Nobody

Given its original title, it is not surprising that Little Dorrit is a book peopled with “nobodies.” Pancks, cautioning Little Dorrit not to pay attention to his “fortune-telling” activities, advises, “I am nobody. Don't take on to mind me” (241; bk. 1, ch. 24). Maggy, the girl-woman who Little Dorrit cares for, similarly “counted as nobody” (319; bk. 1, ch. 31), and Miss Wade, one of several orphans in the novel, is described as “somebody's child – anybody's – nobody's” (452; bk. 2, ch. 9). Even old Mr. Nandy, though not expressly labeled a “nobody,” clearly fits that description, with his “coarse shirt and his coarse neckcloth [that] have no more individuality than his coat and hat; they have the same character of not being his – of not being anybody's” (305; bk. 1, ch. 31). Then, of course, there is Mr. Merdle, who wanders anonymously through his own home, becoming “of no account in the stream of people on the grand staircase” (211; bk. 1, ch. 21).

Merdle shares with these other characters an ambiguous social status. In his person and mannerisms, he is bland and unobtrusive – a “nobody” who became a “somebody” because of his money and the influence it exerts. The narrator observes that Merdle “looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with some inferior spirit” (331; bk. 1, ch. 33). “Common” and “inferior” not only operate as physical descriptors in this passage, but also as social markers, hinting at Merdle's lower-class origins. The discrepancy between his background and his current social status is further suggested by Merdle's mortal fear of his own butler, that “splendid retainer” who “extinguishes” Merdle every time he looks at him (335; bk. 1, ch. 33). Merdle also shrinks from the obligatory social occasions that his position demands. At dinner parties he is observed to “sit heavily among the company at table and wander lumpishly about his drawing-rooms afterwards, only remarkable for appearing to have nothing to do with the entertainment beyond being in its way” (464; bk. 2, ch. 12). His unease extends to his physical surroundings, as he drifts aimlessly through the grand rooms of his own house “like the last person on earth who had any business to approach them” (335; bk. 1, ch. 33).

Merdle's position as a social “nobody” is reflected in his physical description – he literally has no body. Instead, descriptions of him focus on specific body parts: his “interchange of heads with some inferior spirit,” his habit of carrying the “shop. . . on his back,” or his “dull red and yellow face” (331, 334, 331; bk. 1, ch. 33). Much attention is given to his roaming eyes, which stare “at the tablecloth” (209; bk. 1, ch. 21), “under the chairs” (515; bk. 2, ch. 16), “out at a distant window” (331; bk. 1, ch. 33), “at all the carpets,” (335; bk. 1, ch. 33), or “upon another chair beside him” (584; bk. 2, ch. 24), thus turning the focus of the gaze away from his person. When Merdle moves, he seems to do so without the benefit of bipedalism, “ooz[ing] sluggishly and muddily about his drawing-room” (475; bk. 2, ch. 12) or “slinking about the hearthrug” (513; bk. 2, ch. 16). The only limbs we glimpse are his hands, which peep out of his capacious coat-cuffs and continually enact elaborate pantomimes of being arrested – a physical manifestation of his subconscious guilt over his illegal actions. At one point, the narrator remarks: “He took himself into custody by the wrists, and backed himself among the ottomans, and chairs, and tables, as if he were his own Police officer, saying to himself, ‘Now, none of that! Come! I've got you, you know, and you go quietly along with me’” (513; bk. 2, ch. 16).Footnote ⁵ The single most complete physical description that we are offered in the early chapters focuses exclusively on Merdle's head and hands – the part that invents and the part that executes his crimes: “he was 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, and had reasons for being anxious to hide his hands” (207; bk. 1, ch. 21).

Merdle's ambiguous class position is consistent with other Victorian depictions of stock speculators, who were often viewed as interlopers to proper society even as they began to amass money and social capital. The trope of the speculator-villain recurred, with some variation, throughout nineteenth century fiction, including such memorable characters as Anthony Trollope's Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now and Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister. The 1850s witnessed a particular bull-market in speculation plots, including, most famously, Little Dorrit, but also lesser-known works such as Robert Bell's The Ladder of Gold, Charles Lever's Davenport Dunn, Emma Robinson's The Gold Worshippers, Dudley Costello's The Joint-Stock Banker, and Margaret Oliphant's “The Stockbroker at Dinglewood.” Such stories contained common elements: the speculator is depicted as an overreaching social pretender and an outsider; wild speculative activity is followed by the financial collapse and either the flight or death of the speculator;Footnote ⁶ speculation is associated with idleness, corruption and greed; and concern is expressed over the declining morality of the age.

