The Suspenseful Rhetoric of Speculation

In The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, Caroline Levine argues that Victorian novelists used suspense didactically to teach the reader to suspend the self: “For a startling array of nineteenth-century thinkers. . .the experience of suspense was. . .a rigorous political and epistemological training. . .Suspense fiction was all about teaching readers to suspend judgment” (2). Levine's epistemological framework takes the scientific experiment as a formal paradigm for suspenseful narrative. In the pause between hypothesis and result, the experimenter must rigorously constrain his or her desire (7). Levine concludes that,

Prompted by some mystery or secret of the text, one is thrilled by the prospect of validating one's own suppositions.

Though Levine correctly identifies suspense as a major technique for sustaining the reader's interest over the novel's long temporal span, she does not acknowledge that, for nineteenth-century authors and critics, the vibrant pleasures of suspense could easily slide into the morally dubious pleasure of placing bets. Instead of looking to the scientific experiment as the formal paradigm for suspense, which does a fine job of explaining how ‘good’ suspense disciplines the reader, a more expansive model is needed to account for how suspense was also coded as a risky and potentially hazardous state for the reader. Mary Poovey writes that suspense results from the “tension between disclosure and secrecy” that is a “feature of all modern business cultures” (“Writing” 51). She argues that the affect produced by the way “financial institutions generated monetary value” is reflected in the “reading experience itself, as the excitement that sustains suspense and the frustration that ensues when plots or characters disappear at the narrative's end” (55). Writers on finance identified suspense as the mechanism through which speculation distorts one's character, making someone act like someone who they should not be. The suspenseful speculation dramatizes how the unregulated desire to improve one's social position and the fear of losing it can provoke uncharacteristically erratic and degenerate behavior in the speculator. And by doing so, it undermines a system of credit distribution that relies on putting trust in someone's moral character.

The slippage between terms like investment, speculation, and gambling derived from the difficulty of defining legitimate commercial activity from reckless greed. While exact criteria for what distinguishes an investment from a speculation varied, it was generally understood that investments were careful, socially beneficial uses of capital whereas speculations were risky ventures that doomed both the speculator and the public to eventual ruin. The meaning of speculation was also largely dependent on context. ‘To speculate’ could refer to embarking capital on a dubious enterprise or to establish and manage a risky business venture. More particularly, speculation could mean betting on the rise or fall of the market value of stocks regardless of the underlying value of the commodity or services offered by the business. Speculation's resistance to definition derives in part from the fact that its meaning shifts in relation to other terms. According to David C. Itzkowitz, “Victorians viewed gambling and investment as lying at opposite ends of a continuum of financial risk, with speculation lying somewhere in between” (100).Footnote ³

In Speculative Notes and Notes on Speculation (Reference Evans1864), the financial journalist David Morier Evans relates an after-dinner conversation between himself, an investor (named “Millionaire”), and a speculator (named “Optimist”). With “his placid face, and smoothly trimmed hair and beard,” Millionaire is described as “extremely careful” with his investments (18, 16); yet his character receives little sympathy from the narrator, who portrays Millionaire as both arrogant and pedantic. The figure of the speculator presents a much more engaging picture: “hale, bluff, exuberant,” the Optimist's face beams with “kindly feeling” as he convivially encourages his companions to replenish their glasses (16, 22). Optimist goes on to relate an anecdote about his speculation in shares of the Lombardo-Venetian railway. Having once achieved a high premium, shares in the railway plummeted to discount prices because of the Second Italian War of Independence. Embarking his remaining capital on the belief that “the war could not last forever,” Optimist bets that Napoleon III will end the war in a timely fashion and thus catapult the shares of the business to pre-war levels (23).Footnote ⁴

