ABSTRACT
The representation of European travel in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit demonstrates a particularly astute intersection of social and spatial discourses. European travel thus functions in Little Dorrit to open up questions about the reshaping landscape of the continent and Britain's position within it. The fashioning of the body is, then, a central part of being a British traveller to Europe, and this is again articulated in the idea that travellers undergo 'a formation of surface.' The idea of the 'formation of a surface' is first introduced in describing the collective mass of travellers in Rome. The potential fluidities of cultural interaction are thus further iterated at the level of space, and as the narrative progresses through Europe these themes played out on another space, that of the bodies of travelling subjects.