These fictional fraudsters constituted part of the Victorian imaginary, forming a lens through which the public viewed and processed information about the financial realm. As historian James Taylor explains, “[T]he public understood the actions of real life perpetrators of commercial crime through the prism of the novels and plays that it consumed” (239). For example, the directors of the Royal British Bank, which failed in 1856, were variously likened to Montague Tigg, Mr. Merdle, Ralph Nickleby, and the swindling company promoter in the 1855 play Still Waters Run Deep. As this list suggests, banking scandals were particularly notorious among the public, not only because most Victorians participated in deposit banking and were familiar with the institutions, but also because the damage caused by their failure was widespread, ruining both shareholders and depositors.

In creating his thieving speculator, Dickens drew on the highly publicized scandal surrounding John Sadleir, M.P., whose suicide on Hampstead Heath in 1856 brought down the Bank of Tipperary and revealed numerous stock swindles and forgeries.Footnote ⁷ But the descriptions of Merdle's financial genius and the public accolades that it inspired are also reminiscent of the career of another great Victorian financial scoundrel, George Hudson, M.P., who rose from humble origins to become the “Railway King.”Footnote ⁸ Hudson was ultimately ruined by the collapse of railway shares during the financial crisis of 1848, as well as the discovery of financial improprieties in the management of his companies.

Although Mr. Merdle is a worthy addition to the pantheon of mid-century financial criminals, Dickens does not traffic in the same sort of voyeurism and excitement that characterized other contemporary accounts of financial fraud, such as D. Morier Evans's 1859 Facts, Failures and Frauds: Revelations Financial, Mercantile, Criminal. In fact, the specifics of Merdle's financial misdeeds are concealed from the reader – as they were for Merdle's many victims – until after his suicide. Instead, Dickens seems more interested in examining the social dynamics of the speculator's rise. In particular, Dickens adapts those details from the public record that convey the phenomena whereby the speculator's reputation accrues value in its own right, becoming more important than actual financial results. For example, Hudson earned numerous nicknames throughout his career that testified to his commercial importance. He was not only termed a “Wonder of the World” (Lambert 174), but was “lauded to the skies as the veritable man of the age, the resuscitator of industrial prosperity and the most successful financier of the century” (Evans 65). In a purposeful exaggeration of Hudson's reputation, Merdle is described as “one of the greatest converters of the root of all evil into the root of all good” (210; bk. 1, ch. 21) and the “eighth wonder of the world” (502; bk. 2, ch. 15). Furthermore, both men share the ability to raise stock prices merely by their connection with a scheme. Arnold and McCartney note that Hudson's name “was so synonymous with success that the mere use of it in conjunction with a new railway project would provide the credibility that promoters needed” (147). Similarly, the power of Mr. Merdle's name on a company prospectus is such that a potential investor inquires, “‘Now what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?’ And the reply being in the negative, had said, ‘Then I won't look at you’” (207; bk. 1, ch. 21).

In describing the almost mystical power of Hudson's reputation to effect financial outcomes, Evans reported that his name had a “talismanic value” (20). Dickens expands upon and dissects this notion, describing the almost religious fervor with which the speculator is viewed, coupled with a complete lack of any basis for such devotion:

In this passage, Dickens takes pains to strip away the trappings that surround and exalt the “Great Man,” exposing the “common clay” and “clogged wick” that reside underneath. There is no inherent value to Merdle's activities beyond what is credited to him by a willing public – no manifest “good” provided to “any one. . . or any earthly thing.” In Dickens's view, the transparent Mammonism exhibited by this worship of Merdle's wealth demeans the very public who idolize him, reducing them to the level of “savages” who invest inanimate objects with supernatural power. Even more censurable are those “high priests of this worship” who, unlike the unwitting public, have direct knowledge of the man himself and yet still eschew that reality for the promise of the mythical creation.

As this passage suggests, Merdle functions as a cipher – an empty screen upon which others project their desire for wealth, reputation, or power. It is with more than a touch of irony that the narrator proclaims, “Mr. Merdle is the man of this time. The name of Merdle is the name of the age” (404; bk. 2, ch. 5). Through the unqualified celebration of the name of “Merdle,” Dickens offers a sharp commentary on society's tendency to lionize financial success without really understanding it. Hudson's affairs were so convoluted that one board of inquiry doubted “whether they will ever be able to trace, in all its details, the wholesale system of jobbing and peculation which have so signally marked the railway career of Mr. Hudson” (Lambert 270). Dickens takes such mystification one step further. We never really find out what Merdle does, because he seems to do it all: “He was in everything good, from banking to building . . . . He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, president of the other” (206-7; bk. 1, ch. 21). What we do know about him and his business takes the form of rumor and innuendo, as when Bishop gossips to Horse Guards, “Mr. Merdle has made another enormous hit. They say a hundred thousand pounds,” but “Horse Guards heard two. Treasury heard three” (208; bk. 1, ch. 21). Even the narrator observes at one point, “nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was” (331; bk. 1, ch. 33) – a pointed bit of irony, in that the only person who knows the truth of his financial dealings is, in fact, a “nobody” – Merdle himself. The lack of interest in the specific details of Merdle's financial empire suggests the extent of society's willing involvement in the type of mystification necessary for such financial frauds to flourish.

