Little Dorrit is an extremely complex and puzzling book. In the past, critics have been satisfied to write it off as merely uneven or disunified. John Forster, Dickens’s close friend and ardent admirer, was among the first to make the criticism that it was lacking in unity. “The defect in the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it. ... Some of the most deeply-considered things that occur in it have really little to do with the plot itself. ” 1 In more recent times, Percy Lubbock has made much the same comment: "His [Dickens] incurable love of labyrinthine mystification, when it really ran away with him, certainly defeated all precautions; not even old Dorrit’s Marshalsea, not even Flora and Mr. F’s Aunt, can do anything to carry off the story of the Clennams. ... It is strange that he should have known how to invent such a scene, and then have found no better drama to enact on it — strange and always stranger, with every re-reading.” Whether it was really an “incurable love of labyrinthine mysti­fication” or an actual lack of interest in plot that led Dickens to invent the complexities that baffle and annoy the modern reader, is a matter not susceptible of proof. It is my opinion that it was the latter - that Dickens devised his intrigues mainly to hold the interest of his readers from one monthly instalment to the next. But what­ever the explanation may be, the fact remains that the story of the Clennams, ” to which Mr. Lubbock objects, contains the core of the book.
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