num_pages: 928
description: Dickens never lost his life-long preoccupation with the state and psychology of imprisonment.In Little Dorrit he portrays a prison-world in which the shadow of the Marshalsea reaches from the rack-rented Bleeding Heart Yard to the high society of Harley Street and Hamptom Court and the bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office, as well as beyond the Alps to Venice and Rome. The Father of the Marshalsea is William Dorrit, long imprisoned for debt. He is tended by his daughter Amy, Little Dorrit, to whom the prison is home. She becomes the novel's liberator in her selfless devotion to her father and her redeeming love for Arthur Clennam.Little Dorrit is one of the supreme masterpieces of Dickens's maturity. When it first appeared in 1857 it outsold all his earlier novels. In his introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition, Stephen Wall writes: 'Reality proposes, but Dickens metamorphoses...to create not so much a verifiable picture of life as a living alternative to it.'
language: English
title: Little Dorrit
titlecomplete: Little Dorrit
characters: Arthur Clennam, Fanny Dorrit, Amy "Little Dorrit" Dorrit, Mrs. Clennam, Rigaud "Blandois", William Dorrit, Mr. Pancks
genres: Literature, Classics, Novels, Classic Literature, Victorian, 19th Century, Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance, British Literature
ratings_count: 47124
places: London, England
publisher: Penguin Classics