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Finally one might dwell on the case of Dora/Flora: the sentimental inadequate "child-
wife" of David Copperfield transformed into the soppy inebriated Flora of Little Dorrit,
creating breathless surrealistic poetry of her own in a wheezing alcoholic haze. Her half-
remembered fossils of great verse littered amongst the ruins of her syntax produces effects
that are comically and pathetically memorable, and strangely and genuinely moving, and
not only in her resounding farewell:
The withered chaplet my dear is then perished the column
is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what's-
his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly
I must now retire into privacy and look upon the ashes of departed
joys no more but taking a further liberty of paying for the pastry
which has formed the humble pretext of our interview will for ever
say Adieu!"
(Book the Second, Chapter 34)
One could make a good case out for regarding Flora Finching both as the self-
induced victim of Romantic sentiment and as the vindicatress of Romance and snatches of
Romantic verse as a means of survival: if one in the end admits that in comparison with
others in this novel, Flora has indeed bent and not broken, as she claims (Book the First,
Chapter 24), while Clenham asserts earlier that he has been "broken, not bent" (Chapter
2), one could argue that Flora has been able to partly protect herself by taking refuge
not only in the bottle but also in fragments shored against her ruin. Flora suffers from her
Doraesque youth, but unlike the child-wife has refused to fade away.
To sum up: it seems to me that given the basic Gothic alignment of Dickens's
fiction, nevertheless his novels show a radical suspicion of the uses, the abuses and the
consequences of Romantic attitudes and Romantic views. Romantic rhetoric of most sorts
in the minds and mouths of people other than the omniscient narrator is immediately
suspect. It seems to me that Dickens frequently feels and implies that Romanticism and
snatches of Romantic poetry are used as a cover for and an escape from the mendacities
of modern life, the egotistic, exploitative disease of modern life and its social corruptions.
Romantic and poetic sentiment are appeals to illusions that mask the destructive aspects
of mercenary individuals operating in a callously materialistic society.
Dickens forces us to break down -- to deconstruct -- his own Gothic Romantic
presentation (the work of that great and inimitable entertainer) to see the harsh realities,
the threats, the damage, the villains and the victims that are submerged, partially or wholly,
beneath the surface of pleasure that his texts provide. This is the Dickens that has been
discovered in the twentieth century -- the modern academic view of Dickens, if you like
- at odds with the older, nostalgic, more secure and reassuring Pickwickian view of
Dickens. Dickens is a great showman and a great Romantic, but our awareness of his
