Little Dorrit is a novel written by the English author Charles Dickens. The story uses the central image of a debtors’ prison to create a sense of the experience of the poor in a materialistic and decaying society. It is Dickens’s most sustained and satirically bitter attack on the English society of his time, including not only the hopeless system of debt in the country but also the bureaucracy surrounding social and economic affairs. Early in the novel, Dickens introduces the “Circumlocution Office” of the Treasury Department, where citizens find their financial affairs muddled by obstructive officials. Some of the events and experiences it portrays are based on Dickens’s experiences of his own father being imprisoned for debt. Little Dorrit was published in monthly installments from 1855 to 1857, and in a single volume in 1857.
The main plot centers around Little Dorrit, whose real name is Amy. She is the younger daughter of William Dorrit (“Old Dorrit”), who has spent a lengthy term in Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Little Dorrit was born in Marshalsea and visits him regularly. She has a snobbish sister, Fanny, who is a dancer, and a wayward brother, Tip. Little Dorrit and her father become friends with a middle-aged man named Arthur Clennam, who is the hero of the novel. Little Dorrit falls in love with him, but at first he does not return her feelings. Then, with the aid of Clennam, William Dorrit inherits a large fortune. The Dorrit family, apart from Little Dorrit, become proud and selfish as a result of their new wealth.
Arthur Clennam’s money runs out because of the fraudulent pratices of a business partner, and he too is imprisoned for debt. Little Dorrit finds him in Marshalsea and looks after him. Clennam comes to love her, but because of their reversals of fortune, he cannot ask her to marry him. The Dorrit family again loses its money, and Clennam and Little Dorrit marry.
A subplot centers on Arthur Clennam’s paralyzed mother, a grim and deeply puritanical woman. Arthur discovers that she is not his mother and that she suppressed a will from which the Dorrit family would have benefited.
Little Dorrit is a long, complex novel whose many unlikely turns of plot subjected it to criticism when it first came out. But as with a number of Dickens’s novels, its reputation increased during the 1900’s.
