Graeme Milne’s work on the nineteenth-century ‘sailortown’ explores ‘entanglements’ and ‘encounters’ at waterfronts around the world: the liminal spaces separating city, river or sea (Milne: 2016).
Its history is also a history of constructing and questioning binaries: between the nation and the world, the human and the non-human, the haves and the have-nots, the city and the plantation, and, finally, between English and other languages. In Little Dorrit, the ‘Billingsgate trade’ is just one of many interchangeable examples of honest industry, but the market plays a greater role in the nineteenth-century imagination. This is an essay about the ‘Billingsgate trade’, or the sale of fish at London’s most celebrated market. It’s Amy’s last resort for Tip, who ‘tire of everything’, from working in an auctioneer’s to a distillery he goes ‘into a wool house, into dry goods house, into the Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks’ (Dickens: 1855-7).
It’s a fleeting reference to settler colonialism in a novel that explores the difficulties of traversing boundaries – especially once they’ve been constructed in our minds. ‘Don’t be too proud to come and see us, when you have made your fortune’, she urges Tip, but he never makes it past Liverpool, returning to the Marshalsea before the month is up. We’re told that Amy, the ‘brave little creature’ at the heart of the novel, ‘pinche and scrape enough together to ship him for Canada’. Tip is a gambler, perennially in debt and unable to settle to anything he’s always drawn back to the Marshalsea Prison, where the Dorrits have lived with their father since early childhood. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855-7), Amy Dorrit despairs for her brother, Tip.
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