by The Adaptation Stationmaster
Episode 10
This is one of the few Dickens stories to take place outside of England and I must say the miniseries takes advantage of the opportunities for cool scenery.
Mrs. General is showing Fanny, Amy and Frederick around a Venetian museum. (There’s a hilarious exchange here between her and Fanny. It’s too long for me to quote but you can read it here.) Sparkler is also there and tries to flirt with Fanny, but she coldly dismisses him. He takes Amy aside and asks her for help getting in her sister’s good graces. Amy doesn’t like him as a husband for Fanny, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings either and it’s a relief for her to talk with someone who doesn’t mind reminiscing about her family’s past. Mrs. Merdle approaches the Dorrits at the museum too. She and Fanny exchange barbed pleasantries with Fanny making it clear that she doesn’t consider her son any great catch. But Mrs. Merdle gets in some good shots too, saying that the Dorrits must have been abroad for a long time since she’s only been recently introduced to them. Little does she know it’s really Mr. Dorrit, not Fanny, that she’s wounding there.
Mrs. Merdle writes an urgent letter to her husband, telling him about Fanny, saying, “She has that look in her eyes that clearly announces she means to take a terrible revenge upon me.” She demands he get Sparkler a job right away to separate him from Fanny. This is something of a change from the book where Mrs. Merdle gave her approval to the match. Then again, Dickens never explained Mrs. Merdle’s sudden anxiousness for her son to get a job. Maybe this really was the implication and her later acceptance of the Dorrits as in-laws represented a change of heart on her part. In any case, after reading the letter, Mr. Merdle tells his chief butler he needs to host a dinner party. He announces this in much the same tone a man might say he’s going to war. The butler receives the news with his usual aloof contempt.
In Bleeding Heart Yard, Pancks tells Clennam he’s “made the calculations” and Merdle’s bank is “copper bottom guaranteed.” He’s invested his reward from Mr. Dorrit in it and he advises Arthur to do the same with his firm’s money. “Why should we leave all the gains to the gluttons, knaves and imposters?” he asks. “You owe it to your partner. Make him rich. He deserves it if anyone does.” Arthur isn’t completely convinced by all this but he’s considering it. Pancks gets back to work, banging on the doors of Mr. Casby’s tenants and demanding rent from them. The miniseries does a great job of portraying Pancks’s two personalities, his loveable real one and the unpleasant one he puts on for his job. He reverts back to the first as he stops by the Plornishes’ but suddenly, Cavalletto jumps through their open window in a panic, shouting that he’s seen someone. That’s right. Rigaud is back.
Meanwhile, Mr. Merdle has to push his way through a crowd of people clamoring to get into his bank in the morning. Once safely inside, he asks the porter (George Potts) if they’re there to take their money out. “Oh, no, no, sir,” says the porter in surprise, “to get it in.” For someone who’s supposed to be so financially secure, Merdle looks relieved to hear this.
Posing as a Roman emperor, Mr. Dorrit has his portrait painted by Henry Gowan. I find it odd that, given his paranoia of slights, he wouldn’t be nettled by Gowan’s perpetually dismissive tone but whatever. He asks about his French friend and Henry tells him that Rigaud is long gone. Despite him being the one to insist on the man staying against his wife’s wishes, he calls this a “good riddance.” Pet confides in Amy that she’s sure Rigaud poisoned Lion. “I believe he is capable of anything,” she says.
Arthur makes another visit to the Meagleses who have just gotten a letter from Pet. Mr. Meagles expresses his concern for her and says it would have been better for her to marry Clennam though Arthur himself disclaims this. He also asks Mr. Meagles about Merdle’s bank, and he says the same thing as Pancks. “Get in while you can!” Mrs. Gowan has also dropped by for a visit, still doing her thing, insinuating that Mr. and Mrs. Meagles owe her son for marrying their daughter. Finally, her tone gets to be too much for Mr. Meagles. “Let us try to be fair,” he says, “Don’t you pity Henry, and we will try not to pity Pet.” When she openly accuses him of “scheming” for the match, he really blows his stack. This scene ends up being a bit more cathartic than the one in the book as Mr. Meagles is actually able to finish his angry speech and storm off rather than Mrs. Gowan being the one to cut it short. She’s still not fazed by it at all though and the implication is still that she bated him into losing his temper so she would have an excuse to avoid the family in the future. (Not that that would be a bad thing for them.) She asks Clennam to conduct her to her carriage. He looks like he’d like to conduct her off a cliff. (I don’t mean that as a criticism. She’s supposed to be super annoying.) Again, Janine Duvitski makes an impression as Mrs. Meagles with very little to do.
