Preface

PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION

I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of

two years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not

leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on

its being read as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to

suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous

attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory

publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be

looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished.

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the

Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the

common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention

the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good

manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at

Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant

conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the

Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of

one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead

anything in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design

will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious

design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been

brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public

examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But, I

submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these

counts, if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority)

that nothing like them was ever known in this land.

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether

or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I

did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when

I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned

here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up

every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a

certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to

'Marshalsea Place:' the houses in which I recognised, not only as

the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms

that arose in my mind's-eye when I became Little Dorrit's

biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the

largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent

explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly

correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came

by his information, I don't know; he was a quarter of a century too

young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the

window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her

father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger

who tenanted that apartment at present? He said, 'Tom Pythick.'

I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, 'Joe Pythick's

uncle.'

A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used

to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except

for ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning

out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on

the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its

narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at

all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free;

will look upon rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand

among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years.

In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so

many readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit,

I have still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the

affection and confidence that have grown up between us, I add to

this Preface, as I added to that, May we meet again!

London

May 1857

Read next: BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY#CHAPTER 1 Sun and Shadow


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