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Critical Essay by Laura Peters
SOURCE: Peters, Laura. “The Histories of Two Self-Tormentors: Orphans and Power in Little Dorrit.” The Dickensian 91, no. 3 (winter 1995): 187-96.
In the following essay, Peters proposes that orphans and criminals are represented in Victorian fictional discourse in the same way; she examines two orphans in Little Dorrit to illustrate her point.
To make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognised as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.1
The prison, both literal and metaphorical, in Little Dorrit has received a considerable amount of critical attention in the pioneering work of Philip Collins's Dickens and Crime, Lionel Trilling's metaphorical probing in The Opposing Self,2 and more recently in Natalie McKnight's book Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens. However, apart from McKnight's book3 there has...
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This section contains 5,044 words (approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page) |
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