国外英文文学系列 Little Dorrit.docx

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1、国外英文文学系列 Little DorritTitle: Little DorritAuthor: Charles DickensPREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITIONI have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being re

2、ad as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the patte

3、rn finished.If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian

4、 war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anyt

5、hing in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Ba

6、nk. But, I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts, if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority) that nothing like them was ever known in this land.Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Pris

7、on are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent

8、Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, I came to Marshalsea Place: the houses in which I recognised, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my minds-eye when I became Little Dorrits biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the lar

9、gest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came by his information, I dont know; he was a quarter of a century too young to know anything about it of himself.

10、I pointed to the window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenanted that apartment at present? He said, Tom Pythick. I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, Joe Pythicks uncle.A little further on, I fo

11、und the older and smaller wall, which used to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will se

12、e its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years.In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I

13、 had never had so many readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I added to that, May we meet again!London May 1857BOOK THE FIRST: POVER

14、TYCHAPTER 1. Sun and ShadowThirty 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. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and bee

15、n stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly

16、staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the t

17、wo colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hin

18、doos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade aliketaking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a

19、 sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire.The universal stare made the eyes ache. Towards the distant line of Italian coast, indeed, it was a little relieved by light clouds of mist, slowly rising from the evaporation of the sea, but it softened nowhere else. Far away the staring road

20、s, deep in dust, stared from the hill-side, stared from the hollow, stared from the interminable plain. Far away the dusty vines overhanging wayside cottages, and the monotonous wayside avenues of parched trees without shade, drooped beneath the stare of earth and sky. So did the horses with drowsy

21、bells, in long files of carts, creeping slowly towards the interior; so did their recumbent drivers, when they were awake, which rarely happened; so did the exhausted labourers in the fields. Everything that lived or grew, was oppressed by the glare; except the lizard, passing swiftly over rough sto

22、ne walls, and the cicala, chirping his dry hot chirp, like a rattle. The very dust was scorched brown, and something quivered in the atmosphere as if the air itself were panting.Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep out the stare. Grant it but a chink or keyhole, and

23、 it shot in like a white-hot arrow. The churches were the freest from it. To come out of the twilight of pillars and archesdreamily dotted with winking lamps, dreamily peopled with ugly old shadows piously dozing, spitting, and beggingwas to plunge into a fiery river, and swim for life to the neares

24、t strip of shade. So, with people lounging and lying wherever shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day.In Marsei

25、lles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its chambers, 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. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall

26、, with a draught-board rudely hacked upon it with a knife, a set of draughts, made of old buttons and soup bones, a set of dominoes, two mats, and two or three wine bottles. That was all the chamber held, exclusive of rats and other unseen vermin, in addition to the seen vermin, the two men.0027m Or

27、iginalIt received such light as it got through a grating of iron bars fashioned like a pretty large window, by means of which it could be always inspected from the gloomy staircase on which the grating gave. There was a broad strong ledge of stone to this grating where the bottom of it was let into

28、the masonry, three or four feet above the ground. Upon it, one of the two men lolled, half sitting and half lying, with his knees drawn up, and his feet and shoulders planted against the opposite sides of the aperture. The bars were wide enough apart to admit of his thrusting his arm through to the

29、elbow; and so he held on negligently, for his greater ease.A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was

30、 slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside, and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact in one of the spice islands of the Indian ocean.The man who lay on the ledge of the gra

31、ting was even chilled. He jerked his great cloak more heavily upon him by an impatient movement of one shoulder, and growled, To the devil with this Brigand of a Sun that never shines in here!He was waiting to be fed, looking sideways through the bars that he might see the further down the stairs, w

32、ith much of the expression of a wild beast in similar expectation. But his eyes, too close together, were not so nobly set in his head as those of the king of beasts are in his, and they were sharp rather than brightpointed weapons with little surface to betray them. They had no depth or change; the

33、y glittered, and they opened and shut. So far, and waiving their use to himself, a clockmaker could have made a better pair. He had a hook nose, handsome after its kind, but too high between the eyes by probably just as much as his eyes were too near to one another. For the rest, he was large and ta

34、ll in frame, had thin lips, where his thick moustache showed them at all, and a quantity of dry hair, of no definable colour, in its shaggy state, but shot with red. The hand with which he held the grating (seamed all over the back with ugly scratches newly healed), was unusually small and plump; wo

