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

LITERATURE.

Little Dorrit. No. Vt. By Charles Dickens.
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 Marshaltea.. That melan-
choly abode of - the ihsolvent • has long years ago
been swept out of existence. The mere skeleton
of it no longer' surVivesa. as in 'the instance of
The Fleet," in Farringclon-street----still a vacant
site, like the empty socket of.an eye gouged out of
the 'forehead ofa some great brick and mortar
Polyphemus. The Marshalsea,, both as a strut:-
e and as an institution, has altogether dis-
appeared. It has disappeared from London as
entirely as the, • Bastile from Paris or the
Tollsooth from Edinburgh. One can scarcely
*ay now with any degree of certainty whereabouts
.it really stood in the old times, -whin heads were
left to rot aboVe Temple-bara and debtors in the
holes and corners 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 Nubblesin the "Old Curiosity
Shop,".when he tried to puzzle out the locality of
the house of "good-Alia-Mir' for the instruction,
upon that interesting point, of his growing family
(AIM° 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 eo much it was
not like the same.. The old house had been long
ago 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 .theta 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."
And 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
ot Southwark." It has vanished long ago—its very
bones 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
Paudemonitun—in the magical pages of Little
Dorrit, our great novelist peopling the old place
anew with all but living and breathing creations,
with a throng of original and wonderfully real
characters. rimy' the Child of the Marshalsea, in
other words, dear Little Dorrit herself I William
"Dorrit, her father, and metaphorically also the
Father of the Metal:halt:eel...Frederick, her uncle,
arith his screw of snuff and his dirty old clarionet I
Tip, her brother, in his green Newmarket coat,
swaggering in the skittle-ground ! Fanny, her
,ister, opera dancing with such a very high sense
family dignity ! t'Ciiivery, the turnkey, and all
the rest of the motley population ! It is Wonderful,
-the vividness- with which the place and the-people
are eoujured up by the wizard pen of the romauclit.
But how marvellously he describes everything he
puts hi; hand to—this Hogarth among novelists.
elie stage door of the Surrey-side Theatre, for ex-
Atople--" a furtive sort of door, with a curious up-
all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed
f itself and to be in an alley 1". Or the
oinipse behind the scenes, again, with'"such a con-
osion of unaccountable shapes of beams, bulk-
'leads, brick-walls, ropes, and rollers, and such a
,nixing of gaslight and daylight, that one seemed
have got 04 the wrong side of the pattern
ti the universe !" Instance, too, in anotnei way
lie peep at the contents of the dirty little eating-
louse shop-window, with "a stuffed fillet of veal
n rapid cut, a ham iu a perspiration with the pace
t was-going at, a shallow tank of baked potatoes
glued together by their own richness, an unctuous
piece of beef, and blisterous Yorkshire pudding,"
and, to ci Own sll, "a roast leg of pork bursting in-
o tears of 'sage. and 011404 I" What picture that
,s, 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
datice of his body without —moving .his feet,
And 'suddenly turned himself up side down and
,trailed himself,all over the outside of his golden
cage with the aid of his cruel beak and his
olauk tongue." What can be finer in its way
indeed than the whole description of the contents
ot Mr. Merdle's house, (iuciuding the parrot)
with the account of the powdered footmen
-waining upon the grand dinner party. "Powder!"
,:aclaiias- our author, "There was so much powder
in waiting, that it flavoured, the dinner. Pulver-
oui particles got into the dishes,- and Society's meats
had a seasoning of first-rate footmen." Oue of the
guests—"a countess secluded sucnewhere in the
core of an immense dress, to which she was in the
proportion of the heart to an " overgrown caboage"
—is spoken of 'figuratively as The Dress--" the
i ress went down the staircase like a richly-brocaded
Jack-in-the-Green, and nobody knew what sort of
small person carried it 1" The hostess, Mrs.
Merdle, in a similar mood, is spoken of after the
,Nine fashion figuratively (from her ample jeWel-
;overed Bosom, with no heart in it, to speak of) as
--The Bosom ! But the grandest feature of the
a'ole description of this fashionable interior is the
aJnief 'Butler. About whom we read that, after The
Bosom—" The Chief Butler was the most magni.
icent institution of the day. was the stateliest
man iu 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 oat_
_of countenance when
the great creature looked at him ; but ivappeasable
Society would haite himand had got him I" The
Bar, again, one ot the male guests of the night is
admirable, with his "jury droop and persuasive
eye 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, iu fact, Society's " son-in-law")—here is :

