Review: Little Dorrit., by Charles Dickens and Harvey Peter Sucksmith

Conversing Signs

“…Despite the fact that the impact of the denomination on contemporary reception has been so considerable that Tilottama Rajan even called attention to the "horizon of expectations called up by the 'genre' of conversation poems," 8 Effusion has been neglected on the ground of its being devoid of the contextual influences which would permit to read it as a "serious philosophical statement." 9 However, even if the poem cannot be interpreted as a statement and if it may indeed be nothing else but "an entertaining anecdote of mental fantasies and married life played out within conventional gender roles," 10 we might, nevertheless, endeavour to analyse it as a possible enactment of communication itself. G. M. Harper, the first to identify the common pattern of the conversation poems, defines these pieces as Coleridge's "Poems of Friendship."…”