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Little Dorrit's Party
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
March 1856
Illustration for Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Part IV (Book 1, Chapter 14).
Source: Authentic Edition (1901), facing p. 150.
The book was published in the customary twenty monthly parts, December 1855 through June 1857, by Bradbury and Evans with a blue wrapper and forty plates designed by Phiz.
Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
No day yet in the sky, but there was day in the resounding stones of the streets; in the waggons, carts, and coaches; in the workers going to various occupations; in the opening of early shops; in the traffic at markets; in the stir of the riverside. There was coming day in the flaring lights, with a feebler colour in them than they would have had at another time; coming day in the increased sharpness of the air, and the ghastly dying of the night.
They went back again to the gate, intending to wait there now until it should be opened; but the air was so raw and cold that Little Dorrit, leading Maggy about in her sleep, kept in motion. Going round by the Church, she saw lights there, and the door open; and went up the steps and looked in. . . .
This was Little Dorrit's party. The shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night. This was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first grey mist of a rainy morning. — Book the First, "Poverty," Chapter 14, "Little Dorrit's Party," pp. 151-152.
"Little Dorrit's Party" is really Phiz's only chance (apart from the cover and the final pair of etchings) to make direct social and thematic comment, but another dark plate, "Visitors at the Works" (Bk 1, ch. 23), imparts a certain Kafkaesque quality to the novel. [Steig, p. 165]
The picture offers an interesting fusion of the architectural and the pathetic, with Maggy and Little Dorrit locked out of a dilapidated edifice which is also a decaying social institution, the debtors' prison. Phiz subordinates the female characters, the focal point of the nightmarish adventure like something out of French illustrator Gustav Doré's night scenes of Victorian London, to focus on two buildings from earlier eras: the crumbling and ruinous eighteenth-century prison with its tattered flag in the foreground, and the Gothic style Church of St. George the Martyr in the background. Although the debtors' prison as a social institution dates from the middle ages, it was at its zenith in the eighteenth century, when over half of all inmates of English prisons were in fact incarcerated in such places. Dickens's own father, John, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office, was sent to the Marshalsea on 20 February 1824 for an unpaid baker's bill. That year when the future novelist was just twelve was seared into the boy's mind by his own servitude at Warren's Stairs on the Thames. During this period Dickens worked most of the week without seeing his family, lodging not in the Marshalsea like Amy, but in Lant Street.
The title of the fourteenth chapter in Book the First, like that of the complementary illustration, is situationally ironic as Amy's spending the first night of her life outside the Marshalsea, sleeping in the streets and wandering a deserted London Bridge with Maggy, is anything but a party. The night proves Kafkaesque as strange street-people accost the pair, and Amy sees the night side of London, defamiliarizing her notion of the metropolis as a safe and civilised place. Likewise, in his next novel — the last that Phiz would illustrate for Charles Dickens (as much a "Child of the Marshalsea" as Amy Dorrit) — Lucie Manette discovers the night side of another European metropolis in which the normal polity of day and of reasonable civic organisation has utterly broken down. At least in the nightside of Little Dorrit compassion and fairness form part of the code of the streets and sheer social Darwinism does not reign.
Left: In Mary Angela Dickens's retelling of Amy Dorrit's story for children, Harold Copping presents a slightly sentimental but realistic version of the same scene, focussing upon the figures rather than the atmospheric setting: Little Dorrit and Maggie asleep at the Gates of the Marshalsea (1924). Right: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration of Maggy and Little Dorrit locked out of the Marshalsea: The gate was so familiar, and so like a companion, that they put down Maggy's basket in a corner to serve for a seat (1873).
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Created 18 June 2016 Last modified 3 October 2023