ABSTRACT
Dickens's own accounts of the action's formation suggest growth rather than mechanical contrivance. Decisions about it occur late. He is well into the novel before deciding to make Amy 'very strong' and (tentatively) to overwhelm the Dorrits with wealth;3 and though his plans for Merdle and the Circumlocution Office develop early, with Mr Merdle's complaint emerging 'as the last drop in the silver cream-jug on Hampstead heath', it is not until June 1856, when he is working on the
ninth number, that he is able to write: 'The story lies before me, I hope, strong and clear. Not to be easily told; but nothing of that sort IS to be easily done that 7 know of (The Life, p. 600). But the cover-design of the first number indicates the main themes of the novel,4 which suggests that in Dickens's mind there was clarity and confidence about the ideas he wanted to deal with, and an exploratory, tentative approach to the action. The book comes alive for him only when action and theme fuse, and the novel as a story lies before him strong and clear. He can then see his way to a prolonged and complex manipulation of the vast public awaiting each number as he wrote it; and it is as a carefully organized assault on the consciousness of a historic readership that Little Dorrit is meaningful.