Death, of course, reveals the idol's clay feet. Only after Merdle's suicide has exposed the lies that such blind adoration obscured do we confront his body in its entirety – a physical exposure that mirrors the revelation of his financial crimes. Though we are only offered a brief glimpse, the image is striking for its unblinking scrutiny, in pointed contrast to the effusive yet vague descriptions of Merdle's fame and reputation. This is no longer the mythical Merdle but the man himself, stripped of the trappings of his position. And what we encounter is shocking and coarse: “Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features” (589-90; bk. 2, ch. 25). Once Merdle is exposed – both literally and figuratively – his class origins, merely hinted at earlier, are spoken of openly. Society deems him a “vulgar barbarian” (671; bk. 2, ch. 33), while the Chief Butler declares, “Mr. Merdle never was the gentleman” (592; bk. 2, ch. 25). The conclusion offered by the public rumor mill is even harsher: “he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow” (593; bk. 2, ch. 25). Emphasizing the physical terms of this reassessment, the narrator points out, “Mr. Merdle was found out, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket” (671; bk. 2, ch. 33). Dickens concludes Merdle's exposure by tracing the trajectory of his career, from legend to legerdemain: “he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared – was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows” (594; bk. 2, ch. 25). Merdle, the former “golden wonder” (475; bk. 2, ch. 12), has been reduced in the end to carrion – his moral decay having been literalized in the putrefaction of his physical body.

Tamara Wagner and Audrey Jaffe, among others, have pointed out the cultural work of such fictional deaths: aside from their narrative purpose, they functioned to reestablish confidence in the financial market. As Wagner explains, “Whenever financiers turned out to be criminals in popular fiction, they could be expunged from the system” (6), thus reassuring the public of the general security and moral probity of financial institutions.Footnote ⁹ However, Little Dorrit troubles that formulation, for the figure of the speculator is not exorcised from the novel with the death of Merdle. It continues in the person of Arthur Clennam.

The Speculator's Progress

The eagerness with which Society denounces Merdle after his death suggests a desire to deflect attention away from its own role in promoting and sustaining his fraudulent schemes. This complicity among the investing public is examined more specifically in Arthur's dual role: he is both a victim of Merdle's schemes and a speculator in his own right, a man who, “expressly against his partner's caution,” invested his firm's capital in “the swindles that had lately perished” (597–98; bk. 2, ch. 26). Yet at first glance, it would seem as if Arthur is the least likely person to become a speculator – a figure whose typical attributes of secrecy, avarice, and obsession call to mind those shadows of his family history that he is trying to leave behind. Graham Smith aptly notes, “Arthur is the child of nineteenth-century greed and materialism, cloaked under a veil of religious repression” (156). Raised under the dual influences of his parents’ unyielding religious beliefs and rapacious business practices, Arthur recalls his bleak upbringing as one of conformity and despair, as his personal needs were sacrificed to the requirements of the family's business. As he explains to Mr. Meagles, he was “trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted, and which was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated” (17; bk. 1, ch. 2). But the House of Clennam represents more than simply an abhorred past that Arthur wishes to leave behind. It is also aligned rhetorically with the tainted financial sphere depicted in Little Dorrit through the motif of secrecy that dominates its depictions. Poovey has observed that secrecy and disclosure were central to the workings of finance capitalism in the nineteenth century. The financial system depended upon disclosure. Publicizing prices, for example, made the workings of the market seem transparent and thus encouraged confidence and future investment. At the same time, profit and success within that market depended on individuals and institutions holding close specific information, such as actual prices of trades, that gave them a competitive edge (“Writing about Finance” 30–31).

This ethos shapes the business practices of Mrs. Clennam, who exudes an air of secrecy and mistrust. A common image whenever Mrs. Clennam commences business, for example, is for her to go to her “tall cabinet” and “unlock and open it,” while Arthur, commenting on the state of the family's business, notes, “We have never shown much confidence, or invited much” (36, 37; bk. 1, ch. 5). This emphasis on secrecy does more than simply mark Mrs. Clennam's involvement in the realm of finance capitalism. As Barbara Weiss has noted, the initial description of Mrs. Clennam's house includes “dark references to banking houses with secret keys meant only for ‘a very few secret pockets and a very few secret breasts’” (“Secret Pockets” 68). Such an image, Weiss argues, connects the activities conducted there to the financial scandals of the 1850s such as the Royal British Bank, where it was discovered that directors “had loaned money liberally and without security to themselves and their associates, the transactions being recorded in a secret ledger whose key was entrusted to only a few persons” (“Secret Pockets” 70–71). Mrs. Clennam's investment in secrecy – especially her fraudulent concealment of her father-in-law's will – aligns her with such financial impropriety and double-dealing. The transgressions perpetrated by the House of Clennam provide some additional contours to the financial sphere that Dickens is reacting against in Little Dorrit. It is not just the Merdles (or Sadleirs, or Hudsons) of the world that are his target, but the petty thieves and unscrupulous traders such as Mrs. Clennam and her deputy, Flintwich.

