The Sun.
London, England, 1856-09-15 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Little Dorrit. No. X. By Charles Dickens.
" Poverty" is over—the poverty of the Dorrits
of the Marshalsea ! No. X. has duly brought us,
as we anticipated, to the end of Book I.—half of
the new story by Boz being thus already cam-
pleted. Another instalment will, of course, b
the second moiety—" Riches "—the riches of the
Dorrits—no longer the Dorrits of the Marshalsea !
For old Mr. Do-rrit is " out of it" at last, as en-
tirely as Tip, and Fanny, and Frederick. He not
only comes out of a prison, but comes into a fortune
—through the benign agency of Pancks the Tug,
Pancks the Grubber, Pancks the Gipsy (in truth)
" Fortune"-telling ! How all tbis comes to pass is
told very excitingly by means of a chapter expres-
' siyely entitled—" What was behind Mr. Pancks on
Little Dorrit's hand." William Dorrit, the snivel-
ling,degraded, despicable Father of the Marshalsea,
turning out to he heir-at-law to a great estate—an
estate showering the glory of sudden wealth upon
the receiver of dirty douceurs of silver and halfpence
under the title of " testimonials"—upon the vul-
gar prig of a son with a respectability some-
thing between that of a billiard.-marker and that
of a stable-hanger-on—upon the consequential
little hoity-toity ballet-dancer at a low suburban
theatre—upon the half-comatose clarioaet-player,
whose conversational powers are principally re-
stricted to the utterance of " Yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes"—and, last of all, upon poor dear Little Amy
Dorrit herself, the needle-plying Child of the Mar-
shalsea. The chief interest of the revelation made
first of all by Pancks, and afterwards by Clennam,
in this same wonder-working chapter, lies in the
disclosure of the great news in turn to Little Dorrit
and to her Father. Flora (relict of Mr. F.) shining
forth incidentally in this portion of the narrative,
more than ever good natured, and, be it said, also
more than ever ridiculous. The subsequent
chapter, with which the First Book terminates,
places upon record the manner in which the
Marshalsea becomes an Orphan. William Dorrit
(how is it that he comes to be mentioned at page
315 as "Edward Dorrit, Esquire ?") and his Fa-
mily driving away from the Debtors' Prison, in
which the head of the house has teen incarcerated
for nearly a quarter of a century—driving away
from it, not in a prison-van, or a hack cab, or a
job-fly, or anything of that sordid kind, but in a
grand carriage, the bran new carriage of a bran
new gentleman ! The task now devolving upon
Mr. Dickens in the sequel of his story appears to
us one of extraordinary difficulty, one sufficient to
tax. to the uttermost the powers of our great no-
velist. He will have to define with the touch of
a master-hand the change effected upon the
various members of the Dorrit Family by
this abrupt and astounding transition from
Poverty to Riches. The influence of the change
we anticipate, will render Amy more than ever
loveable, and her relations more than ever disgust-
ing, with the single exception, perhaps, of
that orchestral Life-in-Death, the clarionet-player,
Frederick. Besides the two chapters already here
particularised, the two chapters having such extra-
ordinary influence upon the fortunes both of the
Dorrits and of the Marshalsea, there are two other
chapters affecting the minor personages of the tale,
lending their charm to the pr-sent September in-
stalment. One defining " Mrs. Merdle's Com-
plaint"—the other netting together a whole "Shoal
of Barnacles." In the former we learn the par-
ticulars of a sort of a confidential interview be-
tween Mrs. Gowan and Mrs. Merdle—in reference
to the relation between whom, as types of two
contrasting classes, it is remarked—" True,
the Hampton Court Bohemians, without
exception, turned up their noses at Merdle as an
upstart ; but they turned them down again by
falling flat on their faces to worship his wealth"—
whereunto is added " in which compensating ad-
justment of their noses they were pretty much like
Treasury, Bar, and Bishop, and all the rest of
them." Mrs. Gowan tapping her chin (" it was
ou the way to being a double chin," says Boz very
ludicrously, "might be called a chin and a-half at
present") submits her case to the judgment of Mrs.
Merdlo ; the latter in the name of Society vouch-
safing in return her opinion—an opinion bolstered
up on either hand by the Bosom and the Parrot !
Mr. Merdle is capital : looking a little common, in
spite of his enormous wealth—" rather as if, in the
course of his vast transactions, he had accidentally
made an interchange of heads with some inferior
spirit." Mr. Sparkler, his step-son, is still more
capital even than the capitalist—" anxiously feeling
his shirt collar as if it were his pulse, and he were
hypochondriacal." As to the " Shoal of Barnacles"
described immediately afterwards, they are inimi-
tably hit off—every man Jack of them—a grea.t man y
man-Jacks of them, of course, being Jacks-in-office!
Barnacles they are of all kinds and species, but
still to the last, though numerous and various, of
their kind and species—representing only a frac-
tional portion of the gigantic aggregate of Barna-
cles—Barnacles scattered with their despatch-
boxes [Why will Mr. Dickens always spell
Despatch with an i, after the stereotyped etymo-,
logical blunder of the weekly newspaper so called ?]
—all over the world—" despatch-boxing the
compass ?" William Barnacle ; Tite Barnacle ;
Barnacle Junior, with his eyeglass and his
Tonnage, and his ever-lively dread about
Arthur Clennam wanting to know you know ;
the engaging young Barnacle ; Lord Decimus Tite
Barnacle, and the rest of them, the whole "shoal"
here alluded to, being gathered together to cele-
brate the nuptials of Pet and Harry Gowan at Mr.
Meagles's pretty little villa-home down at Twick-
enham. An occasion like so many others where
sundry aspiring individuals " buttered the Barna-
cles on all sorts of toasts." Barnacles, great and
small, come in for the undiscriminating sarcasms
of the arch-foe of the whole joint tribes of Bar-
nacles and Stiltstalkings. Mr. Dickens, indulging
in a cruel reference to the three expensive Miss
Tite Barnacles, double loaded with accomplish-
ments and ready to go off, and yet not going off
with the sharpness of flash and bang that might
have been expected, but rather hanging fire!
And holding up for general contemplation,
in the midst of inextinguishable laughter, the
oratorical powers of Decimus Tite Barnacle,
thus ludicrously celebrated in one stupendous
sentence. He (Lord Decimus) " trotting with
the complacency of an idiotic elephant among
howling labyrinths of sentences, which he seemed
to take for high roads, and never so much as wanted
to get out of !" With which delicious morceaux
of irony we will olose our comments upon this
number of Little Dorrit, a number illustrated as
usual by Phiz, with a pencil of slovenly ability—
but for once, thank Heaven, without ono of his
blotchy sketches of " Darkness visible."

