Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

First published: 1855-1857, serial; 1857, book

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: 1820’s

Locale: England

Principal characters

• Little Dorrit, a young woman born and reared in a debtors’ prison
• William Dorrit, her father
• Fanny, her older sister
• Arthur Clennam, Little Dorrit’s friend
• Mrs. Clennam, Arthur’s mother and Little Dorrit’s employer
• Monsieur Blandois, a blackmailer
• Mr. Merdle, a banker and Fanny Dorrit’s father-in-law

The Story:

Amy Dorrit, who is better known as Little Dorrit, was born in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Although her mother died soon after, the little girl and her older brother and sister have continued to live in the prison with their bankrupt father; he is the only member of the family not permitted to leave the prison. As she becomes older, Little Dorrit works as a seamstress. One of her clients is Mrs. Clennam, a widow who is also a businesswoman, although she has been confined to her room by illness for fifteen years. Mrs. Clennam’s forty-year-old son, Arthur, had gone to the East twenty years earlier to join his father, who looked after the company’s business there. After his father’s death, Arthur Clennam returns. He tells his mother that he will take his part of the inheritance and fend for himself; he does not want to remain in the business with his miserly, grasping, and rather inhuman mother. Mrs. Clennam thereupon takes her old clerk, Flintwinch, into partnership with her.

While he is staying at his mother’s house, Arthur notices Little Dorrit and is struck by her retiring disposition and sweet appearance. He learns that she lives in the Marshalsea prison, and he goes there and tries to help the Dorrit family. When he raises the possibility of getting Mr. Dorrit out of prison, everyone thinks such a thing is impossible, for Mr. Dorrit’s affairs are in hopeless confusion; some of his debts are owed to the Crown through the Circumlocution Office, a place of endless red tape.

Arthur finds that he has a confederate in his endeavor to help Mr. Dorrit in a clerk named Pancks, an odd creature who collects rents for a landlord who is the father of Arthur’s former fiancé, Flora. Pancks is aided in turn by John Chivery, the son of a turnkey at the Marshalsea, who is in love with Little Dorrit, and by Mr. Rugg, an elderly lawyer. In addition to helping Little Dorrit by trying to help her father and getting her brother out of trouble, Arthur helps her to get more sewing clients and provides small amounts of money to the Dorrit household in the prison.

Pancks discovers that Little Dorrit’s father, who has been in prison for more than twenty years, is the only surviving heir to a large fortune, and when he collects that inheritance, he is finally released. Mr. Dorrit immediately sets himself up as a man of fortune, and he and his two older children are determined to live up to their new social position and try to forget the past. They decide that Arthur Clennam has insulted them by acting condescendingly toward them, and they refuse to have anything more to do with him. Only Little Dorrit remains unspoiled.

The Dorrit family travels to the Continent, where they can successfully carry out the fiction that they have never seen a debtors’ prison and where they are admitted to the society of expatriate Britons. Fanny Dorrit, Little Dorrit’s older sister, is pursued by Mr. Sparkle, the stepson of Mr. Merdle, who is reputed to be the richest and most influential banker in England. Although not in love with Sparkle, Fanny likes the prospect of marrying into a wealthy family. The Merdles, who see only that the Dorrits have a fortune, agree to the match, even though Mrs. Merdle is well aware of the fact that her son had fallen in love with Fanny when she was only an impecunious dancer in London.

After they are married, Fanny and her husband go to live in London. Mr. Dorrit visits them there and becomes a close friend of Mr. Merdle. The banker even proposes to help Mr. Dorrit increase his already large fortune through shrewd and well-paying investments. Mr. Dorrit, the former debtor, is elated by his new prospects.

Little Dorrit wonders at the changes in her family but remains her old self. She writes to Arthur at intervals, for, in addition to continuing to be grateful for all he has done to help her, she is in love with him.

Arthur remains in London, where he tries to discover the identities of the mysterious people who visit his mother. At the same time, he is trying to keep his own business solvent. Neither task is easy. On two occasions, Mrs. Clennam is visited by a Monsieur Blandois, whom Arthur knows to be a knave and possibly a murderer. He wonders what business his mother could have with such a person. He also distrusts Flintwinch, a grubbing, miserly fellow who mistreats his wife and has taken a great dislike to Arthur.

While trying to unravel the mystery, Arthur becomes bankrupt. Like many others, he has invested all of his and his company’s money in Mr. Merdle’s business ventures, believing them a safe and quick way to make a fortune. When Merdle and his bank fail, Arthur falls into debt and is sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where he is assigned to Mr. Dorrit’s old quarters. Mr. Rugg and Pancks do their best to make Arthur’s imprisonment a short one, but he seems to have lost all desire to live. Only after Little Dorrit returns to England and takes up residence within the prison to comfort him as she had comforted her father does Arthur begin to recover.

Learning that Monsieur Blandois has disappeared from Mrs. Clennam’s house, Pancks tracks the man down and brings him back to London. Mrs. Clennam realizes at this point that she has to reveal the truth unless she is willing to resign herself to paying blackmail to Blandois. Rising from her wheelchair and leaving her house for the first time in almost twenty years, she goes to the prison to tell Arthur that he is not her child and that she has for many years been keeping money from him and from Little Dorrit. Once restitution has been made, Arthur is released from prison. Shortly afterward, he and Little Dorrit are married.

Bibliography

Grant, Allan. A Preface to Dickens. London: Longman, 1984. Provides an excellent introduction to Dickens’s life and times, with especially good descriptions of the author’s London, which forms the background to so many of his novels.

Hardy, Barbara. Dickens and Creativity. London: Continuum, 2008. Focuses on the workings of Dickens’s creativity and imagination, arguing that these are at the heart of his self-awareness, subject matter, and narrative. Little Dorrit is discussed in chapter 5, “Talkative Men and Women in Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Little Dorrit,” and in chapter 9, “Forecast and Fantasy in Little Dorrit.”

Jordan, John O., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Collection of essays presents information about Dickens’s life and times as well as analyses of his novels and discussions of such topics as Dickens’s use of language and gender, family, and domestic ideology in Dickens’s work.

Novak, Daniel A. “Composing the Novel Body: Re-membering the Body and the Text in Little Dorrit.” In Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Discussion of Little Dorrit is part of a larger work that examines the relationship between photography and literary realism in Victorian Britain by analyzing works of fiction.

Paroissien, David, ed. A Companion to Charles Dickens. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008. Collection of essays provides information about Dickens’s life and work, including discussion of Dickens as a reformer, as a Christian, and as a journalist. Little Dorrit is examined in an essay by Philip Davis.

Rosenberg, Brian. Little Dorrit’s Shadows: Character and Contradiction in Dickens. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Examines the relationship between Dickens’s ambivalent imagination and his creation of character, concentrating on Little Dorrit, which is “founded on contradiction.” Argues that in Little Dorrit and other novels, contradiction and uncertainly are a primary reason for the distinctiveness and success of Dickens’s characterization.

Shelston, Alan, ed. Charles Dickens: “Dombey and Son” and “Little Dorrit”—A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1985. Collection of essays and observations includes, on Little Dorrit, a Marxist interpretation by T. A. Jackson, a psychological examination by Edmund Wilson, a close reading by Hillis Miller, and Lionel Trilling’s classic appreciation.

Sucksmith, Harvey. Preface to Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Excellent essay traces the background and compositional history of the novel, preceding an edition of the text that includes variant readings and the author’s preliminary notes and outline.