Does Arthur Clennam know?

Has biographer Claire Tomalin slipped up in her account of Little Dorrit? In Charles Dickens: A Life, she writes

Arthur Clennam, the unheroic hero, has been brought up by a ferociously pious mother whose creed is 'Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them.' He discovers that his real mother, who died young, had been a poor singer training for the stage, and so dedicated to the world of art and imagination despised by his foster mother.

The problem is that although we as readers learn this information, via a dramatic revelation scene late in the book, it's not made explicitly clear that Arthur ever does. As the book approaches its climax, Clennam is confined in the Marshalsea debtors' prison, delirious from a fever, and being tended to by Amy Dorrit, the "child of the Marshalsea," who was born within its walls but who is now free. His ostensible mother, an invalid with whom he has long had a distant relationship, is being blackmailed by one Rigaud alias Blandois. In a breathless series of disclosures, we learn that Arthur is the product of an adulterous affair on the part of his father, that his real mother was treated with great cruelty, that Mrs. Clennam's sinister aged retainer Flintwinch has a previously unsuspected twin brother, and that Amy Dorrit is, by a string of improbable circumstances, the rightful heir to a legacy from the Clennam fortune. To force Mrs. Clennam to pay up, Rigaud has sent a letter with the details to Amy and Arthur, with instructions to open it if it is not retrieved by the time the prison bell rings that evening. When she learns of the letter, Mrs. Clennam somehow rouses herself from her chair and hurries across the Thames to the Marshalsea, where she instructs Amy to read the letter and implores her to keep its contents secret until she (Mrs. Clennam) dies. Arriving home, she witnesses the sudden collapse of the house where Rigaud is waiting for her return. Rigaud is crushed to death by the wreckage, Flintwinch vanishes, and Mrs. Clennam collapses in the street. She lives for another three years, unable to speak; we aren't told whether Arthur ever sees her again.

While Arthur slowly recovers, Amy receives a box of documents containing the original evidence behind the revelations. On their wedding day, she presents them to Arthur, but asks him to burn them unread, which he promptly does. Had he read them, he would have known, as he had always suspected, that his family had always been under some kind of obligation to Amy Dorrit, and that his inheritance — if it still amounted to anything — was in part rightly hers.

As far as I can tell, there's just one, almost cryptic, indication that Amy will eventually share part of the secret with Arthur. It comes at the exact moment when she receives the cache of documents:

Little Dorrit came in, and Mr Meagles with pride and joy produced the box, and her gentle face was lighted up with grateful happiness and joy. The secret was safe now! She could keep her own part of it from him; he should never know of her loss; in time to come he should know all that was of import to himself; but he should never know what concerned her only. That was all passed, all forgiven, all forgotten. [Emphasis added]

That is, though the scene won't be narrated in the pages of the book, Arthur will at some point at least be told the true story of his birth. Which may, in part, explain why he is never described as visiting Mrs. Clennam again in the few years that remain to her.

Scenes from the Life of a Planet

This may be the first time I've ever hunted down a book based entirely on a phrase that popped into my head. I'd been thinking about the state of the natural world, and how I'd like to be able to feel that it was not only surviving in the face of everything that human beings have done and are continuing to do to it but was actually teeming with life (a feeling that's of course increasingly hard to sustain). The words "nature abounding" came into my thoughts and I wondered if they had a history. As far as I can tell, this 1941 Faber & Faber anthology of nature writing edited by E. L. Grant Watson is the only book that has ever borne the phrase as its title.

Nature Abounding represents a kind of book that has largely gone out of fashion, an armchair or bedside reader of brief prose excerpts, aimed, I suspect, at a somewhat tweedy readership. The selections chosen range from Herodotus to the 1930s, and are accompanied by rather nice illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe, examples of which are shown on the front cover and spine of the dust jacket. The shortest pieces are only a paragraph, the longest run to ten pages or so. There's a brief Preface but no other commentary or biographical information on the writers.

No attempt at inclusiveness was made. The writers chosen — naturalists, travelers, and literary writers — are disproportionately British and almost exclusively European (Emerson and Melville are the most notable exceptions); more eyebrow-raising is that apparently no woman writers were thought worthy of excerpting, unless there are one or two hiding under their initials ( I think not).

In spite of those limitations, it's hard to dislike the book. Nature Abounding is organized thematically by the categories of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. A garish passage from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, describing Egdon Heath, opens the book and sets the overall tone, which tends to the purple. (A bit too purple at times; I found the passages by Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas almost unreadable.) Selections on related topics flow into each other, so that, for example, there are three consecutive excerpts devoted to the hunting habits of stoats and weasels, and we get back-to-back descriptions of marine phosphorescence by Melville and Charles Darwin. Some of the writers are careful professional observers, but colorful nineteenth-century eccentrics like Charles Waterton and Frank Buckland are represented as well.

The editor, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, was at one time a well-known cultural figure. He was born in England but spent much of his life wandering from continent to continent, writing novels, poems, books for children, and works of natural history (several of which were illustrated by Tunnicliffe). He was a bit of a heretic, mixing Darwinian ideas with Jungianism. Most or all of his books are long out of print.