Optimist's anecdote tells us more about how the speculation affects his psychology than about the details of the specific speculation. He says that, “When you operate or speculate, you look straight ahead, avoiding all doubts and contingencies, and only see success” (24). The obsessive energy demanded by the speculation has obvious consequences when things start to go wrong: “I had fixed my mind upon the result, and believed I could wait patiently. But how changed in the next few days was the aspect of the market! The news from Italy was discouraging. . .. My spirits drooped. I was out of sorts” (25). Fluctuating alongside market prices, Optimist's hearty personality is deflated by discouraging news of his speculation; he links feeling “out of sorts” with an inability to “wait patiently,” thus connecting his change in personality with a modified relation to everyday temporality.Footnote ⁵ Things go from bad to worse. As the price of shares in Lombardo-Venetian continue to fall, he comes within a half percent of irrevocable ruin. In his own words: “The anxiety I experienced threatened to terminate in madness. My brain seemed on fire, and the weight of suspense was most overwhelmingly oppressive” (26). It is the devastating suspense of the speculation that almost causes Optimist to lose his mind – in this state he feels cruelly suspended before the success that he believes should result from his venture. He becomes impatient and unable to wait. The example of Evans's Optimist suggests that while it is correct to say that a suspenseful state is one that “suspends” the subject before the object of desire, the psychic state of suspense is one that continually anticipates and thus attempts to overcome this suspension.Footnote ⁶ It is not the interval where the self is annihilated and put on hold (as Levine argues), but an intense and sometimes frenzied span where the desires of the subject are writ large. Suspense manifests a uniquely temporal tension: the inability to realize one's desire for closure exists alongside one's impulse to move toward it as quickly as possible.

Suspense often plays an important role in making someone act out of character, resulting in unpredictable and erratic behavior in the financial world. In Charles Mackay's reflection on the South-Sea Bubble in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), he observes that:

The panic that resulted from the failure of the South-Sea Company in 1720 left a lasting impression on British finance for over one hundred years.Footnote ⁷ While Mackay acknowledges that the fraud of the directors played a large role in the company's collapse, he directs his real scorn toward the unwitting mass of speculators whose desire to get rich quick destabilizes the normative system of social morality. The structure of suspense – the anticipation of wealth in the future – causes a corresponding loss in the moral substance of present, everyday experience. The problem with speculation is not that it raises or lowers individuals in the social hierarchy, but that the suspenseful means of realizing or losing wealth corrupts one's character. Raised to a higher social position through speculation, the newly rich are marked by “over-bearing insolence,” while the “men of true gentility” – those who realize their wealth through legitimate means – “blush” at the speculator's repulsive behavior.Footnote ⁸

Mackay's prose reflects a wider tendency to describe the suspenseful state of speculation as an unwholesome hastening: “a whole people shaking suddenly off the trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision” (67–68); “the infatuation which had made the multitude run their heads with such frantic eagerness into the net held out for them by scheming projectors” (69).Footnote ⁹ Thomas Carlyle, lamenting the poor judgment of the multitude who invested in George Hudson's railway empire, writes that Hudson hurried his schemes “to completion within the former short limit of time; that he got them made, – in extremely improper directions. . .hastily in five years, not deliberately in fifty-five” (267). Both authors represent speculation as encouraging unnaturally accelerated temporalities. For Mackay, the desire to get rich quick proscribes the ordinary time of reflection, resulting in a “frantic,” mindless, and avaricious mob. In Carlyle's critique of Hudson, the practical benefits of the railway are a mere epiphenomenon of the wealth it can create. Because Hudson's business model responds to the imperatives of capital instead of social and economic necessity (the need for transportation), work that should take fifty-five years is compressed into five, resulting in an English countryside crisscrossed with haphazard and ineffective railway lines.

The anticipation of rapid wealth was such a vexing problem for finance in the nineteenth century because credit was determined in large part through the moralized language of character. As Margot Finn writes:

According to Finn, Victorian markets were not determined exclusively through an impersonal cash-nexus, but predicated on a reciprocal relation with personal evaluations of an individual's character. But speculation reveals an unsettling paradox in the system of using character to determine credit: insofar as “good” character attracts credit, that credit tends to corrupt one's character by making one reckless. While character was often used as a term to reflect one's financial stability and wealth, for many middle-class writers great wealth could also serve as a negative index of character. Speculation reveals a fault line at the heart of character by producing wealth that simultaneously corrupts and amplifies it.

Not only does finance share the novel's interest in character, but it also inspires suspenseful writing that blurs the boundaries between the two genres. Charles Mackay takes affront to the complaint that financial history is dull: “the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novellist [sic] can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?” (67). The Parliamentary champion of limited liability Robert Lowe makes a similar observation when he critiques the Joint-Stock Companies Act of 1844:

While suspense helped the authors of financial journalism and blue books to represent and critique finance, it also contributed to disciplining finance as dependent on novelistic conventions. Published in the midst of heated debates about the Limited Liability Act of 1855 and scandals such as John Sadleir's fraud and suicide in 1856, Charles Dickens's novel Little Dorrit attempts to displace suspenseful temporality with the slower and more reflective time of waiting. By changing the way the novel structures the reader's attention, Dickens prepares a new financial subject for the market. The result is a novel that is at odds with its conventional means of stimulating interest – a formal conflict that is also at the heart of the corrupt financial world it represents.