Making his way through the streets of London at night, Arthur spies an uncomfortable Tattycoram talking to someone. It’s Rigaud though Arthur doesn’t know that yet of course. He also sees Rigaud give Miss Wade the box. (If you listen carefully, you can hear him tell her to “keep it safe.”) Arthur follows Miss Wade and Tattycoram and is surprised to see them enter Casby’s house. He goes in and asks Flora about the strange visitors. She goes to ask her father, leaving Arthur in the company of Mr. F’s Aunt who gives him the crusts of her toast and gets mad when he doesn’t eat them. Annette Crosbie is such a scene stealer. (It’s a pity her role in the movie version of Into the Woods, which was already a cameo in the stage play, was trimmed so.) While he’s more of a dramatic actor than a comedic one, Matthew McFadyen also brings out the comedy in this scene. Ruth Jones is funny too as Flora flings herself at Clennam, asking him to put his arm around her as she takes him downstairs to her father.
Arthur asks Mr. Casby about Miss Wade just as Pancks is leaving his office. Casby refuses to tell him anything even when he explains about Tattycoram. In fact, he subtly accuses Arthur of taking a predatory interest in the young woman. (He refers to her as “a fine full colored woman with very dark hair” which is the closest anyone comes in the miniseries to bringing up the actress’s skin color and since the words come from the book, that probably wasn’t the intent.) Outside the office door, Pancks shouts, “good night, Mr. Clennam,” for his boss’s benefit and then whispers to Clennam what he knows about Miss Wade. It’s not much. She’s an illegitimate orphan. The only one who might know her parentage is Mr. Casby who has money for her in trust. Arthur tells Pancks about the strange man he saw conferring with her. “If it’s a contract, I hope he’s exact in it,” says Pancks. “I wouldn’t trust myself with her if I had wronged her.”
Imagine Arthur’s surprise when he passes by his mother’s place that very night and sees the same mysterious man ringing the bell and banging on the door! Hilariously, Affery’s reaction to opening the door and seeing Rigaud is to immediately try to close it again, but he slips inside and so does Arthur. Rigaud is very interested to hear that he’s Mrs. Clennam’s son, but he refuses to explain his business with Miss Wade and Tattycoram. Arthur tells his mother he doesn’t want to leave her with this man. “Allow me to know what is best for the business that you have abandoned,” she says coldly. “Good night.” Thrown out of her room, more or less, Arthur asks Affery about Rigaud or Blandois as they think he’s called. She just covers her face with her apron and begs him to leave her alone.
In private, Rigaud tells Mrs. Clennam he believes she has something to hide and offers his silence in exchange for one thousand pounds. She refuses but as Flintwinch shows Rigaud out of the house, he warns him she’d better rethink that position. “You know what I have,” he snarls. “Make the old lady see sense or the House of Clennam, it comes tumbling down.” Flintwinch is genuinely worried by this which, of course, means Affery is going to suffer for it. (Then again, when does she ever not suffer at her husband’s hands?) When Mrs. Clennam tells him Rigaud is not to be admitted to the house again, he suggests she “give him the thousand for the sake of peace and quiet.” She refuses, asking what he could possibly know after all. (“Those papers in the box were destroyed long since, weren’t they?”) But Mrs. Clennam is worried too. It’s hard not to imagine an accusation in her words. Since I expressed skepticism about whether showing the behind-the-scenes of Rigaud’s dealings with Miss Wade really served the storytelling or not, I should say that I have no such questions about this look at the behind-the-scenes of his dealings with Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch. It’s a great ending to the episode.
Episode 11
The Dorrit sisters observe their father and Mrs. General from afar. Fanny voices her suspicions that “Mrs. General has designs upon Papa and he is not averse to being designed upon.” Both sisters are averse though to the idea of having Mrs. General for a mother. Fanny even says she’d marry Sparkler first much to Amy’s dismay. “Consider,” she says, “you may be wrong about Father and Mrs. General.” “I may be, but I am not,” says Fanny. You could argue she’s slightly-only slightly-more likeable here than in the book in that she actually asks Amy how she would feel about this potential stepmother rather than just talking about how bad it would be for herself. I suspect though that this change was made more to allow Little Dorrit a chance to say that she doesn’t like the prospect than to make Fanny a better sister.
