I've been reading a Dickens novel over winter break every year for a few years now, working my way through the ones I haven't read in order of descending popularity on LibraryThing. I think I have five to go, so I look forward to 2027. This winter break, I was a bit behind in my reading due to prioritizing 2021 Hugo finalists, which meant that I didn't start this book until January... and it took me two whole months to read!
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| Originally published: 1855-57 Acquired: December 2021 Read: March 2022 |
This is a shame, because it starts out pretty good. "Little Dorrit" is really Amy, a girl born in debtors' prison where her father has languished for over twenty years; one could bring one's wife and children along if one desired. All the stuff about how Dorrit came to the prison, and his life there, and Amy's life there, is fantastic stuff, that usual Dickens mixture of the comic and the real. Meanwhile, a man named Arthur Clennam has come home after decades overseas, now that his father is dead, and he soon meets Little Dorrit and aims to help her. His visit to the Circumlocution Office, a government department devoted to stopping the government from doing anything effective, is Dickens at his savage and comic best.
The problem is, every time the narrative moves away from Little Dorrit, it becomes bogged down in some of the dullest characters I can ever remember from a Dickens novel. Who cares about the Meagles or all the rest of them? And yet the novel just goes on and on and on.
Little Dorrit herself is one of Dickens's best psychological portraits: the chapter about her after her family has finally been released from prison and achieved riches once more is utterly devastating. Yet the novel keeps going and going after that point for hundreds of more pages, mostly neglecting its title character, and I lost all interest, even in characters like Clennam who had initially held my attention.
I am wondering if descending popularity order is a mistake, as it means I am going from the good ones to the less good ones!
(This is my first new-look Penguin Classic. Just different enough to make the whole redesign seem pointless, and now my Penguin Classics don't all match anymore.)
I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: The Old Curiosity Shop
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