Remember that Charles Dickens anecdote from a while back? The short version: Dickens, a famed writer already in middle age, reconnects by letter with a woman he once loved passionately. She tells him that in the decades since he’s seen her she’s grown “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” He demurs. They meet. He is repelled to find that she is, in truth, toothless, fat, old and ugly. He places a character based on her in the novel he’s writing, Little Dorrit. The portrait isn’t flattering.
I may be overly sensitive about this story. A couple weeks ago, Lowell and I were watching the recent BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit and at least two or three times when Flora, the character based on Mrs. Winters, came on screen I’d say something like, “SHE TOLD HIM SHE WAS TOOTHLESS, FAT, OLD AND UGLY. WHAT DID HE EXPECT?!?!?”
Now I’m reading the novel for the first time and enjoying it. The BBC adaptation is about 14 hours long, and even at that length they had to elide and compress quite a bit. They did an artful job of it, but still it’s a pleasure to have the fullness of psychology and circumstance that Dickens put in there. One of these places of added dimension is in the meeting of the protagonist Arthur Clennam with Flora. In the BBC version, this scene is mostly comic (Flora is played by Ruth Jones, who is wonderfully funny). In the novel, the meeting is comic — but tinged with a real melancholy. Here is the description of Clennam’s feelings when Flora, now “very broad” and simpering, enters the room:
Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’