osition
in the book. The main interest of it circles round the place that had
at one time been almost a home to Dickens. Again he drew upon his
earlier experiences. We are once more introduced into a debtors'
prison. Little Dorrit is the child of the Marshalsea, born and bred
within its walls, the sole living thing about the place on which its
taint does not fall. Her worthless brother, her sister, her
father--who is not only her father, but the "father of the
Marshalsea"--the prison blight is on all three. Her father especially
is a piece of admirable character-drawing. Dickens has often been
accused of only catching the surface peculiarities of his personages,
their outward tricks, and obvious habits of speech and of mind. Such a
study as Mr. Dorrit would alone be sufficient to rebut the charge. No
novelist specially famed for dissecting character to its innermost
recesses could exhibit a finer piece of mental analysis. We follow the
poor weak creature's deterioration from the time when the helpless
muddle in his affairs brings him into durance. We note how his
sneaking pride seems to feed even on the garbage of his degradation.
We see how little inward change there is in the man himself when there
comes a transformation scene in his fortunes, and he leaves the
Marshalsea wealthy and prosperous. It is all thoroughly worked out,
perfect, a piece of really great art. No wonder that Mr. Clennam
pities the child of such a father; indeed, considering what a really
admirable woman she is, one only wonders that his pity does not sooner
turn to love.

"Little Dorrit" ran its course from December, 1855, to June, 1857, and
within that space of time there occurred two or three incidents in
Dickens' career which should not pass unnoticed. At the first of these
dates he was in Paris, where he remained till the middle of May, 1856,
greatly feted by the French world of letters and art; dining hither
and thither; now enjoying an Arabian Nights sort of banquet given by
Emile de Girardin, the popular journalist; now meeting George Sand,
the great novelist, whom he describes as "just the sort of woman in
appearance whom you might suppose to be the queen's monthly
nurse--chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed;" then studying French
art, and contrasting it with English art, somewhat to the disadvantage
of the latter; anon superintending the translation of his works into
French, and working hard at "Little Dorrit;" and all the while
frequ