ABSTRACT
It is not just rst-person narrators who chart an increasing mistrust of the written word as a means of shaping and validating experience. In common with the emerging sensation genre, Dickens’s major novels of the 1850s and ’60s share a focus on the falsication, appropriation or misappropriation of personal letters and other documents. In a particularly extreme example, Great Expectations takes the anonymous letter as a plot device used in the planned murder of Pip by the vengeful Orlick. A key concern from Bleak House onwards is how private and legal documents are decoded and reinterpreted, often by readers for whom they were never intended and in ways never meant by the writer. There are of course notable similarities between this novel and Little Dorrit. Clennam’s illegitimacy and strict upbringing are reminiscent of Esther’s experience, and the discovery of sexual transgression is vital to both plots.
