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.