35、uld have been unusually white but for the prison grime.The other man was lying on the stone floor, covered with a coarse brown coat.Get up, pig! growled the first. Dont sleep when I am hungry.Its all one, master, said the pig, in a submissive manner, and not without cheerfulness; I can wake when I w

36、ill, I can sleep when I will. Its all the same.As he said it, he rose, shook himself, scratched himself, tied his brown coat loosely round his neck by the sleeves (he had previously used it as a coverlet), and sat down upon the pavement yawning, with his back against the wall opposite to the grating

37、.Say what the hour is, grumbled the first man.The mid-day bells will ringin forty minutes. When he made the little pause, he had looked round the prison-room, as if for certain information.You are a clock. How is it that you always know?How can I say? I always know what the hour is, and where I am.

38、I was brought in here at night, and out of a boat, but I know where I am. See here! Marseilles harbour; on his knees on the pavement, mapping it all out with a swarthy forefinger; Toulon (where the galleys are), Spain over there, Algiers over there. Creeping away to the left here, Nice. Round by the

39、 Cornice to Genoa. Genoa Mole and Harbour. Quarantine Ground. City there; terrace gardens blushing with the bella donna. Here, Porto Fino. Stand out for Leghorn. Out again for Civita Vecchia, so away tohey! theres no room for Naples; he had got to the wall by this time; but its all one; its in there

40、!He remained on his knees, looking up at his fellow-prisoner with a lively look for a prison. A sunburnt, quick, lithe, little man, though rather thickset. Earrings in his brown ears, white teeth lighting up his grotesque brown face, intensely black hair clustering about his brown throat, a ragged r

41、ed shirt open at his brown breast. Loose, seaman-like trousers, decent shoes, a long red cap, a red sash round his waist, and a knife in it.Judge if I come back from Naples as I went! See here, my master! Civita Vecchia, Leghorn, Porto Fino, Genoa, Cornice, Off Nice (which is in there), Marseilles,

42、you and me. The apartment of the jailer and his keys is where I put this thumb; and here at my wrist they keep the national razor in its casethe guillotine locked up.The other man spat suddenly on the pavement, and gurgled in his throat.Some lock below gurgled in its throat immediately afterwards, a

43、nd then a door crashed. Slow steps began ascending the stairs; the prattle of a sweet little voice mingled with the noise they made; and the prison-keeper appeared carrying his daughter, three or four years old, and a basket.How goes the world this forenoon, gentlemen? My little one, you see, going

44、round with me to have a peep at her fathers birds. Fie, then! Look at the birds, my pretty, look at the birds.He looked sharply at the birds himself, as he held the child up at the grate, especially at the little bird, whose activity he seemed to mistrust. I have brought your bread, Signor John Bapt

45、ist, said he (they all spoke in French, but the little man was an Italian); and if I might recommend you not to gameYou dont recommend the master! said John Baptist, showing his teeth as he smiled.Oh! but the master wins, returned the jailer, with a passing look of no particular liking at the other

46、man, and you lose. Its quite another thing. You get husky bread and sour drink by it; and he gets sausage of Lyons, veal in savoury jelly, white bread, strachino cheese, and good wine by it. Look at the birds, my pretty!Poor birds! said the child.The fair little face, touched with divine compassion,

47、 as it peeped shrinkingly through the grate, was like an angels in the prison. John Baptist rose and moved towards it, as if it had a good attraction for him. The other bird remained as before, except for an impatient glance at the basket.Stay! said the jailer, putting his little daughter on the out

48、er ledge of the grate, she shall feed the birds. This big loaf is for Signor John Baptist. We must break it to get it through into the cage. So, theres a tame bird to kiss the little hand! This sausage in a vine leaf is for Monsieur Rigaud. Againthis veal in savoury jelly is for Monsieur Rigaud. Aga

49、inthese three white little loaves are for Monsieur Rigaud. Again, this cheeseagain, this wineagain, this tobaccoall for Monsieur Rigaud. Lucky bird!The child put all these things between the bars into the soft, Smooth, well-shaped hand, with evident dreadmore than once drawing back her own and looking at the man with her fair brow roughened into an expression half of fright and