Dickens, Charles | "the ham (though it was good enough of itself) seemed to blow a faint simoom of ham through the whole Marshalsea.”

From the Library of Jay Michael Haft

Dickens, Charles

Little Dorrit. London: Bradbury and Evans, December 1855-June 1857

20 parts in 19, 8vo (220 x 142 mm). Etched frontispiece, pictorial title-page and 38 plates by Hablot K. Browne "Phiz" including eight "dark plates," with "Rigaud" for "Blandois" in part 15 pp. 469, 470, 472 and 473 and correction slip in part 16; some foxing, particularly to plates, as usual, a few short closed marginal tears. Original blue pictorial wrappers; some browning and chipping, most prevalent to spines, a few minor stains. In custom slipcase. 

First edition, first issue, in original months parts—Dickens's exploration of microclimates in his "condition-of-England" novel.

"Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Every thing in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there" (Dickens 1).

Interestingly, what is perhaps Dickens's most London-centric novel opens in the French port city of Marseilles, in an atmosphere overwhelmed by a stifling heat that renders the environment and its inhabitants immobile. At the heart of this cityscape scorched by unrelenting sun is a "villainous prison," one of its cells "so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for itself, were two men” (Dickens 16). here, Dickens is setting up a parallel between this foreign prison and London's Marshallsea, where debtors were sent until their accounts were settled, or until their lives expired. Indeed, as Little Dorrit progresses, the Marshalsea comes to take on a seemingly foreign climate within London. When Arthur Clennam, one of the novel's central characters, is urged to eat, he drops into the solitary armchair in his cell, and the narrator observes: "the ham (though it was good enough of itself) seemed to blow a faint simoom of ham through the whole Marshalsea.” The sandwich is meant to be a “fresh relief from the stale hot paving-stones and the bricks of the jail,” but Clennam is unable to stomach it (Dickens 757). A simoom, is a hot, dry, suffocating sand-wind, which sweeps across the African and Asiatic deserts. Given this, Dickens is suggesting that that there is something foreign and extreme in the climate of the Marshalsea, and that this unhealthy atmosphere is specific to the tainted prison. 

Through his understanding of sanitary science and his commitment to sanitary reform (see lot 1017), coupled with his friendships with Joseph Paxton (the architect responsible for the Crystal Palace and theories surrounding reproducing foreign climates on native soil) and John Claudius Loudon (who is credited with coining the term “artificial climate”), in Little Dorrit Dickens creates a novel preoccupied with a labyrinthine, compartmentalize London, and the unique environments and climates the city fosters, making the 19th century discipline of medical climatology a driving force in the text.

REFERENCE:

Eckel 82-85; Hatton and Cleaver 305-330; Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. by Stephen Wall and Helen Small (London: Penguin, 2003)