Spending Time in Little Dorrit

In the first chapter of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, as the criminal Rigaud is taken away for trial, his cellmate Cavalletto experiences a remarkable transformation: “in his captivity, like a lower animal – like some impatient ape, or roused bear of the smaller species – the prisoner, now left solitary, had jumped upon the ledge, to lose no glimpse of this departure” (28; bk. 1, ch. 1). Not a great friend of the abusive and arrogant Rigaud, Cavalletto's curiosity derives from the acute desire to know what happens: will Rigaud be found guilty or innocent, will he live or die? Limited by the confines of his cell, Cavalletto's animalistic degeneration dramatizes the effects of suspense when the desire to know is frustrated: “Excited into a still greater resemblance to a caged wild animal by his anxiety to know more, the prisoner leaped nimbly down, ran round the chamber, leaped nimbly up again, clasped the grate and tried to shake it. . .and never rested until the noise, becoming more and more distant, had died away” (28–9; bk. 1, ch. 1). For Cavalletto, the prison physically enacts the distressing state of narrative suspense, in which the intensity of his desire to know threatens to destabilize and even consume his human subjectivity. The beginning of the novel thus provides a warning against becoming too invested in suspenseful narrative.

The second chapter uses another example of incarceration – a quarantine in Marseilles – as a means of bringing together some of the novel's major characters. In his conversation with Arthur Clennam, Mr. Meagles formulates his distress in a peculiar way: “The plague!. . .That's my grievance. I have had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. . .I can't stand the suspicion of the thing” (30; bk. 1, ch. 2). For Mr. Meagles, the plague loses meaning as a physical sickness and becomes a metaphor for the discomfort of suspicion and doubt: “I have been waking up, night after night, and saying, now I have got it, now it has developed itself” (30; bk. 1, ch. 2). The disease that he complains of is not a bacterium or virus but a persistent sense of uncertainty related to the time that one spends anticipating something. The uncertainty that Mr. Meagles likens to a disease is not directly related to his fear of the plague, but rather a result from the suspense he is forced to endure in quarantine.

The threat of disease and epidemic links the novel's critique of suspense to the corrupt world of finance. The novel's financier, Mr. Merdle, “was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise. . .who turned all he touched to gold” (265; bk. 1, ch. 21).Footnote ¹⁰ The narrator observes that “nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money” (417; bk. 1, ch. 33). While “to coin money” is used figuratively here, it is revealed that Mr. Merdle is actually a forger and thief, and that his opulent façade conceals the fact that “he had never had any more of his own, his ventures had been utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous” (742; bk. 2, ch. 25). When he is no longer able to maintain the illusion of wealth, he resorts to suicide, leaving all of those who invested in his enterprise as a “sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes” (742; bk. 2, ch. 25).Footnote ¹¹ Before the secret of Merdle's fraud is exposed, he is represented as having an illness associated with his digestion, foreshadowing the ruin that his deceit will bring upon thousands.

Merdle's fraud is not only registered through the symptoms of his indigestion, but also through a large-scale epidemic that tears through the streets of London. As Pancks makes his rounds collecting rent in the Bleeding Heart Yard, he continually hears some iteration of the Merdle story in relation to his query for rent: “So rife and potent was the fever in Bleeding Heart Yard, that Mr. Pancks's rent-days caused no interval in the patients. The disease took the singular form, on those occasions, of causing the infected to find an unfathomable excuse and consolation in allusions to the magic name” (598; bk. 2, ch 13). The story of Merdle's wealth spreads like a disease amongst partygoers who debate the value of his latest enterprise:

The circuit of storytelling that amplifies Merdle's credit belies the fact that his wealth is as ephemeral as the newspapers that sing his praises: “Mr. Merdle's right hand was filled with the evening paper, and the evening paper was full of Mr. Merdle” (583–5; bk. 2, ch. 12). No one knows what he does or where he does it, but everyone agrees that his time is of “enormous value” (641; bk. 2, ch. 16). Merdle's time is precious because it forms the ground of his wealth – it is why the speculation appeals to so many people who put their faith in the ability of enterprise to conquer time through impossible profits and enormous returns rather than encourage lasting and socially beneficial modes of production.Footnote ¹² People collaborate on puffing Merdle's name because it allows for the imagination of a miraculous and expedited relation to the maturation of capital. His money does not need to be invested in business or land; instead, his wealth is built on fictions and hot air, enlarging every time someone opens his or her mouth. A bubble fit to burst.

