Coming To Conclusions

Got to the end of the BBC Little Dorrit this evening, and wasn't there a lot of end to take on board? Like many a lesser writer Dickens is better at creating mysteries than solving them, and tying together all of Dorrit's loose ends was never going to be easy. I'm not sure Dickens actually succeeds, but the resolution of the one storyline that matters, that of Amy and Arthur's sort of romance, makes up for everything else. The moment when Arthur is able to accept Amy because she is again penniless has a resonance that goes deep to the heart of the novel's thematic concerns.

This version opted, rightly I think, to give a fairytale sheen to proceedings thereafter. The Missus enjoyed that, which was justification enough. To have gone with the astonishingly downbeat ending, in the way Christine Edzard's movie did, would have been to alienate more than a few faithful viewers. But that brilliant final paragraph was in my mind, even as I smiled at the final images from Andrew Davies's version:

Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother's care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny's neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society for ever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.