Reading through the Past: 'Archaeological' Conceits and Procedures in 'Little Dorrit'

Abstract

In Little Dorrit, the hero, after many years in China, feels dispirited and disaffected upon his arrival in London. Although at first the reader might want to ascribe his alienation to a phenomenon now called 'culture shock', Dickens makes it clear that Arthur's estrangement has a less immediate cause in the repressions of his childhood. Speaking in propria persona, though half locating the commentary in Clennam's own consciousness, he presents the city as Sabbatarianism writ large: 'It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again.1