We know that Pancks has been infected by the disease when he advises Arthur: “Be as rich as you can, sir. . .. Be as rich as you honestly can. It's your duty. Not for your own sake, but for the sake of others. Take time by the forelock” (611; bk. 2, ch. 13). Pancks's imperative is motivated by the fiction that Merdle enables: the impossibly fast maturation of capital. The prospect of such quickly realized wealth puts stress on the language used to describe finance. Where Arthur asks if it is right to “speculate” with Merdle and questions why the “ventures” are so popular (609, 607; bk. 2, ch. 13), Pancks strategically changes the terms:

Pancks's attempt to redefine the language used to discuss Merdle's business – from the risky venture or speculation to the safe investment – underlines the rhetorical foundation for inspiring confidence in financial enterprise. When Arthur's partner Doyce warns that “If I have a prejudice connected with money and money-figures. . .it is against speculating,” Arthur confirms that “to travel out of safe investments, is one of the most dangerous. . .of those follies which often deserve the name of vices” (704; bk. 2, ch. 22). Though Arthur and Doyce agree on the moral distinction between speculation and investment, the fact that Arthur will soon deposit the firm's reserves into Merdle's faltering enterprise reveals that they have significantly different definitions of what these terms mean.

Something has occurred to skew Arthur's perception of what the terms speculation and investment signify. While the meanings of the words do not change, character does. When Arthur reflects on Pancks's advertisement of Merdle, he “thought of Mr. Pancks's being so sanguine in this matter, and of his not being usually of a sanguine character” (612; bk. 2, ch. 13). The “fatal mania” warps Pancks, making him act like someone who he is not – a person of sanguine temper (744; bk. 2, ch. 26). The same can be said for Arthur, whose normal character –exceedingly cautious and moral – is perverted by the prospect of speculation to rapidly improve the fortunes of his elderly partner. Thus, the problem with finance is not only the difficulty in distinguishing between a quality investment and a reckless speculation, but also a difficulty in fixing, reading, and interpreting character. Dickens insists on this fact through the incongruous character of Merdle himself. Prostrating themselves before his wealth, the public misreads him: “a reserved man, with a broad, overhanging, watchful head, that particular kind of dull red color in his cheeks which is rather stale than fresh, and a somewhat uneasy expression about his coat-cuffs as if they were in his confidence” (266; bk. 1, ch. 21). Merdle's character should not inspire credit but suspicion, as he continually clasps his “wrists as if he were taking himself into custody” (417; bk. 1, ch. 33). If credit is a function of character, then speculation destabilizes the system of credit and debit – and by extension the foundation of finance itself – because the hysterical belief in rapid wealth obscures the truth about character.

The changes or misrepresentations of character are consistently linked to the volatility of market fluctuations.Footnote ¹³ For example, Mr. Dorrit's change in fortune causes a change in his character that culminates in a fatal double-consciousness. Only once as a debtor does Mr. Dorrit break character with the “Father of the Marshalsea,” and he does this only to explain the impossibility of ever escaping that identity. After Mr. Dorrit upbraids Amy for refusing John Chivery's marriage proposal, he breaks down under the contradictions of the reality of his living conditions and the gentility of his fictional persona: he pleads with Amy, “if you could see me as your mother saw me, you wouldn't believe it to be the same creature you have only looked at through the bars of this cage” (245; bk. 1, ch. 19). When Mr. Dorrit inherits his estate and becomes wealthy, his personality is split into “two under-currents. . .pervading all his discourse and manner” (671; bk. 2, ch. 19); in his dealings with Amy, one part of him showed “her how well he had got on without her” and the other, “in a fitful and unintelligible way almost complaining of her, as if it had been possible that she had neglected him” (671; bk. 2, ch. 19). It is only a matter of time before his former self makes a sensational return. During a lavish dinner party hosted by Mrs. Merdle, Mr. Dorrit hallucinates himself back into the prison, addressing the affluent company as if they were debtors newly arrived to the Marshalsea. Mr. Dorrit's confusion attests to the novel's pathologization of suspense as it relates to the character-based credit economy.

