ABSTRACT
A refinement of the same view sees the real story in Dickens's novels as a rather simple set of movements within a large group of characters. To this a mechanical plot seems to have been attached like an outboard motor to a rowboat, just to get things moving faster and more noisily. Thus our main interest, in reading Little Dorrit, is in the straightforward
and quite touching story of Clennam's love for the heroine, of their separation through her suddenly acquired wealth, and of their eventual reunion through her loss of it. Along with this goes a preposterous melodrama about forged wills, identical twins, a mother who is not a mother, skulking foreigners, and dark mysteries of death and birth which seems almost detachable from the central story. Similarly, we finish Our Mutual Friend with a clear memory of a vast panoramic pageant of Victorian society, from the nouveau-riche Veneerings to Hexham living on the refuse of the Thames. But the creaky Griselda plot, in which John Harmon pretends to be dead in order to test the stability of his future wife, is something that we can hardly take in even when reading the book, much less remember afterwards.
