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. How this young Newton (for such I
judge him to be) came by his information, I don't know; he was a quarter of a
century too young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the window
of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so long,
and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that apartment at
present? He said, 'Tom Pythick.' I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said,
'Joe Pythick's uncle.'
A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to
enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for ceremony. But,
whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to
Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct
Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very
little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got
free; will look upon rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the
crowding ghosts of many miserable years.
In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many
readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to
repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and confidence that have
grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I added to that, May we meet
again!
London
May 1857
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