Amy continues to write to Arthur, confiding in him that she feels lost without her old cares and worries. She also tells him about Pet who is having a baby. Her parents are visiting. The contrast between how anxious they are during her labor and her husband who just seems bored and cynical about the whole thing, even a little resentful at having another mouth to feed, is great. Neither Pet nor the perceptive Little Dorrit can fail to pick up on it. (It’s interesting to note though that Henry isn’t totally wrong when he calls Mr. Meagles “a pompous old buffoon.” We’ve seen him act that way in past episodes though not really in this one.)
One day when Amy is going to go help Pet with her baby, Fanny intercepts her and lectures her about acting like a servant and embarrassing the family. “I am determined that Mrs. Merdle shouldn’t have anything to sneer about,” she says. While the miniseries generally makes Fanny more of a caricature than she was in the book, it actually does the opposite in this scene, giving her a bit more depth and complexity than in the source material by having her admit that she sometimes gets bored of her life of leisure and misses being a dancer. “We all have to make sacrifices,” she says, “Even Sparkler’s making sacrifices.” As always when her sister mentions Sparkler, Amy gets worried. Fanny tells her that Mr. Merdle is getting him a job. “Mr. Merdle, he can do anything,” she says reverently. You’ve got to love the implication that anyone hiring Sparkler would require a miracle. LOL.
The big dinner party at the Merdles’ is in full swing. As usual, Mr. Merdle looks like he’s being tortured. Physician and Bar (remember them?) gossip about how it’s really all about getting Edmund Sparkler a job at the Circumlocution Office where he’ll do no harm and no good. Tite Barnacle gets Lord Decimus’s tired pun from the book about Eton pears and parliamentary pairs. (Dickens meant it to be a tired pun.) He agrees to hire Sparkler without seeing him for the sake of the great Mr. Merdle.
In Venice, a grand party is held to congratulate Sparkler. Mr. Dorrit is there, kissing up to the Merdles as usual. Also as usual, Frederick and Amy feel out of place. Henry congratulates Sparkler though in a subtly insulting way, lamenting that the Barnacles haven’t given him, their relative, a job at the Circumlocution Office. “Leaving you to sponge off the in-laws you affect to despise,” says Fanny, sharp even by her standards. When I first watched the miniseries, I was a bit confused by this scene. It seemed so odd for such a negative character to be the one to call Gowan out. The book explained to me that once Sparkler was considered by everyone to be Fanny’s boyfriend, she couldn’t stand for him to embarrass her and so came to his defense whenever Henry drew him into humiliating himself before company. Maybe the miniseries should have had her criticize him for something different to make it clear she was motivated by pride, not moral concern. Still, it’s satisfying to hear anyone reprimand Henry Gowan to his face.
Mr. Meagles takes this opportunity to criticize the Circumlocution Office. (I’m not sure why he and his wife were invited to the party. I guess it’s because they’re the in-laws of Mrs. Merdle’s friend’s son.) “All I’ve ever seen anyone do at that place,” he says, “is pushing pieces of paper around, giving each other jobs for life and letting the country go to rack and ruin in the meantime!” This is something of a change from the book. While the literary Mr. Meagles was angry at the Circumlocution Office for not patenting Doyce’s invention, he also couldn’t help but be attracted to the Barnacle family’s glamour. It’s really interesting how this adaptation enlarges some of his blind spots and eliminates others. Mr. Dorrit comes to the Barnacles’ defense. Mr. Meagles, oblivious to the fact that he shouldn’t bring this up in front of everybody, responds by telling him that Arthur Clennam spent days at the Circumlocution Office trying to untangle Mr. Dorrit’s affairs for him to no avail. We hear the shutting of gates in Mr. Dorrit’s head again as well as the echoes of veiled insults from Mrs. Merdle and Henry Gowan.
Amy goes downstairs to help take her father to bed. He also gets to show a little more range than usual. When he chides her for not calling him Papa, as Mrs. General instructed her to do, he sounds affectionate for once rather than grieved. Amy shows a wider range of emotions too as she actually jokes that she’s “a disgrace” rather than stressing over the idea. “I fear you are,” her father says, “but you’re a good girl, Amy. A good girl.”