In the process of interrogating the use of character as a means of assessing the value and risk of financial transactions, Little Dorrit asks questions about agency and responsibility that were central to the debates concerning limited liability in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Dickens's original title for the novel was Nobody's Fault, a gesture to the ethical impasse of either implicating dormant partners without agency or leaving debts unpaid. Dickens implies that Mr. Dorrit begins the novel in the Marshalsea because of debts incurred by the failure of his speculation in an unlimited liability company: “a partnership, of which he knew no more than that he had invested money in it” (75; bk. 1, ch. 6). His helplessness underscores the injustice of the punishment. In contrast, Arthur accepts full responsibility for the debts accrued by his speculation in Merdle's business. Arthur declares, “I must retain nothing for myself. I must resign to our creditors the power of management I have so much abused, and I must work out as much of my fault – or crime – as is susceptible of being worked out, in the rest of my days” (745; bk. 2, ch. 26). Such sacrifice is necessary to make reparations to his partner Doyce, whose character would be implicated by Arthur's ruin: “in all he meant to do, he was guided above all things by a knowledge of his partner's character” in order to prevent “the slightest suspicion wrongfully attaching to his partner's honor and credit” (747; bk. 2, ch. 26). Like Mr. Dorrit before him, Arthur is arrested and put in the Marshalsea prison for debt.

Though a successful investor himself, Dickens sympathizes with the responsibility his characters must assume for debt.Footnote ¹⁵ When Mr. Dorrit is finally released from prison, Amy reflects, “It seems to me hard. . .that he should have lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both” (444; bk. 1, ch. 35). The narrator's ironic response is that, “The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit's mind no more than this” (444; bk. 1, ch. 35). For the mid-nineteenth-century debtor, time is not money, as a money debt absorbs one's time indefinitely until repaid with some form of real currency. Both Mr. Dorrit and Arthur Clennam are locked in a prison where the relation between time and capital radically changes. Where the speculator moves through time as quickly as possible to realize fiscal gain, the debtor is made to wait outside the feverish temptations of the market. As the turnkey observes to Mr. Dorrit, “We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here; there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man's heart into his mouth. . .Nobody writes threatening letters about money, to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's freedom!” (78; bk. 1, ch. 6). Clennam experiences a more acute temporal disequilibrium when he enters “the unnatural peace” of the Marshalsea (752; bk. 2, ch. 27). He is described as “sitting with his eyes fixed on the floor, recalling the past, brooding over the present, and not attending to either” (751; bk. 2, ch. 26), and “Dozing and dreaming, without the power of reckoning time, so that a minute might have been an hour and an hour a minute” (788–89; bk. 2, ch. 29).

To be imprisoned in the Marshalsea's fetid atmosphere is hardly an ideal alternative to the fluctuations of a credit economy, and yet it prescribes a temporal regimen that corrects the impulses that provoke debt: certainty, security, and patience. This is emphasized by the fact that most of the novel's unredeemed characters are distinguished by volatility, impatience, and a chronic inability or refusal to wait. Amy's brother Tip is unable to maintain a job because he eventually “tired of everything” (90; bk. 1, ch. 7). Amy's temperamental sister exclaims, “I have no patience,” which the narrator follows up with a parenthetical verification: “which was indeed the truth” (477; bk. 2, ch. 3). Suffering from a particularly virulent form of listlessness, Henry Gowan does things in an “unsettled and dissatisfied way”: “He does nothing steadily or patiently; but equally takes up and throws them down, and does them, or leaves them undone, without caring about them” (577; bk. 2, ch. 11). Rigaud exclaims that “it's my character to be impatient!” (569; bk. 2, ch. 10).

These examples of rashness are balanced against Amy Dorrit, who occupies what Rebecca Stern calls the “novel's moral center” (14). Amy is described as having a “patient heart” (309; bk. 1, ch. 24) and “little patient hands folded before her” (488; bk. 2, ch. 3). When locked out of the Marshalsea and forced to roam the streets of London, she advises Maggy that they “must be patient, and wait for day” (189; bk. 1, ch. 14). The most significant aspect of Amy's patience is that it gives her unique insight into character. Talking with Arthur about her father, Amy tells him that “You don't know what he is. . .you don't know what he really is. How can you, seeing him there all at once, dear love, and not gradually, as I have done!” (187; bk. 1, ch. 14). Amy criticizes Arthur for his most serious fault, the one that the Circumlocution Office has already warned him against and what will eventually provoke him to rush into Merdle's speculation: one must not attempt to gain knowledge or money “all at once” but “gradually.”

