The Sun.
London, England, 1856-05-30 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Little Dorrit. No. VI. By Charles Dick.ens.

It is considered about the loftiest manifestation
of genius "to create a soul under the ribs of
Death." Charles Dickens is doing more than this
by means of Little Dorrit, in the instance of the
old debtor's prison of the Marshalsea. That melan•
choly abode of the insolvent has long years ago
been swept out of existence. The mere skeleton
of it no longer survives, as in the instance of
" The Fleet," in Farringdon-street--still a vacant
site, like the empty socket of an eye gouged out of
the forehead of some great brick and mortar
Polyphemus. The Marshalsea, both as a struts
altogether dia.
ture and as an institution,
appeared. It has disappeared from London as
entirely as the Bastile from Paris or the
Tolloooth from Edinburgh. One can scarcely
say now with any degree of certainty whereabouts
it really stood in the old times, when heads were
left to rot above Temple-bar, and debtors in the
holes and ;:coniers of the Fleet aforesaid, and of
this miserable, vanished Marshalsea. To borrow
an apposite illustration from Mr. Dickens himself,
elsewhere than in Little Dorrit, we may compare
our bewilderment, on endeavouring to point out
the place where the Marshalsea Prison really stood,
with that of Kit Nubbles in the " Old Curiosity
Shop," when he tried to puzzle out the locality of
the house of " good Miss Nell" for the instruction,
upon that interesting paint, of his growing family
of little children. "He sometimes took them to

the street where she had lived," says the veracious

chronicler of that most exquisite of stories ; " but
new improvements had altered it so much it was
not like the same. The old house had been long
:tgo pulled down, and a fine broad road was in its
place. At first he would draw with his stick a
square upon the ground to show them where it
used to stand. But he soon became uncertain of
the spot, and would only say it was thereabouts,
.he thought, and that these changes were confusing."
Ind so with the old debtors' prison "on the left
hand side of the way going southward, a few doors
short of the Church of St. George in the borough
of Southwark." It has vanished long ago—its very
:Imes and dust (the crumbling walls and rafters),
carted away somewhere with other rubbish, after
which we should like to send a vast deal more still
disfiguring the highways and byeways of our
metropolis. Yet, gone in fact, it is revived in fic-
tion—this melancholy old Marshalsea. It rises

up again, exhalation-like, after the manner of
Pandemonium—in the magical pages of Little
Dorrit, our great novelist peopling the old place
tnew with all but living and breathing creations,
with a throng of original and wonderfully real
eharacters. Amy, the Child of the Marshalsea, in
',tiler words, dear Little Dorrit herself I William
Dorrit, her father, and metaphorically also the
rather of the Marshalsea I Frederick, her uncle,
,Tith his screw of snuff and his dirty old clarionet

rip, her brother, in his green Newmarket coat,.
swaggering in the skittle-ground ! Fanny, her
iister, opera dancing with such a very high sense
of family dignity ! Chivery, the turnkey, and all
k.he rest of the motley population ! It is wonderful,
the vividness with which the place and the people
are conjured up by the wizard pen of the romancist.
But how marvellously he describes everything he
puts his hand to—this Hogarth among novelists.
The stage door of the Surrey-side Theatre, for ex-
ample—" a furtilre sort of door, with a curious up-
q) I-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed
,f itself and to be hiding in an alley I" Or the
impse behind the scenes, again, with "such a con-
, losion of unaccountable shapes of beams, bulk-
' )eads, brick-walls, ropes, and rollers, and such a
;nixing of gaslight and daylight, that one seemed
io have got on the wrong side of the pattern
f the universe I" Instance, too, in another way
I,lle peep at the contents of the dirty little eating-
iiouse shop-window, with "a stuffed fillet of veal
is rapid cut, a ham iu a perspiration with the pace
was going at, a shallow tank of baked potatoes
glued together by their own richness, an unctuous
niece of beef, and blisterous Yorkshire pudding,"
to crown all, "a roast leg of pork bursting in.
to tears of sage and onion !" What picture that
is, moreover, in a different way, of the Parrot who
" as he tore at a clawfull of biscuit and spat it out,
seemed to mock the bystanders with a pompous
lance of his body without moving his feet,
And suddenly turned himself up side down and
railed himself all over the .outside of his golden
zap with the aid of his cruel beak and his
lack tongue." What can be finer in its way
Aideed than the whole description of the contents
,f Mr. Merdle's house, (including the parrot)
'-ith the account of the powdered footmen
waiting upon the grand dinner party. "Powder!"
xclamis our author, "There was so much powder
ti waiting, that it flavoure 1 the dinner. Pulver-
ous particles got into the dishes, awl Society's meats
;tad a seasoning of first-rate footmen." One of the
..:uests—" a countess secluded somewhere in the
(.;ore of au immense dress, to which she was in the
proportion of the heart to au "overgrown cabbage"
—is spoken of figuratively as The Dress---" the
dress went down the staircase like a richly-brocaded
Jack.in-the-Green, and nobody knew what sort of
small person carried it !" The hostess, Mrs.
Iferdle, in a similar mood, is spoken of after the
tame fashion figuratively (from her ample jewel-
covered bosom, with no heart in it, to speak of) as
—The Bosom ! But the grandest feature of the
whole description of this fashionable interior is the
Chief Butler. About whom we read that, after The
Bosom—" The Chief Butler was the most magni.
geent institution of the day. He was the stateliest
man in company. He did nothing, but he looked
on as few other men could have done. He was Mr.
Merdle's last gift to Society. Mr. Merdle didn't
want him, and was put out of countenance when
the great creature looked at him ; but ivappeasable
Society would have him—and had got him !" The
Bar, again, one of the male guests of the night is
admirable, with his "jury droop and persuasive
ve-glass !" But Sparkler, Mr. Merdle's step-son
(called several times by Mr. Dickens, through an
odd mistake of phrases, his, Mr. Merdle's, in other
words, in fact, Society's " son-in-law")—hare is ;