Back in England, Rigaud meets Flintwinch at a tavern. We cut to the next day when a police notice has been put out for the disappearance of “Blandois” who was last seen at Clennam and Co. Pancks asks Arthur what his mother has told him about this man. “My mother has never in her life taken me into her confidence,” he says bitterly. “Try her again,” Pancks urges, “she’s in trouble now.” Suddenly, Cavalletto runs up to them with the notice. He tells them he knows the man and his real name and that he’s “a bad man” and “a killer.” Regrettably, Arthur doesn’t ask Cavalletto to help him find Rigaud as he does in the book. What he does do is rush to his mother’s house. He arrives just in time to see Flintwinch talking to a(n uncredited) constable. He tells his mother what he’s learned about Rigaud. He just describes him as a criminal though, not a murderer. If he did, maybe Mrs. Clennam would give a start as she does on hearing that in the book. As it is, she seems completely unbothered and claims to have no fear of being blamed for the mysterious disappearance. What does unsettle her is Arthur expressing guilt for not visiting her more often and offering to change that. (In the book BTW, we’re told he does visit his mother regularly though neither she nor him enjoy it much.) “That won’t be necessary,” she says. “I may be paralyzed but I am not a weakling like your father was. Goodbye, Arthur.”
Sparkler and Fanny announce their official engagement to Amy. After she’s dismissed her extremely deferential betrothed, Fanny hugs and comforts her distraught sister. This is the other of the two scenes of her being wistful about her questionable life choices. (Well, there are only two where we’re supposed to feel bad for her. There are some others where she’s frustrated by Sparkler, but we’re supposed to laugh at her and maybe feel some satisfaction in those.) Mr. Dorrit needs no comfort. He heartily congratulates Fanny on making such a socially advantageous match and tells Amy to “mark and learn” from her. Truth be told, since Mrs. Merdle never gives her consent to the union in this version and we’ve seen how much Edmund is under her thumb, I feel like viewers actually end up rooting for this marriage too in spite of their better judgement. Mrs. Merdle is such a phony jerk that it feels good to see her son thwart her wishes. I can’t approve of the way Fanny deliberately bugs her, but I can’t say I don’t enjoy it. I also enjoy the hilarious yet ominous scene of Fanny’s wedding with Sparkler fumbling with lifting his bride’s veil until she finally loses patience and shoves her bouquet into his hands so she can lift it herself. Clearly, their honeymoon will be over soon. That is, if it ever begins.
Afterwards, Mr. Dorrit says that he will accompany Fanny and Sparkler back to England while Tip, Mrs. General, Fredrick and, much to her disappointment, Amy will stay behind. In the book, Little Dorrit is too shy to ask to go home though she longs to do so, so we never get an explanation for why her father doesn’t bring her. Here he apologetically says that she’s “not yet quite presentable in society” and she needs to learn more from Mrs. General. The episode ends with Amy standing by herself, looking lost and forlorn.
Episode 12
This is the first episode to be directed by Diarmuid Lawrence.
Mr. Dorrit arrives with his daughter and her new husband at Mr. Merdle’s house where even Fanny is a tad intimidated by the chief butler. (Just a tad, mind you.) Mr. Dorrit is so intimidated by him that, as thrilled as he is to meet Mr. Merdle and as terrified as he is of doing the wrong thing, he declines his invitation to stay at the house. He does ask Merdle about “the prudent investment of (his) capital” though and they agree to meet the next day to discuss it. As usual, Mr. Merdle looks like someone somewhere is holding a loved one of his hostage and will blow their brains out if he steps out of line. He and Mr. Dorrit are arguably well matched in that respect.
Meanwhile in Bleeding Heart Yard, Doyce tells Clennam he’s been offered a job as a consultant engineer at a factory in St. Petersburg, but he feels bad about leaving his partner with suspicion hanging over his family name. Arthur tells him not to worry about that but to just go. He also tells him he wants to invest Doyce and Clennam’s funds with Merdle. “Come on, Dan,” he says, “fortune favors the brave! This is the chance of a lifetime!” I feel like those expressions are way more cliched and hackneyed than Dickens would have given his characters in Little Dorrit. However, that doesn’t necessarily make this bad writing. After all, people often speak in cliches in real life. You could argue it adds a pleasing realism. I use a lot of cliche expressions in these recaps and I hope that gives them the pleasant impression of a real person talking. (The actual reason I use them is that the recaps are time consuming enough as it is without trying to be eloquent and original in my phrasing. I don’t mean that to sound like a complaint BTW. Nobody’s forcing me to write them. I came up with the idea myself.) Anyway, Doyce is reluctant to take the risk but ultimately agrees. In the book, Arthur never actually asks Doyce’s permission to invest their company’s capital. In fact, he calls Doyce’s aversion to speculation “the soundest sense.” I guess Andrew Davies felt that Clennam might lose the viewers’ sympathy if it seemed like he went behind his partner’s back. Having him encourage Doyce to go to Russia is another way of making sure he doesn’t lose that.