Part of what makes Amy's character virtuous is the distance she cultivates from money speculations. Unlike many of the characters in this novel, Amy is unaffected by the forces of suspense. Her character simply does not change. Following her father's inheritance of a vast sum of money, she is unable to adjust to her wealthy lifestyle, insisting on wearing her modest clothes from the Marshalsea and referring to her experience abroad as a “dream” and “unreal” (487–88; bk. 2, ch. 3). However, her indifference to the money market belies her shrewd understanding of the marriage market. The only request that Amy refuses her father is with respect to her matrimonial prospects. With her heart set on Arthur, Amy circumvents her father's hint to marry the humble John Chivery and his later demand that she marry someone who would raise the social profile of the family. It is through waiting – rather than suspenseful steps such as risk taking – that Amy is able to overcome her father's imperatives: in the first case, Mr. Dorrit inherits money that makes Chivery a bad match and, in the second, he dies before pressuring Amy into marrying someone she does not love. Amy's only attempt at speculation in love must be defused to enable her marriage to Arthur. It is only when Amy loses her fortune that the two can be united in marriage. But Dickens's attempt to lift ideal marriage above concerns about wealth has the opposite effect of revealing the inextricable connections between money and marriage.Footnote ¹⁶ Making Amy's divestment a necessary precondition for marriage underwrites the tremendous importance of money, whether it be the insistence on marrying someone of equal social standing or the mercenary desire to enrich one's self through marriage.

Amy's sister, Fanny, has mastered the art of playing marriage and money against each other. When the sisters call at Mrs. Merdle's house, they are debriefed on Fanny's successful speculation regarding the dimwitted Edmund Sparkler. By strategically rejecting Sparkler's advances Fanny brings him to the brink of proposing marriage. She converts her conquest into capital by negotiating with Mrs. Merdle for the release of her son (261; bk. 1, ch. 20). After the Dorrits acquire their fortune, Fanny continues to speculate with marrying Edmund Sparkler, balancing the risks with the rewards. Despite, or because of, her economic and social success speculating in the marriage market, Fanny is the negative image of Amy's saintly self-denial and steadfastness.Footnote ¹⁷ While Amy is represented as being outside of speculation in a positive way, the novel codes her sister's speculative conquests as morally corrupt and unfeminine.

However, the binary between the virtuous woman who exists outside the realm of speculation (Amy Dorrit) and the immoral woman who revels in it (Fanny Dorrit) is deconstructed by characters such as Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade who share important characteristics with Amy – such as the ability to wait and the immunity to speculative frenzy –but commit heinous acts anyway. Mrs. Clennam surreptitiously retains inheritance money that should have passed on to Amy Dorrit, thus dooming the Dorrits to insolvency in the Marshalsea prison. “Stern of face and unrelenting of heart,” Mrs. Clennam expiates her sins by immobilizing her body for a dozen years (45; bk. 1, ch. 3). Estranged from the outside world, Mrs. Clennam is associated with a malfunctioning clock: she “stopped the clock of busy existence” (361; bk. 1, ch. 29); “morning, noon and night, each recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork” (359; bk. 1, ch. 29).

For Mrs. Clennam, her waiting serves as the means of extracting revenge on her enemies and retaining the money that she feels is rightfully hers. It is her way of balancing the accounts outside of the temporal logic of economic and financial transactions: “Thus was she always balancing her bargain with the Majesty of heaven, posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and claiming her due” (64; bk. 1, ch. 5). Such moral accounting is meaningful only outside the volatility of the market economy. “All seasons are alike to me,” she tells Arthur “with a grim kind of luxuriousness:” “I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here” (49–50; bk. 1, ch. 3). When Jeremiah asks Mrs. Clennam if she wants to know where Amy lives, she refuses multiple times, eventually remarking that “if it is any compensation to me for my long confinement to this room, that while I am shut up from all pleasant change, I am also shut up from knowledge of some things that I may prefer to avoid knowing, why should you, of all men, grudge me that relief?” (200; bk. 1, ch. 15). Mrs. Clennam's willed ignorance of time's passing is reflected in the dilapidated state of the Clennam family business of lending credit to European clients. Arthur observes “the track we have kept is not the track of time” and the business is consequently “out of date and out of purpose” (60; bk. 1, ch. 5). The problem for the Clennam business and Mrs. Clennam's spiritual bookkeeping is that extending credit within a vacuum – or to one's self – is a deeply meaningless action: a financial tautology that becomes significant only through the ironic aspiration to distance one's self from the suspenseful temporality of credit based market.

