SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. “Guilt, Authority, and the Shadows of Little Dorrit.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34, no. 1 (June 1979): 20-40.

In the following essay, Showalter characterizes the shadow motif in Little Dorrit as emblematic of the spiritual darkness of Victorian society.

As J. Hillis Miller has observed, “shadow” is the “most frequently recurring” of certain key words in Little Dorrit, a term which links “physical imprisonment and imprisoning states of soul”:

It is used most obviously to express the literal shadow of the Marshalsea, but it appears, often metaphorically, in connection with almost all the characters and eventually we understand that the real shadow here is “a deeper shadow than the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall” (II, 19), and that to be “shadowed” by some sadness or blindness or delusion or deliberate choice of the worse rather than the better course is the universal condition of all the dwellers in this prison of...