Arthur's decision to form a partnership with Daniel Doyce based on principles of honesty and openness signals his desire to separate himself from the defining characteristic of his family's business, “the pursuit of selfish objects by low and small means” (259; bk. 1, ch. 26). In pointed contrast to the secrecy that rules Mrs. Clennam's business, when Arthur first approaches Doyce with the idea of a partnership, Doyce offers Arthur “the keys of all his books and papers,” saying, “Let Mr. Clennam have the means of putting himself on a perfect equality with me as to knowing whatever I know. If it should come to nothing after all, he will respect my confidence. Unless I was sure of that to begin with, I should have nothing to do with him” (220; bk. 1, ch. 23). When Doyce later comments on the “regularity and order” with which Arthur keeps the firm's books – “Nothing can be plainer. Nothing can be better” (562; bk. 2, ch. 22) – it is clear that Arthur has repaid his partner's openness in kind.

Furthermore, while Mrs. Clennam conducts her business out of an “old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black. . . [with] a patch of grass. . . as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty” (25; bk. 1, ch. 3), Arthur's office at Doyce & Clennam is described as “a room of wood and glass at the end of a long low workshop” that exudes a “fanciful and practical air” (223; bk. 1, ch. 23). The stagnation and decay that dominate the former are offset by the light, warmth, and energy of the latter, providing a fitting roadmap from Arthur's darkened and constrained past to an active, open future. Yet despite his desire to break with this past, Arthur's blighted upbringing, “so long, so bare, so blank” (139; bk. 1, ch. 13), ironically has prepared him to assume the role of a speculator. Having been deprived of human warmth, connection, and pleasure for so many years, Arthur has developed the habit of imaging them as a future state or goal, “For it had been the uniform tendency of this man's life – so much was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better directed and happier to speculate upon – to make him a dreamer, after all” (33; bk. 1, ch. 3). This speculative aspect of his personality not only leads him to form conjectures about a possible connection between Little Dorrit and his father's unnamed guilt, but also makes Arthur vulnerable to Pancks's proposal to invest in Merdle's enterprises. Lured by the promise of an alternate future that is more appealing than the present, Arthur is tempted to abandon his usual caution.

Pancks's business philosophy – “keep me always at it, I'll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it” (135; bk. 1, ch. 13) – offers a secularization of the notion of duty put forth in the seventeenth-century devotional pamphlet “The Whole Duty of Man” (Brown 94). As such, it recalls the creed of Arthur's parents, whose “very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered up as part of a bargain for the security of their possessions” (17; bk. 1, ch. 2). Thus, it is significant that it is Pancks who convinces Arthur of the soundness of Merdle's enterprises, for the offer draws Arthur back into a world where accumulating money is more important than human relationships. “Why should you leave all the gains to the gluttons, knaves, and imposters?” argues Pancks, adapting the principle of self-interest to make his case. “Why should you leave all the gains that are to be got, to my proprietor and the like of him?” (489; bk. 2, ch. 13).

During the entire conversation in which Pancks attempts to convince Arthur that the “inclination to speculate with Mr. Merdle” is sound business, both men are smoking “Eastern pipes” provided by Arthur, a material reminder of his years of drudgery for his father in China (487, 486; bk. 2, ch. 13).Footnote ¹⁰ At one point, the smoke from the pipes becomes literally entwined in the conversation: Pancks gets so worked up about the possibilities offered by the investment opportunity that Arthur “was fearful of something happening to Mr. Pancks, in the violent conflict that took place between the breath he jerked out of himself and the smoke he jerked into himself” (489; bk. 2, ch. 13). This “violent conflict” mirrors the one taking place within Arthur himself, as he struggles between his newly embraced business principles (Daniel Doyce is firmly “against speculation” [563; bk. 2, ch. 22]) and the financial temptations that Pancks offers:

In this passage, Arthur commingles his dreams for the future with the dismal recollections of his youth, finally coming to rest on a speculation that attempts to gain the former by embracing the philosophy of the latter. The “symptoms” of his particular form of the disease include the resentment and frustration he has built up through his years of labor – those “toils and disappointments” (488; bk. 2, ch. 13) for which he wants to recompense his partner, but perhaps also himself. In this novel of prisons and imprisonment, Arthur's turn to stock speculation is a reminder of those psychological chains that still bind him. Despite the new beginning signified by his partnership with Doyce, he has not fully escaped from the “grasping for money” (39; bk. 1, ch. 5) represented by the House of Clennam.Footnote ¹¹