The major female characters of Little Dorrit tend to wait outside the suspenseful market economy, gaining an outsider's ability to manipulate the flows of information and money that circulate through the text. Amy is, after all, the “vanishing-point” of the novel: “Everything in its perspective led to her innocent figure” (766; bk. 2, ch. 27).Footnote ¹⁸ And yet such aesthetic and formal magnetism puts her in the blind spot of the text, an elusive index that quietly organizes the events and characters of the novel. In Hilary Schor's account, the story of Little Dorrit is “in the hands of women who serve as uncanny narrative agents,” women like Amy, Mrs. Clennam, and Miss Wade who “have fierce desires, a passion for narrative, and an obsession with property” (137). But if these women evince a passion for narrative it is for a particular kind – of the durable rather than the suspenseful – and their obsession with property is equally qualified. Where men like Arthur, Pancks, and Merdle attempt to speculate their fortunes into ever larger quantities, Amy, Mrs. Clennam, and Miss Wade either reject property or hoard it in a solipsistic parody of the credit economy.

Miss Wade, who moves from house to house along the fringes of society, intermittently appeals to Mr. Casby for money from her trust “when she can't do without it” (566; bk. 2, ch. 9). Miss Wade's reluctance to access her own money aligns her with Amy's double renunciation of her inheritance. But where Amy is the novel's vanishing point, Miss Wade is its architect. In a widely discussed passage from the novel, Miss Wade portentously announces a theory of character and plot:

Dickens's number plans also sound as though they could have been spoken by Miss Wade: “People to meet and part as travellers do, and the future connexion between them in the story, not to be now shewn to the reader but to be worked out as in life. Try this uncertainty and this not putting of them together, as a new means of interest” (“Working Notes” 271). Both Miss Wade and Dickens express how a passive uncertainty is made possible in the midst of a more certain expectation: eventually people will meet and react on one another in unexpected ways. These passages are remarkable in the way they sterilize suspenseful encounters. People will meet and react at some point in the future, but one should not be surprised, elated, or hurt when it happens. Life, like the novel, is a matter of waiting for things that we know are coming, which is precisely the kind of relation – one of affectless, albeit temporally uncertain necessity – that Miss Wade adopts to her small store of capital in Mr. Casby's trust.

In Little Dorrit, bankrupt men engage in suspenseful speculations that result in the quietude of death (Mr. Merdle) or the stagnation of the prison (Mr. Dorrit, Arthur). While Fanny meets with some success speculating in the marriage market, by the end of the novel even this bubble has burst and she is attached to a dull man from a disgraced family. In his attempt to constitute a zone outside of financial markets, Dickens proposes the temporal regimen of waiting. But this solution raises new and more troubling possibilities. The novel holds up Amy Dorrit as a model of feminine morality because of her distance from speculation, but characters such as Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade show how her virtue of patience and waiting can be used for wicked and anti-social ends. This reveals that even feminine virtues can be corrupted from within. The desire for a zone untouched by the taint of finance thus produces two images that oppose and overlap one another: the happy marriage between Amy and Arthur and the nightmarish domesticity of the debtors' prison.

The prison shares a number of important characteristics with domestic spaces. The Marshalsea is the place where Amy Dorrit is born and raised. She carefully tends to the preparation of supper and housekeeping, “comforting her father's wasted heart upon her innocent breast” (247; bk. 1, ch. 19). It is where she is engaged to Arthur. But as the prison takes on the characteristics of the domestic, the domestic becomes infected by the toxic and claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison. Both are simultaneously places of imprisonment and refuge. The extended descriptions of Mrs. Clennam's house emphasize stasis and confinement: “Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects that he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats” (70; bk. 1, ch. 5). When Arthur visits Casby's “sober, silent, air-tight house” he remarks that it “is as little changed as my mother's, and looks almost as gloomy” (159; bk. 1, ch. 13). For the domestic configuration of Little Dorrit, time has not stopped so much as flattened and become secure, homogenous, and boring. The very values that make the home a refuge from the market – privacy, enclosure, safety – also render the space stultifying and carceral. If Little Dorrit conceptualizes the domestic as a haven from suspenseful speculation, it is a zone that is subject to the same kind of discipline that characterizes the debtor's incarceration in prison.