SPARKLER.
" He was of a chuckle-headed high-shouldered make,
with a general appearance of being, not so much a young
man as a swelled boy. He had given so few signs of
reason, that a byeword went among his companions
that his brain had been frozen up in a mighty frost
whiok prevailed at St. John's, New Brunswick, at
the period of his birth there, and had never thawed
from that h(lir. Another byeword representeChimi as
having in his infancy, tnrough the negligence. of a
nurse, fallen out of a high window on his headr. which
had been heard by responsible witnesses to orack. It
is probable that both of these representations were of
ex post facto origin ; the young gentletnan (whose ex-
nressive name was Sparkler) being monomaniacal in of-
fering marriage to all LlVtll tier of undesirable young ladies,
remarking of every successive young lady tn_whom
h• tendered a matrimonial. proposal that- she; was 'a
'loosed fine gal—well educated too—with no biggodd
nonsense about her."

here, too, no less figuratively described than The
Dress and The Bosom, are—

MR. MERDLVS GIIESTS.
" Everybody knows how like the street, the two
dinner-rows of people who take their stand by the street
will be. The expressionless-uniform twenty houses, all
to'be knocked at and rung at in the same form, all ap-
proachable by the same dull steps, all fended off by the
same pattern of railing, all with the same impracticable
fire-escapes, the same inconvenient fixtures in their
heads, and everything without exception to be taken at
a high valuation—who has not•dined with these ? The
house so drearily out of repair, the occasional bow-
wiudow, the stuccoed house, the newly-fronted house,
the corner house with nothing but angular rooms, the
house with the blinds always down, the house with the
quarter of Idea, and found nobody at
i,atchment alca,ys up, the house where the collector has
has not dined with these?. The house that
,:aoliloeddyfuvrr
home-wholn ieake, and is to be had a bargain-_—who does
~ot know her ? The showy house that was taken for
life by the di appointed gentleman, and which doesn't
•uit him at ali—whu is unacquainted with that haunted
habitation ?"

As a contrast to all which fashionable ,nothings,
what a description that is of the poor Clariouet
Player, Frederick Dorrit, drawn in his poor den
the orchestra; where, although ," mugged at" by
m the low.coedian itt his richest way fifty times for
wager, he. shows 110 trace of consciousness !
Poor Uncle Frederick, about whom the stage
carpenters had a joke to the effect -that
"'he was dead without his being. aware of it"--and
who is suppose,' by the frequenters of. the pit "to
pass his whole life, night and day and Sunday and
all, in the orchestra 1' Something should be said
before closing our notice of this last number of
• tittle: Dorrit about Little Dorrit's lover, John
Chivery, who is discovered pining among the damp
linen hung out to dry in the backyard, as though
it (the linen) "was groves !" And about the cir-
cumstantial account of his iil-starred wooing& given
ale afternoon to Arthur C:ounain by Mrs. Chivery,
John's mother, whose peculiar power of construc-
tion in her sentences—together with its circum-
stantiality and repetition have upon her hearer's
mind we are told "an effect in the nature of an
'affidavit I" The sixth number closes and with it
the twenty-second chapter, leaving Arthur puzzled
as to whether Little Dorrit really is after all in
love, and it so—with wham ? "Thereby hangs a
tale "—or rather upon it depends the interest of
the whole story of, Little Dorrit.

PALMER IN STAFFORD Geor,.—:Since his arrival at
Stafford the culprit has been .taciturn, but his manner
does nut indicate any appearance of his being thjected.
The day fixed for big execution is Saturday, the 14th
of June.