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Little Dorrit: "And London looks so large, so barren and so wild"
Fred Barnard
1884, 1912
Photogravure
18.5 cm high by 12.7 cm wide (7 ⅜ inches high by 5 inches wide
Volume XV, 176, in Dickens's Little Dorrit in the Co-operative Publication Society Edition (1912).
A garret, and a Marshalsea garret without compromise, was Little Dorrit's room.
Terry-Lynn Johnson Collection
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
To her own room too, strangely assorted room for her delicate youth and character, she was glad to retreat as often as she could without desertion of any duty. There were afternoon times when she was unemployed, when visitors dropped in to play a hand at cards with her father, when she could be spared and was better away. Then she would flit along the yard, climb the scores of stairs that led to her room, and take her seat at the window. Many combinations did those spikes upon the wall assume, many light shapes did the strong iron weave itself into, many golden touches fell upon the rust, while Little Dorrit sat there musing. New zig-zags sprung into the cruel pattern sometimes, when she saw it through a burst of tears; but beautified or hardened still, always over it and under it and through it, she was fain to look in her solitude, seeing everything with that ineffaceable brand.
A garret, and a Marshalsea garret without compromise, was Little Dorrit's room. Beautifully kept, it was ugly in itself, and had little but cleanliness and air to set it off; for what embellishment she had ever been able to buy, had gone to her father's room. Howbeit, for this poor place she showed an increasing love; and to sit in it alone became her favourite rest. [Book 1, Chapter XXIV, "Fortune-Telling," The Household Edition, 149]
This atmospheric drawing is one of many nineteenth-century works employing the Mariana theme — the contemplative, yearning, or despairing young woman at a window — popularized by Tennyson's "Mariana" [GPL] It is far more expressive than the only real models available to Barnard, Little Dorrit leaving The Marshalsea (June 1857: Book 2, Chapter XXIX) and Mahoney's title-page vignette, Little Dorrit at the door of a cell in the Marshalsea (1871).
Although Barnard would surely have been familiar with Phiz's extensive narrative pictorial sequence of forty engravings for Little Dorrit (1857), he would have found few useful portraits of the protagonist either there or in Mahoney's equally extensive series of fifty-eight composite woodblock engravings for the fifth volume of the Household Edition. Owing to copyright restrictions that still hampered the transAtlantic book trade in the 1880s, Barnard is not likely to have seen any of the relevant American illustrations.
Having undoubtedly read with great diligence and considerable interest John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1879), Barnard was aware that Forster's life-time friend, colleague, and client was in fact also very much "a child of the Marshalsea" since the profligate John Dickens, the novelist's father, like the Dorrits, had been incarcerated for debts in London's Marshalsea Prison. Barnard himself had illustrated this intimate biography as Volume VII of the Household Edition in 1879. Thus, Barnard, knowing the connection between author and protagonist, depicts Little Dorrit not as a victim but as a philosopher in embryo, looking out her garret window upon the London skyline north of the Thames. Barnard dismisses the meanness and sordidness of the place as Phiz depicted it in such scenes as The Brothers (Book One, Chapter XIX), and focuses on Little Dorrit as she seems to be reflecting upon her present and future state as stares out the window. However, Barnard has, as it were, moved in for the closeup, and removed Maggy, Little Dorrit's constant companion, so that the moment which he realizes is far more intimate and introspective than that which Phiz realizes in The Story of the Princess (June 1856: Book One, Chapter XXIV).
Left: Hablot Knight Browne's Title-page Vignette, Little Dorrit at the door of The Marshalsea (1857). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Little Dorrit and Her Father (1867). Right: F. O. C. Darley's frontispiece for the second volume in the Household Edition, Joyful Tidings (1863). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Authentic Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1901 [rpt. 30 May 1857 volume].
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Frontispieces by Felix Octavius Carr Darley and Sir John Gilbert. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1863. 4 vols.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. 14 vols.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by James Mahoney. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873. Vol. V.
Dickens, Charles. Works. Photogravure-Illustrated Edition. New York and London: Co-operative Publication Society, [n. d., 1912?].
A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens, from the Original Drawings by Frederick Barnard, Being Facsimiles of Original Drawings by Fred. Barnard. Series 1: Mrs. Gamp, Alfred Jingle, Bill Sikes, Little Dorrit, Sydney Carton, and Pickwick. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1884.
Created 12 August 2012
Last modified 11 February 2025