In Hamlet’s Shadow: Mourning and Melancholia in Little Dorrit

In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens turned both to Romantic and Victorian appropriations of Hamlet and to an emerging naturalistic psychology to dramatize a condition anticipating, and influencing, Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” Arthur Clennam becomes identified with the ghost of Hamlet’s father and, implicitly, with his own father’s ghost. He retraces the father’s past, unconsciously seeking out the dimly remembered mother in the form of Little Dorrit. In his psychological bankruptcy, he embraces his Marshalsea imprisonment until, in his marriage to Little Dorrit (always “Little Mother”), he is released without recovering knowledge of his past that lies buried within him.