Little Dorrit - Page 2/462

I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two

years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its

merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read

as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have

held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can

have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable

to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and

with the pattern finished.

If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the

Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the

common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the

unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the

days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might

make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I

would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the

times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally

laudable enterprises.

If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the

preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good

and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence

that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of

the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But,

I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts,

if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing

like them was ever known in this land. Some of my readers may have an

interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea

Prison are yet standing.

I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this

present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard,

often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then

almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however,

down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to

'Marshalsea Place:' the houses in which I recognised, not only as the

great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose

in my mind's-eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. The smallest

boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered

a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old

uses, and was very nearly correct.