“For not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love.” ~ Charles Dickens
In the BBC 2008 Mini Series – Little Dorrit – Arthur Clennam’s “mother” never lets him see his beautiful biological mother, who dies of grief from being separated from her son. That is the “secret” revealed near the end of this excellent series. It is easy to note early on how cold, cruel and dismissive the woman that Arthur thinks of as “his mother” is towards him.
There is so much that could be said and I found tons of perspectives and essays about Dickens and orphans with a quick Google search. Charles Dickens’ oldest son, Charley, once wrote that “the children of his brain were much more real to him at times than we were.” He really wasn’t a sterling character in his own life. After 10 children and a series of post-partum depressions, his wife Catherine had grown fat, tired, and dull. He met a young actress named Ellen Ternan, a girl the same age as his daughter, Kate. It is said that they had a son who died in infancy. Dickens’s children may have disappointed him, but he almost always got what he wanted. When he died, Kate joined her siblings in summoning Ellen Ternan to his deathbed.
Dickens involvement with the imaginative and emotional implications of orphanhood and of the horror of abandonment is inscribed in Dickens’s fiction. All the forms that give shape to the self – status, work, citizenship, marriage, parenthood, property – are explored from the subjective vantage point of what may be termed the orphan imagination. Dickens was relentless in critiquing child labor, both in legal and criminal enterprises, and exposing the hypocrisy of a society that allows children to live on the streets. In a Dickens novel, orphans, women, and the mentally disabled repeatedly suffer.
In Dickens’ 11th novel, Little Dorrit, he tells the story of a little girl, Amy Dorrit, who is raised in a debtors’ prison, where she spends much of her life. Yet she develops into a capable and caring person. She works as a seamstress for a family whose son, Arthur, falls in love with her. With time, the Dorrits prosper and Arthur falls into debt. Later, it is revealed that Arthur’s “supposed” mother has been cheating him and the Dorrits.
High mortality rates made orphans commonplace during that time in England. Dickens tendency to obsessively include orphaned children throughout his literature. Little Dorrit is capable of standing up for herself and for what she believes is right and what is wrong. In the end Mrs. Clennam is forced to reveal that Arthur is not really her son and that she has been keeping money from him and the Dorrits for many years. Mrs Clennam’s unloving attitude drove her husband to infidelity, which resulted in a son, Arthur. Mrs. Clennam raised him as her own, without any motherly feeling. When Arthur’s birth mother died, his paternal grandfather bequeathed money to Amy, who was born in the Marshalsea the day Arthur’s birth mother died there.
Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The novel satirizes some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors’ prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison in this case is the Marshalsea, where Dickens’s own father had been imprisoned. Imprisonment – both literal and figurative – is a major theme of the novel, with Clennam and the Meagles quarantined in Marseilles, Rigaud jailed for murder, Mrs Clennam confined to her house, the Dorrits imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and most of the characters trapped within the rigidly defined English social class structure of the time.
Here is a preview of the series we finished watching last night –
Missing Mom 