Mr. Dorrit proudly tells his valet (Stephane Cornicard) that he’s been invited to dine with Merdle every night he’s in London. He greatly enjoys his first dinner except when he catches the chief butler’s eye. The next morning, he and Mr. Merdle have their talk about investing his money with him. “At the present moment, it would not be possible for a mere outsider to come into any of the good things,” he says, “unless it were what we are accustomed to term a very long figure. There is a very good thing it might be possible to let you in on highly privileged terms.” As Mr. Merdle goes through this patter, we see him relaxed and in his element for once. It’s a new side to the character and not a pleasant one. Ironically (as we’ll see) he stresses the importance of “integrity and uprightness in these transactions.”
Mr. Dorrit happily goes to Merdle’s bank to invest. There he sees Arthur Clennam who calls to him, but he doesn’t answer. That bit isn’t from the book, but it makes a lot of dramatic sense. The many men entering the bank look as if they’re being swallowed up by it. Like I said, the directors for this miniseries do a good job of capturing the high emotions of Dickens’s writing style.
Arthur asks Pancks to help him track down Miss Wade as she might know where to find Rigaud. (Mrs. Plornish asks not to have him brought to Bleeding Heart Yard for Cavalletto’s sake.) At breakfast, Flora reads about Mrs. Clennam being suspected in his disappearance in the paper and is so worried that she goes down to Doyce and Clennam to ask Arthur how she can possibly help. (“Probably did it himself,” says Mr. F’s Aunt.)
Meanwhile, Mrs. General takes Little Dorrit to yet another art museum and gives her a list of artist’s names to memorize. Frederick amuses her by imitating Mrs. General behind her back.
Mr. Dorrit’s valet tells him that a Mrs. Finching would like to see him. Dorrit initially dismisses this but when he hears that she used to know Amy, he decides it would be safer to see her so that he can clarify that he knew nothing about his daughter having a job. Flora asks him if he’s seen Rigaud in Italy and shows him his picture in the police notice. Of course, he has. Flora asks him to “seek him out and make enquiries in the hotels and orange trees and vineyards and volcanoes and places for he must be somewhere, and why does he not come forward and clear all parties up?” Upon hearing that Mrs. Clennam is suspected of the murder of someone he once knew, Mr. Dorrit decides he’d better go and see her. She coldly gives him the party line that she doesn’t know anything and dismisses him. By now, the viewer is used to Mrs. Clennam’s unfriendliness, but Mr. Dorrit takes it as a personal slight. His cabby (Mark Kempner) then angers by asking if he’d like to take the route past the Marshalsea back to his hotel.
Dorrit is still fuming when he arrives back at his room and it’s the worst possible time for John Chivery to make a surprise visit with a gift of cigars for old times’ sake. Mr. Dorrit goes ballistic, accusing him of insults and even threatening him with a poker. After John tearfully assures him that wasn’t his intent, he seems to feel genuinely guilty and tries to make chitchat about John’s father. This is a great scene that really makes you feel bad for both characters. That night, Mr. Dorrit can’t enjoy dinner at Merdle’s as he imagines Physician and Bar gossiping about him. The chief butler’s presence doesn’t help. It’s so bad that he decides to return to Italy in the morning though not before buying an engagement ring for Mrs. General.
Doyce, we hear, has also left England. Pancks tells Clennam he’s found out that Miss Wade is staying in Whitstable with Tattycoram. In the book, they’re in Calais but it would probably have been too complicated to have Arthur go all the way to another country and then right back again even if it was just across the Channel.
We follow Mr. Dorrit on his trip. He practices proposing to Mrs. General in his head before deciding “to leave it to the inspiration of the moment.” He also worries about people judging him behind his back and insists on making as few stops along the way as possible. We sense his descent into madness through a montage of him repeatedly falling asleep in his carriage and waking up to find a different set of identical twins sitting across from him, likely as not in a different carriage. This is how Esther Summerson’s bout with smallpox should have been dramatized in the 2005 Bleak House IMO.
At night in Venice, Frederick enjoys entertaining Little Dorrit with his clarinet. “I’m not up to Fanny’s expectations,” he says, “and I’m not up to William’s and I’m certainly not up to Mrs. General’s but you take me as I am, Amy.” Mr. Dorrit seems angry to return and find them enjoying themselves without him even though they’re clearly delighted to see him again. (Or maybe it bothers him to be reminded that his brother once had to play music for a living.) He makes a big point of describing Frederick as “feeble” and “broken” but he’s clearly projecting. Chillingly, he asks if John has called and when Amy asks whom he means, claims he never mentioned anyone named John. I know I keep describing things as ominous in these recaps, but that word is perfect for this episode’s ending.
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 