Educating Investors

The image of Arthur and Pancks discussing the soundness of Merdle's enterprises is also significant because it offers an intimate look at the relatively recent mid-century phenomenon of stock market investing among the middle classes. As such, it directly engages with questions and concerns that emerged as England transformed over the latter half of the nineteenth century into “a nation of shareholders” (Robb, White-Collar Crime 3). One particular concern that resonated throughout the Victorian era was how to draw the line between “fair enterprise” and “extravagant speculation” (Itzkowitz 125).Footnote ¹² Sir John Barnard's Act of 1734, which outlawed futures trading, combined with the Gaming Act of 1845, which made “wagering contracts” unenforceable at law, called into question the legality – not to mention the morality – of much of the activity of the financial market. Defenders of the stock market responded to these challenges by attempting to distinguish between sound investments, which were to be encouraged, and risky speculative activities that, they felt, rightly deserved opprobrium. Therefore the stock exchange “sought from its beginnings to establish its security, safety, and respectability by declaring some forms of trading and some kinds of traders to be inadmissible on the basis of illegitimacy or risk” (Jaffe 50). Such efforts to mark a clear distinction between speculation and investing did more than merely clarify the differences between the two activities; they attempted to alleviate concerns about the stock market in general. In effect, they worked to “domesticate” the stock market by reconfiguring its activity as familiar, unthreatening, and morally acceptable.

The nineteenth-century novel played a formative role in this cultural negotiation. According to Audrey Jaffey, it did so by defining speculation in affective terms, articulating a “particular constellation of feelings and attitudes” that distinguish the investor from the speculator. In this way, the nineteenth-century novel did “what novels do best,” which is to “draw that line: to harden suspicion into narrative” (78). Yet Little Dorrit not only seems to resist drawing such a line, but to call that entire process into question. For although, as Pancks argues, the “figures are not to be disputed,” the Merdle scheme, which “ought to have been a good investment” turns out to have been a risky speculation (638; bk. 2, ch. 30). Instead of clarifying the distinction between legitimate and illicit behavior, the investment subplot in Little Dorrit seems to call such boundaries into question.

Pancks, with the thousand pounds he earned through his successful efforts to track down and secure the Dorrit fortune, and Arthur, who manages the small capital of his firm, represent the growing ranks of those who began entering the stock market in the 1840s and 1850s as investment opportunities increased.Footnote ¹³ They are among the intended beneficiaries of the mid-century limited liability reforms, which opened up the stock market to “‘cautious persons, of moderate capital, and esteemed for their intelligence and probity’” (“Law of Partnership” vi, qtd in Loftus 104). Pancks, who is described as “a very cautious fellow” (563; bk. 2, ch. 22), is presented as an adroit stock market investor, the forerunner of those “model” investors that made their way into the pages of articles designed to educate the investing public during the latter part of the century.Footnote ¹⁴ Pancks continually emphasizes the vast difference between his financial knowledge and that of the uninformed masses of potential investors who “know nothing of figures. Know nothing of money questions. Never made a calculation.” In contrast, Pancks approaches investing with the same methodical thoroughness that he demonstrated in his research into the Dorrit fortune. As he explains to Clennam, “I've gone into it. I've made the calculations. I've worked it. They're safe and genuine” (487; bk. 2, ch. 13).

In their cautious approach to investing, Arthur and Pancks are not only distinguished from naïve investors but also unscrupulous risk-takers. Both men are explicitly wary of speculation, and articulate this aversion in moral terms. As Arthur explains to Daniel Doyce, he and Pancks “both agreed that, to travel out of safe investments, is one of the most dangerous, as it is one of the most common, of those follies which often deserve the name of vices” (563; bk. 2, ch. 22). In fact, it is only after Pancks has done extensive calculations on the scope, security, and soundness of the Merdle schemes that they decide to invest. What, then, are we to make of the fact that instead of being “worth from three to five thousand pound[s]” (638; bk. 2, ch. 30), Pancks discovers that his investments are worthless speculations after all?

Although investing was becoming increasingly popular in the mid-nineteenth century, financial accounting and joint-stock company regulation lagged behind this growing interest in entering the market. In its 1849 report, the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Audit of Railway Accounts cited the lack of uniformity in preparing accounts in the railway industry as a contributing factor in the recent financial losses and recommended that companies adopt a standard reporting form. In response to some of the more egregious frauds committed by the railways, the Committee also called for an end to secret accounting entries (something George Hudson was known for), the establishment of a reserve or depreciation fund, and more professional auditing of company reports (Lewin 354). But despite the glaring need for tighter financial controls, the state of financial accounting in nineteenth-century Britain remained loose and informal. Until the 1870s, when accounting became professionalized, audits were commonly performed by amateur auditors (often friends of the directors or prominent shareholders) and rarely went beyond merely confirming the information provided to the public (Robb, White-Collar Crime 128–29). George Robb notes, “Even many honest directors believed that shareholders, like children, should know no more than is good for them, and, like children, should be deceived for their own good.” As a result, financial reports issued at annual shareholder meetings often contained the “meagerest information,” and balance sheets “lumped together assets so that the profits (if any) for a given year were not clearly discernable” (White-Collar Crime 127).Footnote ¹⁵

