Book Review: The Companion to Little Dorrit by Trey Philpotts. Mountfield, near Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information, 2003

[...]as Philpotts effectively observes, perhaps the “most disheartening” feature was “that the movement of documents from one office to the next was entirely the responsibility of the applicant or his agent” (160). Since the Treasury Office, on which the Circumlocution Office is modeled (131–32, 399), supervised the Commissariat (148–49, 355), the branch of government responsible for mismanaging logistical support during the Crimean War, Philpotts gives us a clear understanding of the ineptitude and bungling — the rigidity, insensitivity, and irresponsibility — that led to suffering and death for thousands and thousands of British troops in the Crimea. In Merdle's misbehavior, as this Companion indicates, Dickens blends the railway speculation promoted by George Hudson and the bank failures caused by John Sadleir and others (18–20, 249–52): deceit and illegal practices seriously harmed vast numbers of ordinary people. In Little Dorrit the depiction of the prison's sordid, degrading atmosphere understates matters like the licentious behavior of some inmates and the wholly inadequate sanitation (106–07). Because Dickens's intense involvement in the life of his time is reflected in his fiction, the annotation that Philpotts provides reveals wide-ranging, industrious research, as well as resourcefulness. A scholar 290 doing such work must discover suitable sources (from Dickens's own era and from more recent times) and must then be energetic enough to find and visit libraries where these materials are accessible. [...]The Companion to Little Dorrit also displays sound judgment in deciding which details call for annotation, the same kind of good sense needed by a teacher to determine what in a text is self-evident and what should be explained.