SOURCE: Edgecomb, Rodney Stenning. “The Displacements of Little Dorrit.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96, no. 3 (July 1997): 369-84.

In the following essay, Edgecomb explores Dickens's characterization of the gentility as idle and useless.

In the second book of Little Dorrit, Fanny and William Dorrit reproach Amy for relying insufficiently on servants, badge of their recovered gentility:

[“]Therefore, your not exposing yourself to the remarks of our attendants, by appearing to have at any time dispensed with their services and performed them for yourself, is—ha—highly important.”

“Why, who can doubt it?” cried Miss Fanny. “It's the essence of everything.”¹

I shall take Fanny's statement, a function (in context) of her intemperate speech and distorted values, as an epigraph for this essay and argue that displaced performance, while it might not represent “the essence of everything,” does constitute an important theme of the novel. Fanny has been complaining...