Given this lack of reliable financial information available to mid-century investors, it becomes clear that the line Pancks and Arthur draw between investment and speculation is not as absolute as either man naively believes. When Pancks's sense of security in “the numbers” is revealed as an illusion, he becomes an object lesson to other middle-class investors – a reminder that analyzing financial information does not necessarily protect against fraud. Given the general vulnerability of the joint-stock system to corruption and manipulation of information, diligent research and careful investing, such as Pancks conducted, are not enough to protect new investors. As Robb explains, “Among the hundreds of proposed railway lines dangled before the English public [in the 1840s], were many who were downright fraudulent. The nation, however, was ill-equipped to separate the sheep from the goats. . . . Investors had little access to good financial advice or even to accurate financial data. Fraud thrived in this atmosphere of ignorance and confusion” (White-Collar Crime 34). The inference here is that one simply can't “account” for fraud and corruption. Thus, although critics such as Tamara Wagner have argued that financial narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century “were regularly concerned with marking out anything fraudulent or unstable as an exception, a mere fluke” (6) that could be removed in order to stabilize the system, Dickens's depiction of the investment experience depicted in Little Dorrit offers a disconcerting exception to this practice. Even after the unscrupulous speculator is exposed and expunged from the text, the taint of uncertainty and fraud clings to the depiction of stock market investing. For even the most cautious of investors (Pancks) and the most scrupulous of men (Arthur), what appears to be a solid investment can turn out to be a mere speculation after all.

Somebody

To underscore this point, the aftermath of Merdle's financial collapse and suicide is replete with contemporary stereotypes of the “legions” of innocent victims who will be ruined: “Numbers of men in every profession and trade would be blighted by his insolvency; old people who had been in easy circumstances all their lives would have no place of repentance for their trust in him but the workhouse; legions of women and children would have their whole future desolated by the hand of this mighty scoundrel” (593; bk. 2, ch. 25). But how “innocent” are those “victims?” Even as the focus on Arthur's and Pancks's involvement in the Merdle enterprises puts a face on those nameless and numerous victims, Arthur's role as both victim and perpetrator troubles the simple characterization offered by the image of “ruined women and children.” For at the same time that he is a victim of Merdle's swindles, Arthur becomes a double for Merdle: an unscrupulous speculator who, through his own actions, has “ruined. . . [an] honest, self-helpful, indefatigable old man” (594-5; bk. 2, ch. 26) – his partner, Daniel Doyce. The bare facts of the case against Arthur are damning: against the wishes of his absent partner, he invested the firm's capital in speculative activities that ultimately collapsed, bankrupting the firm. Thus Arthur not only personalizes the victims of share abuses, but also the perpetrators.

As Elaine Showalter and others have noted, much of the social satire in Little Dorrit occurs through doubling, most particularly in the way that the social pretensions of the Dorrit family mirror and mock those of Mrs. Gowan, Mrs. Merdle, and the rest of Society (Showalter 31–39). But doubling also occurs through the displacement of “proper feeling” from one character to another, as when Little Dorrit expresses the shame and humiliation that her father disavows in his solicitation of “testimonials” from inmates in the Marshalsea. One of the most striking instances of such displacement is this confluence of Arthur's guilt for some unknown “sin” his parents may have committed and his assumption of accountability for Merdle's financial crimes, enacting the self-recrimination and punishment that properly belong to the swindler.

Stewart Justman traces Arthur's assumption of guilt to a “habit of vicariousness, a concern with the woes and sins of others.” Even before he embarked on his speculative schemes, Arthur was “haunted not by a wrong he himself committed or even one he is strongly implicated in, but by the supposition of a crime done by one or both of his parents in connection with the family business” (42). Justman connects this vicarious guilt to Arthur's lack of purpose and agency. While Arthur's mother “owns” her guilt for her past actions “with a strange pride and even possessiveness,” Arthur himself “abdicate[s] the first person and live[s] in the character of nobody, a kind of understudy of a man” (42). From this perspective, we can read Clennam's statement of guilt as an act of self-determination: a separation from the legacy of familial guilt that has haunted his life through an active admission of his own, personal misdeeds.Footnote ¹⁶

Such an interpretation is bolstered by the energy and eagerness with which Arthur embraces his role as a criminal. Rejecting his solicitor's advice to consider and protect his own interests, Arthur instead conveys his “fixed resolution. . . publicly to accept the blame of what he had rashly done” by declaring that “he, Arthur Clennam, of that Firm, had of his sole act, and even expressly against his partner's caution, embarked its resources in the swindles that had lately perished” (597-8; bk. 2, ch. 26). In an echo of his earlier ineffectual plea to his mother, “if restitution can be made to anyone, let us know and make it” (40; bk. 1, ch. 5), he also actively embraces a self-directed course of repentance and reparation: “What wretched amends I can make must be made. . . 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” (596; bk. 2, ch. 26). It is therefore fitting, given Arthur's construction of his financial failure as a “crime,” that he is sent to jail – albeit debtor's jail.

