Government is the very model of a modern Mrs General

As her unimaginative name suggests, Dickens’s Mrs. General is intended to carry an allegorical importance greater than one character. The author’s relatively exhaustive description of her near the end of Book 2, Chapter 2 suggests the character’s significance as a symbol of some of Dickens’s criticisms with his contemporaries, touching on themes of artifice and societal apathy which resound throughout the lengthy novel. Just as, we can surmise, Dickens perceived a subset of the Victorian population to be guilty of, Mrs. General leads a life cleansed of complexity or obstacle, favoring instead the simplicity of ignorance and intellectual abstention.

Elaborating upon the extent to and mechanisms by which Mrs. General avoided the formation of opinions, Dickens seems to be relating the nonproductive and wasteful processes of the character’s mind with similar practices within government. Just as opinions navigate useless “circular… rails” within Mrs. General’s brain and “never g[e]t anywhere,” so, too, did new legislation and political activism expire on the cyclical tracks of governmental bureaucracy. Coupled with the inclusion of the Circumlocution Office (the name of which, significantly, involves moving in circles in the interest of evasion), Mrs. General becomes another symbol against toothless government.

Worse than that, however, is the accusation of inaction and willful ignorance of problems within a broken socioeconomic class structure. Where government was lax in correcting societal ills, instead brushing the poor and powerless under the aforementioned bureaucratic carpet, Mrs. General chooses to “varnish” those issues she fails to ignore altogether. The word choice of “varnish”—to quite literally gloss over imperfections by applying an artificial sheen—is apt for its similarities to society’s treatment of class woes. With these parallels to governmental ignorance and negligence, combined with his inclusion of other symbols like the Circumlocution Office to augment Little Dorrit’s social commentary,¹ it’s hard to read Mrs. General as anything but emblematic of Dickens’s criticisms of government, of socioeconomic inequities, and of his contemporaries.