It was-not metre that made a

poem of the ' Old Curiosity Shop/ or of that portion of ' Dombey and Son ' which told the life and death of little Paul. Prom other English novelists we think that Mr. Dickens may hereafterbedistinguished as the one writing mosfc _ habitually with the temper of a poet. This it is in no slight degree, which gives their peculiarity to nearly all the characters he paints. They are personifications, and as such their names pass constantly into our common speech as pleasant equivalents for the particular qualities they represent. A particular form of hypocrisy in a man is expressed by calling him a Pecksniff, or a particular form of worthlessness in a statesman, is expressed by calling him a Barnacle. Of the sins of a class Mrs. Gamp is an emblem, Mr. Mumble is an emblem of another thing, and Mr. Merdle of another. In the same spirit a common abuse in statesmanship, being seized and idealized, is reproduced under the type of the Circumlocution Office. Every one of these personifications is to be taken, rather as one of the elements of truth reduced to its pure state by chemistry of genius than as the ordinary compound truth which enters into every-day life. Of course, one may complain of a chemist who experiments on oxygen that it is air with the nitrogen improperly left out; and so one may complain of Mr. Dickens's sketch of the Circumlocution Office, that it shows only half the constitution of the air in Downing-street. In the same way too, nearly sill his characters may be pronounced monstrosities, for nearly all the elements of which the world is made, when seen alone, can be seen only as monstrosities in nature.^ We do not complain of the chemist for delighting us when he reducps to their essence a ihvr compounds of dead matter, nor need we complain of the poet—or the novelist who chances to do poet's work—when he also reduces to their elements a few compounds of life. In ' Little Dorrit' we have the most perfectexample of that principle of personification upon which, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Dickens generally constructs his characters, and even his incidents and plots. Very often there is connected with each some typical cireumshiMCß, such as the sneer and the while hands <>f Blandois, the pomposity- and. weakness of Mr. Don-it's " hum " aud "' lia-;-" or the idea of ■a steam-engine in reference to Mr. Pancks, who is a machine in Mr. Casby's hands, full of repressed energy ; (by reason of the too much' : pressure he at last explodes;) in all personification this is a common and indeed a necessary and inevitable practice. We are not sure also whether the same impulse which caused Spenser to personify folly and vice under so many grotesque and monstrous forms is not that which has compelled Mr. Dickens to create such dwarfs and dragons as a Quilp, a Smallweed, and a Flintwinch.

We have called the attention only to one point in discussing * Little Derrit,' the point from which we believe that a reader will*best see the entire picture on the artist's canvass. And we are tempted to illustrate a part of what we have been saying by reference to a point of similarity between two very different works, Mr. Dickens's ' Little Don-it,' and the ' Newcomes 'of Mr. Thackeray, When the story of the ' Newcomes' was appearing in its monthly parts, very few readers could keep their attenfixed upon its purpose: the author seemed almost to have no purpose, and to be drifting about weekly with its characters. There were not a few who gave up the reading of it in despair. But the work being once collected and read as a whole, proved to the surprise of many readers to be most remarkable for unity of plan; to be a novel in which Mr. Thackeray had taken the deepest and the truest views of life, and in which he had been working out with unfaltering skill a single lesson. Its theme was Marriage, and in no chapter did the author lose sight of his purpose to contrast the right with the wrong foundations-of domestic life. That which had appeared like want of concentration in a detached part was found to b.Mong intimately— as words broken out of the middle of a sentence may belong—to the simplicity and clearness of whole. The likeness between ' Little Dorrifc' and the ' Newcomes' in this one respect is obvious enough. Very lightly let \is touch upon one other consideration. We have said that ' Little Dornt' is to, be regarded as the most characteristic of the works of Mr. Dickens, meaning thereby that it is the best example of the way in which his novels are constructed. We need hardly remind any reader that it is characteristic also in a higher sense. The spirit of the author's life is in his own story. What Englishman does not know how the fame won by the brilliant sport of genius in ' Sketches by Boz,' and ' Pickwick' filled its author's heart not with a weak self-worship, but with a deep sense of duty to be done. From the moment when his name became a name to conquer with* Mr. Dickens has made ouly one use of its great influence. As novelist, as journalist, in every honest way, he has steadily, and day by day, to the best of his knowledge and the utmost of his talent, been maintaining what is good, attacking what is evil, and bent wholly ou the doing of his duty.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18571107.2.8

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Lyttelton Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 523, 7 November 1857, Page 3

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,872

REVIEW Lyttelton Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 523, 7 November 1857, Page 3

REVIEW Lyttelton Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 523, 7 November 1857, Page 3

Help

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Use your Papers Past website account to correct newspaper text.

By creating and using this account you agree to our terms of use.

Log in with RealMe®

If you’ve used a RealMe login somewhere else, you can use it here too. If you don’t already have a username and password, just click Log in and you can choose to create one.


Log in again to continue your work

Your session has expired.

Log in again with RealMe®


Alert