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A critique of capitalism, Little Dorritt could not be more relevant
Sebastian Shakespeare21 Oct 2008
George Bernard Shaw declared Little Dorrit "a more seditious book than Das Kapital"; George Orwell said that "in Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached". This Sunday the BBC kicks off its 14-part adaptation of the Charles Dickens story adapted for the screen by Andrew Davies.
The story could not be more relevant to our troubled times. It is an unforgiving critique of capitalism and is all about money, debt and bankruptcy, and sudden reversals of fortune (from rags to riches and vice versa). It was last adapted for the screen in 1988, starring Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi, appropriately just a few months after another major financial crisis, Black Monday of 1987.
The novel is divided into two books - Poverty and Riches - and that is the story in a nutshell. Little Dorrit looks after her father, William, who has been incarcerated in the debtors' prison of Marshalsea since before her birth. It is not just a story about the poverty trap but is a satire on the shortcomings of government and the society of the day. Dickens's own preface to the book explained how it was written during the culpably mismanaged Crimean War and a period of banking scandals (sound familiar?). Mr Merdles, a fraudulent banker whom society lionises as a repository of rock-solid investments, is a recognisable predecessor of many of today's fat cats.
The Treasury Office is reincarnated as the Circumlocution Office, with incompetent and obstructive officials as typified by Mr Barnacle. It is a place of endless bureaucractic confusion, where forms need to be filled in to request permission to fill in more forms. The Office's raison d'être is to show how not to do it.
But most of Dickens's fury was focused on the debtors' prisons, in which people who owed money were imprisoned until they repaid their debts. It was a pernicious Catch-22 - how could they pay off debt if they were unable to work?
Dickens was writing from personal experience. His father John was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea in 1824 when Dickens was just 12 years old. It was one of his worst childhood memories, which scarred him for life.
Orwell noted how Dickens managed to attack the government "without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself".
The reason for this, he speculated, was that Dickens was essentially a moral writer who believed that human nature, rather than any government institution, was ultimately to blame.
No doubt Dickens would have endorsed Gordon Brown's call for an end to "the age of irresponsibility": we are all at fault.
