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In his introduction to a recent re-issue of Little Dorrit (The Oxford Illustrated Dickens), Lionel Trilling — the most brilliant and psychologically the most astute literary critic in this country today — called attention to the fact that this novel contains a series of hitherto unacknowledged psychological findings of some magnitude. Trilling mentions three of these: the unconscious meaning of the “prison image”; Miss Wade's account of her life, “The History of a Self-Tormentor,” which exemplifies “the sense of injustice” which “haunts the infancy of all of us”; Arthur Clennam's suspicion that his mother's invalidism, her “imprisonment” in the sick-room, is inner penance for keeping William Dorrit in debtor's prison.
Trillings conclusions are fully justified, a re-reading of the novel proves. His priority in the psychological re-discovery of this part of Dickens' talent is undisputed. Little Dorrit is psychologically first-rate.
To start with the “prison image.” According to Trilling, “the prison haunted the mind of the nineteenth century, which may be said to have its birth at the fall of the Bastille.” The explanation lies in Matthew Arnold's “Most men in brazen prison live” — the conflict between ego and society on the one hand, and inner forces and the ego on the other. “In the mind of Dickens himself the idea of prison