Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that
'It Never Does'

While the waters of Venice and the ruins of Rome were sunning
themselves for the pleasure of the Dorrit family, and were daily
being sketched out of all earthly proportion, lineament, and
likeness, by travelling pencils innumerable, the firm of Doyce and
Clennam hammered away in Bleeding Heart Yard, and the vigorous
clink of iron upon iron was heard there through the working hours.

The younger partner had, by this time, brought the business into
sound trim; and the elder, left free to follow his own ingenious
devices, had done much to enhance the character of the factory. As
an ingenious man, he had necessarily to encounter every
discouragement that the ruling powers for a length of time had been
able by any means to put in the way of this class of culprits; but
that was only reasonable self-defence in the powers, since How to
do it must obviously be regarded as the natural and mortal enemy of
How not to do it. In this was to be found the basis of the wise
system, by tooth and nail upheld by the Circumlocution Office, of
warning every ingenious British subject to be ingenious at his
peril: of harassing him, obstructing him, inviting robbers (by
making his remedy uncertain, and expensive) to plunder him, and at
the best of confiscating his property after a short term of
enjoyment, as though invention were on a par with felony. The
system had uniformly found great favour with the Barnacles, and
that was only reasonable, too; for one who worthily invents must be
in earnest, and the Barnacles abhorred and dreaded nothing half so
much. That again was very reasonable; since in a country suffering
under the affliction of a great amount of earnestness, there might,
in an exceeding short space of time, be not a single Barnacle left
sticking to a post.

Daniel Doyce faced his condition with its pains and penalties
attached to it, and soberly worked on for the work's sake. Clennam
cheering him with a hearty co-operation, was a moral support to
him, besides doing good service in his business relation. The
concern prospered, and the partners were fast friends.
But Daniel could not forget the old design of so many years. It
was not in reason to be expected that he should; if he could have
lightly forgotten it, he could never have conceived it, or had the
patience and perseverance to work it out. So Clennam thought, when
he sometimes observed him of an evening looking over the models and
drawings, and consoling himself by muttering with a sigh as he put
them away again, that the thing was as true as it ever was.

To show no sympathy with so much endeavour, and so much
disappointment, would have been to fail in what