The power and agency that Arthur experiences by embracing his role as a confessed criminal is reinforced by the transformation that both he and Merdle undergo after the exposure of their crimes. Whereas Merdle was a “nobody” who was reduced to a mere body when his financial schemes collapsed, Arthur ironically becomes a “somebody” at this moment. Not only is he the only person who is imprisoned in the aftermath of Merdle's collapse, but he also becomes the sole focus of scorn and condemnation for the thousands of others who had likewise been bilked. By taking on a measure of guilt far greater than his actions suggest and accepting the consequences, Arthur fulfills a plea that Dickens made in the August 1856 Household Words article, “Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody,” which addresses many of the same themes that figure so prominently in Little Dorrit. Dickens begins by decrying the “Nobody” who was responsible for the gross mismanagement of the Crimean War: “It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind, who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no means of transport, who killed the horses” (482). He then identifies and condemns such general bureaucratic incompetence in the political sphere – enshrined in Little Dorrit in the Circumlocution Office – as well as the toadyism, nepotism, and public complacency that “set afloat a system of false pretence and general swindling, the taint of which soon begins to manifest itself in every department of life” (484). The article ends with a plea for accountability, embodied in the figure of “Somebody:” “And yet, for the sake of Everybody, give me Somebody! I raise my voice in the wilderness for Somebody. . . Come, responsible Somebody, accountable Blockhead, come!” (485). The hyper-responsible Arthur, who carries the guilt of his parents and has assumed the guilt of the speculator, emerges out of the backdrop of “false pretence” and “general swindling” that characterizes Society in Little Dorrit to become that “Somebody.”

As “Somebody,” the public face of the chastened and repentant speculator, Arthur can finally externalize and expiate the guilt he carries as a legacy from his father through an act of penance for his own financial “crimes.” Arthur's emergence from the shadows that have haunted his life is prefigured in Little Dorrit's story of the Princess and the “tiny woman.” Like Arthur, the “tiny woman” carries a shadow with her – one that she keeps locked away in a “very secret place.” This shadow, however, is not a secret of shame and transgression, but of clandestine love. As Little Dorrit explains to Maggy, “It was the shadow of Some one who had gone by long before: of Some one who had gone on far away quite out of reach, never, never to come back.” In case the allusion has been lost, Maggy clarifies, “Some one was a man then?” (245; bk. 1, ch. 24). The possibility for Arthur to become that Someone if he recognizes and returns the love of the “tiny woman,” as Little Dorrit is often described, offers him the chance to fulfill the “hopeful promises” and “playful fancies” of his earlier youthful speculations (679; bk. 2, ch. 34). Note that the word “speculation” in this context carries the original meaning it had in the opening chapters of the book, when it referred to Arthur's hopes and dreams for the future, in contrast to the specifically financial connotations it assumed when he succumbed to speculation fever. The collapse of his financial schemes has made way for the fulfillment of his romantic fancies; the speculator can now be domesticated.

This shift from the financial to the domestic register, figured in the marriage plot of Little Dorrit, contrasts with the resolution offered by another speculation novel, Trollope's The Prime Minister. In Trollope's novel, Audrey Jaffe insists, “the marriage plot is, in fact, the financial plot” (69). Although The Prime Minister centers on rise and fall of the villain-speculator Ferdinand Lopez, more importantly, according to Jaffe, it figures Emily Wharton's marriage to Lopez as a form of emotional speculation. That is, romantic feeling is positioned as a form of capital, to be speculated with and invested in marriage. From this perspective, Jaffe explains, Emily's initial romantic feelings for Lopez “may be understood as the characteristic attitude of the speculator,” and her disastrous marriage to him teaches her that she must “invest her emotions, as she would her money, wisely” (68).

But while, as Jaffe notes, “the terms of romance and those of finance are interchangeable” in Trollope (68), the two remain quite distinct in Dickens. In fact, Little Dorrit figures the reclamation of the speculator in both romantic and financial terms. This double resolution includes not only Arthur's marriage to Little Dorrit but also his financial rehabilitation through the resurrection of the partnership of Doyce and Clennam. The process begins with Doyce's re-interpretation of Arthur's “crime” as a simple computational error:

Whereas Arthur, in his overzealous insistence on accepting responsibility for the firm's collapse, had conveyed a sense of intentional recklessness in his financial decisions, Doyce counters with the image of a straightforward mechanical miscalculation: an error in one part that affects the whole. Doyce's assertion of the educational nature of this experience (“You will profit by the failure, and will avoid it another time”) insists on a future for Arthur that rejects the usual endpoint of a speculator's career: death or jail. Although Doyce's formulation seems to suggest a faith in “the numbers” to differentiate between investment and speculation, his talk of “machines” and “construction” takes such activity out of the domain of finance capitalism and situates it firmly within the manufacturing sector, where such calculations have a material basis. By insisting on the rebirth of their partnership on these terms, Doyce recommits Arthur to an idealized image of English industry as productive and useful. Unlike Merdle, a man who had never “done any good to anyone alive or dead, or to any earthly thing” (464; bk. 2, ch. 12), Arthur is welcomed by Doyce into the fellowship of men “quick in invention and determined in execution: practical men, who could make the men and means their ingenuity perceived to be wanted, out of the best materials they could find at hand” (561-2; bk. 2, ch. 22).

