Today I finished reading Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. For those of you who are keeping track (hi Mom!) that is indeed two Dickens novels within a month. A new record for me, although not something I will ever attempt again. Why? Because there are too many similarities between his ’sombre novels’, as the prologue so charmingly calls them, and Little Dorrit has a plot with all the staples: suppressed inheritence, wicked aunties, abduction of bastard children, spells in prison, debts, ruin, soot, and mysterious unexplained happenings – spontanious human combustion in Bleak House, the sudden collapse of a building in Dorrit. After a few chapters, one gets confused, and starts looking for the Jarndyces.

Little Dorrit herself is also not the greatest heroine, and I doubt I would have made it through the novel if it was all about her gentleness, self-sacrifice, ‘quiet helpful ways’, etc. Throughout the book, she is stepped on by almost every other character, and by the end one is left wanting to shake some sense into the poor girl: she gets to marry the hero, sure, but is he worth it? Also, will she be required to cheerfully mend his socks and serve his meals for the next forty years?

Luckily we also have Little John Chivery, (who is constantly composing his own epitaph) Flora Fitching, (who speaks in the most amazing pauseless paragraphs I have ever seen in my life) Pancks the Tugboat, dashing young Ferdinand Barnacle (why read Dickens? For the names!), Mrs General, (a woman of vast deportment) Mr. Meagles the practical man, and scary Mr. Fitchwitch. They act like yeast on the Dorrit morality, and fluff the story up into good Victorian entertainment.

So even if the hero is dull and a little on the foolish side, and the heroine is highly slappable, it’s still a great novel. What can I say? Dickens was a genius. Even when I want to dislike him, like after a long chapter on how Little Dorrit tenderly nurses Arthur Clennam back to health as he is dying in Marshalsea Jail, he will go and do something like cause the Clennam house to collapse into an urban sinkhole, right in the next paragraph. And how is a person supposed to stop reading after that?

In the future, though, I am going to hold myself to one Dickens novel per year. The Circumulocation Office chapters alone are going to be giving me bad dreams for weeks.