Foundling Hospital, est. 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram (?1668-1751), a retired merchant seaman, for the care of deprived and abandoned children; originally 'set among fields' until by urban encroachment it came to be in Guilford Street, St Pancras, north London. BR 38; CS 20; LD i 2; NN 36. (The Dickens Index)
Little Dorrit
"Tattycoram?" Mr. Meagles struck in. "I have not the least idea." "I thought," said the other, "that - ""Tattycoram?" suggested Mr. Meagles again.
"Thank you - that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times wondered at the oddity of it."
"Why, the fact is," said Mr. Meagles, "Mrs. Meagles and myself are, you see, practical people."
"That, you have frequently mentioned in the course of the agreeable and interesting conversations we have had together, walking up and down on these stones," said the other, with a half smile breaking through the gravity of his dark face.
"Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when we took Pet to church at the Foundling - you have heard of the Foundling Hospital in London? Similar to the Institution for the Found Children in Paris?"
"I have seen it."
"Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the music - because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives to show her everything that we think can please her - Mother (my usual name for Mrs. Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take her out. 'What's the matter, Mother?' said I, when we had brought her a little round; 'you are frightening Pet, my dear.' 'Yes, I know that, Father,' says Mother, 'but I think it's through my loving her so much, that it ever came into my head.' 'That ever what came into your head, Mother?' 'O dear, dear!' cried Mother, breaking out again, 'when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never through all its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice, even her name!' Now that was practical in Mother, and I told her so. I said, 'Mother, that's what I call practical in you, my dear.'"
The not unmoved, assented.
"So I said next day: now, Mother, I have a proposition to make that I think you'll approve of. Let us take one of those same children to be a little maid to Pet. We are practical people. So if we should find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account. We shall know what an immense deduction must be made from all the influences and experiences that have formed us - no parents, no child-brother or sister, no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper, or Fairy Godmother. And that's the way we came by Tattycoram."
"And the name itself - "
"By George!" said Mr. Meagles, "I was forgetting the name itself. Why, she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle - an arbitrary name, of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattie, and then into Tatty, because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name might be a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of effect, don't you see? As to Beadle, that I needn't say was wholly out of the question. If there is anything that is not to be tolerated on any terms, anything that is a type of jack-in-office insolence and absurdity, anything that represents in coats, waistcoats, and big sticks, our English holding-on by nonsense, after every one has found it out, it is a beadle. You haven't seen a beadle lately?"
"As an Englishman, who has been more than twenty years in China, no."
"Then," said Mr. Meagles, laying his forefinger on his companion's breast with great animation, "don't you see a beadle now, if you can help it. Whenever I see a beadle in full fig, coming down a street on a Sunday at the head of a charity school, I am obliged to turn and run away, or I should hit him. The name of Beadle being out of the question, and the originator of the Institution for these poor foundlings having been a blessed creature of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet's little maid. At one time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we got into a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always Tattycoram."
"Your daughter," said the other, when they had taken another silent turn to and fro, and after standing for a moment at the wall glancing down at the sea, had resumed their walk, "is your only child, I know, Mr. Meagles. May I ask you - in no impertinent curiosity, but because I have had so much pleasure in your society, may never in this labyrinth of a world exchange a quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an accurate remembrance of you and yours - may I ask you, if I have not gathered from your good wife that you have had other children?"
"No. No," said Mr. Meagles. "Not exactly other children. One other child."
Meagles in Little Dorrit is a retired banker and very much a middle-class English gentleman. He is portrayed, albeit a minor character, as the object of Dickens's sarcastic banter on an unconscious self-deception. In Dickens's view this is as common to people in general as Arthur Clennam's conscious self-deception. Meagles is a good-humoured and warm-hearted elderly gentleman, one of the same kind as Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Brownlow, but he has no definite opinion of his own and is unaware of the way in which he reacts to people more powerful than himself. He is meant by Dickens to be the embodiment of the general tendency to worship the powerful. Clennam cannot help speculating whether "there might be in the breast of this honest, affectionate, and cordial Meagles, any microscopic portion of the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the Circumlocution Office" (Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 194). The image of "mustard-seed", based on the New Testament, serves as a corroborative proof of the tendency to worship the powerful that we will later see in Pip, when he becomes totally obsessed with the gentry. Pip finds himself looking for the "great tree" of the gentry when he seeks a different shelter from the village blacksmith household, whereas Meagles is not aware of his blind worship of "the great tree of the Circumlocution Office". Besides his inability to recognise his disguised tendency to truckle to the stronger, Meagles not only believes in the authorities but also justifies his statement by identifying himself with them. For example, he brings the inventor Daniel Doyce out of the Circumlocution Office door by the collar, and informs the very porter that he is "a practical man who appreciate[s] the official estimates of such characters" (121). Doyce has tried to turn his ingenuity to his country's service, but that makes him "a public offender". Here is an intimation by Dickens that Meagles shares unpractical views with the Office that cannot understand the value of "an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures" (119). Meagles's practicality is questioned by his repeated mention of himself as "a practical man". It is the way of the world that the greatness of an inventor, such as Doyce, is misunderstood or fails to be understood at first. "To be great is to be misunderstood", as the Sage of Concord R. W. Emerson remarked pertinetly in Essays.
