Note 11 to Chapter 8 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
The best comments on Flora are by Dickens himself. He wrote to Forster: "There are some things in Flora in number seven that seem to me to be extraordinarily, droll, with something serious at the bottom of them after all" (F, ii. 183). In another letter he also touched very close to one of the basic reasons Flora makes us so sad: "Indeed some people seem to think I have done them a personal injury, and that their individual Floras (God knows where they we, or who) are each and all Little Dorrits!" (Letters, ii. 785, to the Duke of Devonshire, 5 July 1856). Monroe Engel's statements on the "terrible pathos" of Flora's "divided awareness" seem to me perceptive and valid (p. 131).
Last modified: 3 May 2001