Miscellanies. Vol. M. By W. M. Thackeray.
Another volume of Mr. Thackerey's delightful
'' Miscellanies " reproduces for us, in a revised
form, several of those earlier productions of his
which won him so much praise from the discern-
ing, under the pseudonym of M. A. Titmarsh. In
this manner we are enabled to peruse once more
"The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon," by the light
of a great literary fame, second only to the two
most illustrious of living novelists. The names of
Dickens and Lytton being followed in due order
nowadays by that of Thackeray, the glorious writer
of Vanity Pair and The Newcomes—to say nothing
of the ever-charming memorials of Colonel Esmond,
or of the altogether inimitable Lectures on English
Humorists. In this great living author—the con-
temporary of l3ulwer, and Boz, and Macaulay,
and Tennyson—immortal among our writers of
fiction as the creator of Becky Sharp, and honest
Dobbin, and noble-hearted Thomas Newcome, and
delectable M. de Florae, and capital old tufthunt-
ing Major Pendenuis, and loveable Gorge War-
rington, and the infamous Marquis of Steyne, and
the hardly less execrable Dowager Lady Kew, and
beautiful Ethel, and handsome Clive, and that
most charming of couples, Arthur and Laura Pen-
dennis—in the creation of these and other scarcely
less real "ideal" characters, we recognise one rather
more important than a pleasant contributor to.
Punch and Fraser. Somebody more welcome to be-
hold than the double of "Jeamos," or the alter ego
of " P'liceman X.," or Charles Yellowplush, or
Michael Angelo Titmarsh, or Fitzboodle, or
the Snob of " Snobs," or the Bashi-bazouk
among " Bashi-bazouks," or the "Fat Con-
tributor" to the " London Charivari," or
any other among those not easily numerable moms
de plume, by which William Thackeray first won
his way to an immense popularity and a splendid
reputation. Here is a fictionist rather more notable
than all this—a Great Author, and not merely a
successful feuilletonist or a light and sparkling
magazine-writer 1 The queer, comical, capital
masks have dropped off one after another, and at
last we have before the world, in his own proper
person, a humorist and satirist whose name will
henceforth rank with those of Richardson. Fielding,
Siiiollett, Swift, Lytton, Dickens, among the glories
of our national literature ! As the earlier writ-
ings of W. M. Thackeray these facetious "Miscel-
laMes" are right welcome every one of them,
even the most fugitive and ephemeral, even " Re-
becca and Rowena." And bearing yet vividly in
remembrance his noble masterpiece—" The New-
comes," we turn over with renewed zest the. re-
cords penned by the same hand in a more negligent
mood of the "Legend of the Rhine," of the
" Little Dinner at Timininc;s," and of " The Bed-
ford-row Conspiracy." As we have already
turned over curiously and laughingly (in vols. i.
and ii.) the " Ballads," the " Book of Snobs," the
‘• Fatal Boots," " Cox's Diary," the " Yellow-plus%
Memoirs," " Jeames's Diary," " Travels in Lon-
don," "Novels by Eminent Hands," "Character
Sketches," and Last, but not lout in their own oz-

travagant way, the "Tremendous Adventures o
Major Galiagan." Besides all wnich, • however,
—" there be" pippins and cheese to come
yet"—ballads, verses, tales, squibs, burlesque and
satiric pasquinades, contributed during the last ten
years with a lavish and industrious hand to all
kinds of periodicals. Let us hope that these may
not fail to include among their nunilr3r,7together
with what Mr. Thackeray has written for example
in Punch, in the Times, in Fraser, and in House-
hold Words, such sparkling and, in their way, alto-
gether matchless criticisms as that delicious tri-
bute of admiration (in the Quarterly) to John
Leech's " Pictures of Life and Character." Other-
wise the collection will remain after all signally
incomplete. Otherwise there will bo something
still a-wanting even in Thackeray's "Miscellanies."

Oxford and Cambrid9:c.—Aniong a number of
meritorious contributions may be noticed a pleasing
paper on that fine old poet " Robert Herrick"
and a laudatory notice of " Alexander Smith," of
whom, after a third perusal, it is said, "if his
future performance does not belie his youthful
promise, he may look to stand in the first rank of
English poets, or, at the least, below only the
very greatest."