We must admit, however, that that kind of world is carried on their shoulders by those ordinary people who are unaware of their slavish submission to the powerful like Meagles. Dickens clearly regards Meagles as representative and typical of the general at large; he attempts a bold generalisation of their blind worship:
Measles is perhaps what we easily associate with the name of Meagles. The name suggests the highly infectious disease of the subserviency to the stronger. The disease is fairly confidently generalised in Little Dorrit. So many of the general public are infected by the disease that "none of us need go into the next street to find" (204) it. What distinguishes the metaphorical disease from the real measles is its lack of obvious symptoms. The metaphorical disease is genrally an adult's illness. There are few children in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities. All the adult victims live quite indifferent to the disease with their moral conscience dulled. Although a self-styled "practical man", Meagles is not practical in the least, especially about emotional problems. He has brought up his daughter Pet so indulgently that "an air of timidity and dependence" (16) makes her easily tricked into a marriage with the self-indulgent worthless snob Henry Gowan (modeled in part on W. M. Thackeray). He is what is called sn inverted snob, or a person who likes or takes pride in what a snob might be expected to disapprove of. Meagles knows that Miss Wade had an intimate relationship with Gowan but was abandoned in a careless, offhand way. And yet he is too unpracticed to understand how she feels about Pet: "'Now, I am sure . . . that you can't have any unkind feeling towards my daughter; it's impossible.'" (809) We can argue, therefore, that Miss Wade's story, to which Bk.II, Ch.21 ("The History of a Self-Tormentor") is all devoted, is an episode written to criticise such a shallow-minded fellow as Meagles.
This is not a far-fetched argument. Miss Wade begins to write the story with a paradoxical statement: "I have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have been habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do. . . ." (663) Even though she was not deceived, however, Miss Wade has deceived herself into loving Henry Gowan:
Miss Wade loved Gowan because she found him akin to herself in open cynicism about most people and most people and most things in life. A clue as to why she was "false enough to herself" to love him before hating him, seems to lie in the fact that her story was written in particular for Clennam's "perusal". Why does she expect Clennam to "comprehend" what she means by hating? She was so perverse an orphan as to mistake - as wilfully as Mr. Lorry mistook the word of story - the kindness of other girls for their pity or superiority. From her story, though, we can read that she is apt to develop her consciousness of kind in order to justify herself. For instance, she says about Gowan, "'He was the first person I had ever seen in my life who had understood me.'" (669) She no doubt imposed upon herself into thinking highly of him so as to justify herself by finding his open cynicism congenial to her. Similarly, she self-deceivingly expects Clennam to "comprehend" her, because she knows he was as good as "an orphan" in mind when a child. Her self-deception about love and hate reflects a strong influence of that love complex which her childhood as an orphan formed. Love and hate are reversible in her mind, and what she means by loving is hating and vice virsa.
We do not know about Miss Wade's intention, but part of her story is surely intended by Dickens to intimate that Meagles is typical of "most fools". He has been deceived by the worthless snob Gowan only for coming of a very good family. In other words, Meagles is easily deceived because he is not aware of deceiving himself. That is what is implicit in her story. Needless to say, his unconscious self-deception is connected with his blind worship of the powerful. Released from quarantine, Meagles says cheerily, "'I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let out.'" (22) His cheeriness clarifies the limitations of his blind optimism. His inability to understand any problems in human psychology is revealed by Miss Wade's subversive views: "'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and wish to turn it down, or raze it to the ground.'" (23) Meagles's respect for power is emphasised notably in his blind deference for the aristocracy. He justifies himself to Little Dorrit in the pain of the remembrance of his daughter Pet's marriage with Henry Gowan:
Deploring Pet's self-deception, Meagles falls a victim of irony by repressing his self-deception in the substitution of her husband's noble birth for "his faults". There is no doubt that Meagles sees a speck in Pet's eye but does not notice any mote in his own.1 In order to avoid any consciousness of his greater self-deception, Meagles deceives himself into projecting it on Pet. What, then, makes Dickens refrain from blaming Meagles? Meagles's worship of the "well connected" is a weakness common to human kind. If someone's motive is unconscious, then it seems plausible to say that he is not morally responsible for his self-deception. Where there is not the case, however, the self-deceiver is responsible for his self-deception and for the behaviour that flows from it. But Dickens thinks that nobody "could blame him"; everyone deceives oneself. This is why "Nobody's Fault", the original title of Little Dorrit, has a powerful suggestion of the way Dickens has recognised the blind worship of the powerful and the well connected at the time. Nobody's fault is effectively everybody's fault. Even if nobody is interpreted as their sinful alter egos or other selves they have unconsciously repressed, it is equally easy to detect who is responsible for the fault. The original title, when read in this light, will hold the possibility of putting another social interpretation on the novel.
In a social context Meagles has no awareness whatever of his self-deception. When he makes his first appearance in Bk.I, Ch.2, Meagles explains to Clennam how he named the child he had rescued from the Foundling Hospital founded by Thomas Coram (c.1668-1751):
Harriet Beadle is indeed "an arbitrary name", but the name of Tattycoram - a diminutive of Harriet plus Coram - is equally reminiscent of Meagles's caprice and despotism. He can no more understand Tattycoram's feelings than foreign languages, though he is a widely-travelled person. His point of view is always from the absolute power or control from which he has borrowed his identity. This identification explains his inability to recognise his self-deception about his slavish submission to the powerful. By his emotions Meagles betrays in speech and action later, we are made gradually aware that the "beadle", against whom he has laid down tough strictures, is a reflection of his own "English holding-on by nonsense" which, he is not aware, is latent in his mind. He argues that the beadle looks like a slavish creature of quite a different nature from him even though he seems to include himself in the possessive adjective "our". But his argument is flagrantly inconsistent. The very slavish submission that he has projected on the beadle is a moral disease which has invaded his conscience. He is just unconscious in the self-deceiving life that he is a carrier of the disease without suffering from it. We cannot but to recognise the limitations of Meagles. His intellectual resources are very limited or, as his name suggests, pathetically meagre. Meagles is chronically infected by insularism; it is one of his habits "to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow." (23) His "perfect conviction" is a result of his self-deceptive justification of his limitations; he is ignorant of or indifferent to what is outside his respectable life as an English gentleman.
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