Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit is a novel by the English writer Charles Dickens, first published in monthly instalments between 1855 and 1857.

The book's subject is imprisonment, of which the Marshalsea is only the plainest form. William Dorrit has been inside for more than twenty years and has taught his three children to behave as though the family's time in the prison were a temporary embarrassment rather than their whole life; his youngest daughter Amy, small, industrious and devoted, has arranged herself entirely around his needs. Dickens knew the place from the inside, since his own father had been jailed for debt there, and he uses it to attack a legal system that locked people up until they paid money they had no way of earning. The other half of the satire is institutional: the Circumlocution Office, a government department that exists to make sure nothing is ever done, and the class arrangements that let respectable people ruin each other politely. The plot is thick with secrets, an inheritance under dispute, a travelling party in Europe and a man in Marseille who knows something about the Clennam family, and Dickens keeps the reader following Amy, who notices more than the people around her believe.

It was, in its first publication, the strongest-selling of his books to that point.