The Devil Let Loose in Little Dorrit

Abstract: Little Dorrit , among many other things, is an exposition of Dickens's ideas on how to present the supernatural in an appropriate language. The most immediately striking vehicle for this is its unusually large number of biblical quotations and pointed references to the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. They provide a powerful rhetoric of ideas for the novel as a dramatic poem. Allusion to scriptural sources encompasses a great flexibility in tone: irony, contempt, horror, incredulity, amusement, approval. It sustains a sense of the supernatural dimension within the novel's naturalism. Dickens's presentation of different forms of evil in Little Dorrit has much in common with the presentation of the diabolic and the hellish in works he is known to have read in the 1840s: Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third," Swedenborg's treatise, Concerning Heaven and Hell , and Dante's Inferno , coupled with Paradise Lost .