Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit (1856/7) is one of that handful of masterpieces of Dickens’s maturity in which his imaginative genius embraces the whole fabric of a changing society. The Marshalsea, Bleeding Heart Yard, and the Circumlocution Office are only the principal features of a landscape drawn with all his awareness of and delight in the multitudinously refracted surfaces of life. Embedded though it is in the social and political preoccupations of the time, Little Dorrit goes far beyond the political. With little hope for change in society itself, Dickens’s vision in this novel is of a world of hypocrisy and sham, of exploiters and parasites—a world of prisons, real and metaphysical, in which reality itself is imprisoned by appearances.