Within those walls
With Little Dorrit the BBC has dramatised a fable for our times. AS Byatt pays tribute to a terrifying, wonderful novel



Little Dorrit scared me terribly when I read it as a child. I had survived the scary bits of David Copperfield and even the appalling first scene of Great Expectations, which must be one of the most frightening moments in literature. But the terror of Little Dorrit was different. It is a book that encloses its reader in an unbearable, imprisoning world. It is about debt, and money - too little of it - too much of it. The first half is called "Poverty" and the second half is "Riches", and both are nasty and inhumane. Victorian novels are about money and as a child I was terrified that my parents might not have enough, that we might suddenly all find ourselves imprisoned in the Marshalsea. I was a logical child, and didn't see how debtors could ever find the money to pay off their debts, if they were locked in and couldn't work.

The terror was Dickens's own. In 1823, when he was 12, his father was taken into the Marshalsea, with his family, and the bright, ambitious boy was sent to earn a pittance in a boot-blacking factory. John Dickens was the model for both Mr Dorrit, the self-deceiving Father of the Marshalsea, and Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. Dickens recounts how when his father and he went into the prison they both wept very much and his father warned him that if a man had 20 pounds a year and spent 19 pounds, 19 shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched - an observation Dickens later gave to Mr Micawber. Little Dorrit, who spends her time in a prison in whose atmosphere her family is sunk, is Dickens himself. The horrified child in him drove his writing.

The Marshalsea prison was in Borough High Street in Dickens's time. It was closed in 1849. Dickens wrote Little Dorrit in the mid-1850s and set it back in the time when his father was imprisoned. It is part of a group of late novels - Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend - in which Dickens creates whole complicated interlinked models of society, from the aristocracy, through the bureaucrats and functionaries, to the very poor and the criminal. Bleak House begins with thick fog, which symbolises the obscure and deadening - indeed murderous - processes of the chancery law courts. The ruling metaphor of Our Mutual Friend is waste and detritus - the dirt and dead bodies that float down the corrupted Thames, the riches to be found in the great heaps of trash, ashes and dust. The extraordinary energy and brilliance with which Dickens describes slow suffocation and hopelessness is one of the paradoxical glories of English writing. The ruling metaphor of Little Dorrit is the prison. Mr Dorrit becomes very rich, but remains imprisoned in his mind. The malign Mrs Clennam is imprisoned by her religion and her past. Good men are inveigled into financial speculations and end up bankrupt and imprisoned.

Rereading the novel because of the current (excellent) television adaptation I was struck by how full of anger the book is. It is written as a polished attack on a society Dickens in many ways despaired of. That brilliant invention the Circumlocution Office was made up at a time when examinations were introduced for the Civil Service. Dickens felt that bureaucratic indolence and incompetence were responsible for the sufferings of British soldiers in the Crimean war. "This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen ... Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving - HOW NOT TO DO IT." (Meaning, in Dickens's time, how to avoid doing anything.)

The Circumlocution Office is inhabited by a family of Tite Barnacles and relations. There is also a world of rich society that centres on the financier, Mr Merdle, and a world of frivolous arty hangers-on (what Dickens called tuft-hunters) all of whom mingle. Mrs Merdle is a society hostess. Dickens turns her into an object by using her bosom to represent the whole of her:

"It was not a bosom to repose upon, but it was a capital bosom to hang jewels upon. Mr Merdle wanted something to hang jewels on, and he bought it for that purpose ... Like all his other speculations it was sound and successful. The jewels showed to the richest advantage. The bosom moving in Society with the jewels displayed upon it, attracted general admiration."

Merdle commits suicide - borrowing a penknife to do so, and specifying a dark handle - in a public warm bath. Dickens's remorseless rhetoric as he describes both the society whispers and gossip, and the real consequences when Merdle is found to be bankrupt, is too lengthy to quote well. "Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place for their repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by this mighty scoundrel ..." Dickens describes his ugly, naked corpse in the bath, with the reddened water running down the plughole. The whole world of speculation is "a new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts until it stopped over a certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared". That makes the financier the antichrist.

The BBC has dramatised a fable for our times, obsessed with bejewelled celebrities, as the fever drives the stock markets down, the Ministry of Defence bungles the supplies of British soldiers in the field, the National Health computer fails yet again, and our names and addresses are left for fraudsters in trains on abandoned hard discs. The dramatisation is more human than the terrible and wonderful novel - the actors are real people, so it has to be. The seedy feel of the Marshalsea is right - children played games in the real one, it was not foul in the way Newgate was. The serial will be longer than Bleak House was, and the condensation into episodes works well. Dickens wrote and published in episodes. I wait eagerly for Merdle to appear.



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