The last chapter of “Hard Times” appeared in the number of Household Words for the 12th of August, 1854, and the first number of “Little Dorrit” came out at Christmas, 1855.  Between those dates a great war had waxed and waned.  The heart of England had been terribly moved by the story of the sufferings and privations which the army had had to undergo amid the snows of a Russian winter.  From the trenches before Sebastopol the newspaper correspondents had sent terrible accounts of death and disease, and of ills which, as there seemed room for suspicion, might have been prevented by better management.  Through long disuse the army had rusted in its scabbard, and everything seemed to go wrong but the courage of officers and men.  A great demand arose for reform in the whole administration of the country.  A movement, now much forgotten, though not fruitless at the time, was started for the purpose of making the civil service more efficient, and putting John Bull’s house in order.  “Administrative Reform,” such was the cry of the moment, and Dickens uttered it with the full strength of his lungs.  He attended a great meeting held at Drury Lane Theatre on the 27th of June, in furtherance of the cause, and made what he declared to be his first political speech.  He spoke on the subject again at the dinner of the Theatrical Fund.  He urged on his friends in the press to the attack.  He was in the forefront of the battle.  And when his next novel, “Little Dorrit,” appeared, there was the Civil Service, like a sort of gibbeted Punch, executing the strangest antics.

But the “Circumlocution Office,” where the clerks sit lazily devising all day long “how not to do” the business of the country, and devote their energies alternately to marmalade and general insolence,—­the “Circumlocution Office” occupies after all only a secondary position in the book.  The main interest of it circles round the place that had at one time been almost a home to Dickens.  Again he drew upon his earlier experiences.  We are once more introduced into a debtors’ prison.  Little Dorrit is the child of the Marshalsea, born and bred within its walls, the sole living thing about the place on which its taint does not fall.  Her worthless brother, her sister, her father—­who is not only her father, but the “father of the Marshalsea”—­the prison blight is on all three.  Her father especially is a piece of admirable character-drawing.  Dickens has often been accused of only catching the surface peculiarities of his personages, their outward tricks, and obvious habits of speech and of mind.  Such a study as Mr. Dorrit would alone be sufficient to rebut the charge.  No novelist specially famed for dissecting character to its innermost recesses could exhibit a finer piece of mental analysis.  We follow the poor weak creature’s deterioration from the time when the helpless muddle in his affairs brings him into durance.  We note how his sneaking pride seems to feed even on the garbage