The rehabilitation of Arthur's partner in speculation, Pancks, mirrors Arthur's reclamation, though in a minor key. Disillusioned by Merdle's collapse and angered by the continued existence of such chicanery, Pancks exposes another imposter, Casby, who plays the part of the generous patriarch while squeezing his renters through his agent. In a gesture reminiscent of Merdle's physical exposure,Footnote ¹⁷ Pancks brazenly cuts off Casby's flowing white hair, the hallmark of his guise of benevolence, to reveal a “bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big-headed, lumbering personage. . . not in the least impressive, not in the least venerable” (669; bk. 2, ch. 32). At the same time, Pancks exposes Casby's methods to the occupants of Bleeding Heart Yard, declaring, “What do you think of his showing himself to-night, that I may have all the blame on Monday? What do you think of his having had me over the coals this very evening, because I don't squeeze you enough?. . . He's a driver in disguise, a screwer by deputy, a wringer, and a squeezer, and a shaver by substitute” (667-68; bk. 2, ch. 34). Having been chastened by his financial experiences, Pancks publicly rejects Casby and his philosophy of “keep[ing] always at it” (136; bk. 1, ch. 13) that had prompted his own entry into the financial market and is subsequently welcomed into the fellowship of Doyce and Clennam, eventually becoming a partner in the firm.

Yet is significant that, unlike the more “triumphant” ending of Dombey and Son, in which a new firm “is gradually rising, perhaps to equal, perhaps to excel, that of which [Dombey] was once the head” (974; ch. 62), Arthur and Doyce “will construct no great commercial ‘edifice’ to replace the one that has smashed” (Weiss, Hell of the English 159). Although the ending of Little Dorrit is highly sentimental – Arthur is saved through the love of a good woman and the loyalty of his business partner – it is also subdued. The shadows of the past that have clung to Arthur have not entirely been lifted; although the reader knows the secret of his birth and the source of his parents’ guilt, he does not. The novel's final image is similarly ambivalent: Arthur and Little Dorrit walk “quietly down. . . the roaring streets” into a “modest life of usefulness and happiness,” yet they are surrounded by the “fret[ing] and chaf[ing]” and “usual uproar” of the “arrogant and the froward and the vain” (688; bk. 2, ch. 34). The strong contrast between foreground and background in this concluding scene suggests that while Arthur may have been altered by his experience, the larger society remains unchanged. Merdle may be dead, and Arthur and Pancks may have renounced speculation, but the threat it poses remains.Footnote ¹⁸ As Ferdinand Barnacle confides to Arthur at the end of the novel,

To Dickens, having witnessed the financial scandals of the 1840s and 1850s, the rise of another stock swindler such as Merdle may have seemed inevitable.Footnote ¹⁹ By preying on the average investor's gullibility and desire for easy riches, such fraudulent speculators expose society's crass materialism, as well as the ways that weakness can be manipulated for individual gain. As Mrs. Merdle so aptly reminds her friend Mrs. Gowan, “Society is perhaps a little mercenary you know, my dear” (330; bk. 1, ch. 33). By extension, the stock market is revealed as yet another flawed institution, like the governmental, political, and social realms satirized in Little Dorrit, which reflects and amplifies the worst aspects of human nature.

The novel's response to such failings is to turn inward, away from the public sphere and toward an investment in individual relationships and personal responsibility. Though perhaps reassuring to Dickens's mid-century readers, such an “inward turn” would become less practical over time, as the securities market became more central to the everyday lives of Victorians. The depiction of Pancks's and Arthur's investment experiences offers another option – a way for readers to engage vicariously with this emerging reality. By encouraging them to become speculators themselves, picturing their own responses to the novel's unfolding financial events, Little Dorrit thus played a role in the larger project by which the nineteenth-century realist novel mediated for readers the workings of finance capitalism. But while it helped to naturalize the operations of the stock market, the novel also offers a clear-eyed assessment of its limitations and vulnerabilities. Pancks's failed investment calculations remind readers that one can't “account” for fraud, while Merdle's unwarranted fame suggests the public's complicity in the perpetuation of such frauds. By cautioning against the larger structural dangers posed by speculative schemes and condemning the social environment that encourages such abuses, the novel thus conveys a deep ambivalence about both the stock market and stock speculators, even as it gave potential investors the means to imagine themselves navigating this new financial terrain.