Prisons and Accounting

Just a few days ago, I wrote that I had to stop trying to write about (capitalized) Meaning in the books I read. And now, all too soon, here am I to pronounce the Meaning of Dickens’s Little Dorrit.

Well, one of the meanings, anyway: redemption from a life of moral accounting.

The idea starts with prisons, a pervasive theme in both literal and figurative forms. The book begins with legal criminals Rigaud and Cavalletto in prison in Marseilles, and the jumping-off point for the main plot is the long incarceration of William Dorrit in the Marshalsea for debt. This much I remembered.

But I'm noticing so much more this time through the book. The workers of London are said to be in prison. The monks at the St. Bernard pass speak of their confinement. Mrs. Clennam says she is imprisoned by her wheelchair and bound to her house. Importantly, even the prisoners who have served their terms are described as having a lingering taint of prison about them. The words of Charles Darnay have been ringing in my ears: “[I am] bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it.”

Many characters keep mental balance sheets of right and wrong, for themselves and for others, operating under the idea that ethical behavior before God (or not) is just a matter of paying off bad deeds with good deeds or jail sentences or money (spent for the good of the state, of course) – just a matter of getting your account into the black. But then at the end (I won't give away all the details on the miniscule chance that you ever read this unjustly forgotten book), one character leaves the prison of keeping accounts and goes out to find the most humble Christian character of the book in order to ask for her forgiveness, and in doing so, the penitent character barely escapes death when the house that represents both prison and accounting literally collapses. The picture is of a passage not just from death to life or from sin to righteousness but from a religious stance that one can bargain with God by means of one's own righteousness to a position of humility, confession, and acceptance of grace.

More words ringing in my ears:

     “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
          because the LORD has anointed me
     to bring good tidings to the afflicted;
          he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
     to proclaim liberty to the captives,
          and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”

Much of my frustration with the American Church can be summarized by pointing out that a great book by one of the greatest authors in all of history can offer this profound Christian message and not be found on the shelves in a Christian book store.

P. S. Seriously? Blogspot’s spell checker doesn’t know the word “miniscule”?!