You know how you can tell Monsieur Rigaud is a villain and not an innocent wrongly imprisoned? His hair is streaked with red, that's how. Redheads in Dickens are nothing but trouble. Beware the redhead! [says the redhead]
I do not remember anything at all about Miss Ware from my first reading of Little Dorrit, but I will bet you twenty American dollars that we see her again. She's too tormented and angsty to fade into the background. (Now I'm wondering if I ought to have remembered her. Anything I missed on my first trip through Little Dorrit I will blame on sharing my body with an enormous baby the whole time I was reading it. Joe was 9#12 when he was born, so I'm fairly sure every part of me, including my brain, had to squish into less space than it was accustomed to in order to make room for him.)
We also meet Pet Meagles in chapter 2; she is the anti-Miss Ware. Dickens says of her: "there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without." I'm thinking Dickens would not have voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary -- how about you?
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