Dickens and Saint-Pierre: Paul et Virginie, David Copperfield, and Little Dorrit

Abstract: This article discusses Dickens's use in Little Dorrit of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie (1788), and makes discussion of this fundamental for David Copperfield and Little Dorrit . The shipwreck in Paul et Virginie is identified as a source text for the storm in David Copperfield , but the article is also concerned with Saint-Pierre's contributions to questions of childhood love in the transition to puberty, and the themes of innocence and corrupt urban existence in comparison with life in a colony. It engages with questions of women's desire and men's, locating the former as thwarted in nineteenth-century English society.