It is in such domestic spaces that a great deal of the novel's business is conducted. Mrs. Clennam's credit business is run out of her dilapidated home, Mr. Dorrit receives his “little testimonials” before his hearth, Mr. Casby receives his rent money from Pancks over the dinner table, and the Plornish grocery is run out of their little cottage. The private has become privatized, an unlikely and fraught place to transact the business of city life. Marrying the domestic with the commercial, these prison-like houses reveal that even the spaces marked as refuge from the public world of finance are vulnerable to the credit economy they are supposed to escape. While it is explicitly the job of Mrs. Clennam's business to lend credit, this becomes the primary function even of the Plornish grocery: “It's quite true that the business is very steady indeed,” Mrs. Plornish complains; “The only thing that stands in the way, sir, is the Credit” (601). Far from building new businesses, credit is associated with tearing them down, as the spectacular collapse of Mrs. Clennam's house attests. It is only a matter of time before credit fractures its domestic grounding, just as it tends to debase the character of the individual who solicited it in the first place. The more credit one is given, the more reckless they become in business dealings. Thus, Dickens links domestic spaces with the failed attempt to ground credit on the basis of character.

At once punishment and salvation, the ongoingness of waiting serves as an ambivalent alternative to suspenseful speculations, contrasting the moral charge of Amy Dorrit's patience with the callousness of Miss Wade's cynical fatalism. As a place to retreat from the financial world, the domestic hovers ambiguously between refuge and prison. When it is used as an alternative place of business, the domestic does not purify financial transactions but takes on their demoralizing and destructive energy. Though Little Dorrit proposes waiting as a solution to the problem of finance, the novel is reflexive enough to recognize that it is not in the nature of waiting to solve problems or come to conclusions. Waiting simply supports the indeterminacy that contests the myopia of suspenseful speculation.

The lack of closure at the level of financial questions makes waiting a formal principle of the novel, as a summary of the unresolved plot threads confirms. Arthur's inquiries into the Circumlocution Office – concerning both the fortunes of Mr. Dorrit and Daniel Doyce's invention – are left unanswered and remain “at the end of Little Dorrit like a loose thread of the plot dangling unresolved” (Miller 234). Arthur never uncovers the secret of his birth; in fact, he never even realizes this was one of the novel's greatest secrets in the first place. The codicil that contains the information about his stepmother's fraud are obliterated when Amy coerces Arthur to burn the documents; while Amy may tell Arthur the truth in the future, the reader is not invited to the scene of revelation. Even the concluding line of the novel throws a dark shadow of uncertainty over the lives of the newlyweds Arthur and Amy: “They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar” (859–60; bk. 2, ch. 34). The object of suspense never materializes, and the reader is forced to wait – like the characters themselves – for answers that are interminably deferred.

While a novel's lack of closure might seem suspenseful, the final page marks the revelatory limit of the text: whatever mysteries remain are modified by the reader's knowledge that there is nothing else to say. The desire to know must channel its great energies into a new form, away from the linear propulsion of suspense into the contemplative possibilities of waiting. In Little Dorrit, the novel's lack of closure is implicated in a larger thesis about temporality and the economy that attempts to transform the excessive and unremarkable time of waiting into a socially productive alternative to suspenseful speculation. While waiting does not solve the problems of finance, it does open the possibility of new economic subjectivities to manipulate capital in hopeful and shocking ways. The indeterminacy of this economic subjectivity is precisely the point, as it enlarges the range of outcomes that a financial event can produce. Not just the binary “jackpot or bust,” but the dizzying array of possibilities that connect an individual to the economic world in which he or she is enmeshed. In the process of deconstructing the speculation's suspenseful binary, Dickens draws on the ideology of gender to theorize a temporality that is not outside of the economic but a different mode of relation within it. Doing so, however, necessitates the breakdown of other binaries such as the gendered separation of public and private. The result is a novel deeply ambivalent of its own critique, disturbed by the very indeterminacy it offers as an antidote to the suspenseful compulsion of the novel and the financial world it represents.