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    Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Audiobook (abridged)10 hours

    Little Dorrit

    Written by Charles Dickens

    Narrated by Anton Lesser

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens created one of his most penetrating satires on the weaknesses of government in the Victorian era. He chose Marshalsea debtors’ prison as the setting, where his own father had been imprisoned. The story revolves around a complex mystery involving conspiracy, debt and a disputed will that results in unexpected consequences for the main characters.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateDec 1, 2009
    ISBN9789629547547
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the most popular and, many believe, the greatest English author. He wrote many classic novels, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are available from Brilliance Audio.

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    Reviews for Little Dorrit

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    • 3/5
      I love Dickens and no one narrates a Dickens book better than Simon Vance. David Copperfield and Bleak House were 2 of my favorite audiobooks from 2010. But Little Dorrit is only getting 3 stars from me. And it's not due to the narration. The title character of the story, Amy Dorrit is born in the Marshalsea prison. Her father, William Dorrit has lost his fortune and is thrown into the Marshalsea and lives there for decades, unable to pay his debts. Amy, like many Dickens' heroines, is sweet and industrious and works hard to eke out a living by sewing and scrapes together enough money to barely survive and feed her father. Arthur Clenham discovers her working at his mother's house and is able to free her father of his debts when he discovers a long lost inheritance for Mr. Dorrit. The story follows the family's fortune and misfortune as they overnight change from being impoverished to incredibly wealthy. In this story, Dickens uses his wit and satire to make a strong social commentary on the absurdity and hopelessness of imprisoning people and not allowing them to work off their debt. My main problem with this story is that it became so convoluted at the end. There were many obscure plot twists that didn't really add to the story. Even after reading comments in an online book group, I still didn't understand the ending and finally resorted to Wikipedia. The book had many of the traits that I love about Dickens - quirky characters, humor and a strong theme, but definitely not a favorite of mine.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      "Little Dorrit," published in 1857, is such a remarkable novel that I wonder why it has not been honored as much as some of the other works of Charles Dickens, such as "Great Expectations," "Bleak House" and "David Copperfield." It is not easy reading, both because of its great length (855 pages in my edition) and because of its complexity, but it is never boring. The novel is not flawless by any means, but its many strengths outweigh its few weaknesses.Little Dorrit is a small woman who was born in a debtors' prison and, until she is in her early 20s, has spent every night of her life there. Her beloved father is the prisoner. She and her brother and sister are free to come and go as they please, but it pleases Amy (Little Dorrit) to stay with her father each night.Arthur Clennam, who may actually be the novel's main character, is a middle-aged man who returns to England after many years away to find that his mother and her butler have taken over the family business after the death of his father. Their actions are mysterious, but he has no intention of interfering. Arthur notices a tiny servant girl working for his mother who eats little and disappears mysteriously every evening. He calls her Little Dorrit, and he learns that she saves her food to give to her father and that she spends every night with him in the prison.Through Arthur's efforts, Mr. Dorrit is not only released from prison but receives a very large inheritance that makes him a wealthy man who doesn't like to be reminded of his many years in prison. Because Arthur Clennam is a reminder, Mr. Dorrit keeps him at a distance both from himself and his daughter, who secretly loves Arthur.The novel has many subplots and multiple characters. It is a complicated love story (Little Dorrit is not the only woman who loves Arthur, who loves somebody else, and somebody else loves Little Dorrit), a mystery (what are Mrs. Clennam and her butler up to and what secret is she hiding?), a social commentary on business, government and the imprisonment of debtors and an outrageous satire.
    • 4/5
      Great story about letting each other down, while still believing in the kindness of others.)
    • 5/5
      The complex structure of this book adds to its power; when a good man falls on hard times in a merciless world, who will help him? Little Dorrit is wonderful creation by Dickens who enters the heart; a moving book about friendship, courtship and greed. The evocation of the debtor's prison in London is masterful.
    • 4/5
      That synopsis does not do this book justice. As anyone who has read other works by Dickens, his books are very rarely as simple as this synopsis would imply. However, considering the novel's length, a short synopsis is as good as any.Given my unabashed love for all things Dickens, I am absolutely crestfallen that I could not rave about Little Dorrit. Instead, I have very mixed feelings about this monstrosity of a novel. For one thing, Dickens, in my opinion, is the master of suspense and of taking a complex set of characters and interweaving their lives in unique and unexpected ways. There was almost none of that here. The story is predictable with very little suspense. The characters are too black-and-white with almost none of the moral ambiguity that makes his characters so memorable and also helps build tension for the reader. As a result, I lost my desire to read this book about halfway through it. The predictability prevented me from being truly vested in any of the characters and staying actively engaged in the story. In fact, I struggled to stay awake while reading it.However, there are still some very Dickensian things to love about this story. His descriptions of 1850s London remain absolutely stunning. The reader can all but smell the streets, hear the sounds of the horses' hooves as they clatter down the street and feel the despair of life in debtors' prison rising up from the pages. The picture he paints of London is very raw and real, and in a historical context, more accurate for what an everyday person's life was like than anything by Austen, the Bronte sisters or other English authors from a similar period who focused only on upper class society.Staying true to form, Dickens has several pointed critiques of society he brings forward with Little Dorrit. Given his own personal history of life in the workhouse with a father who lived in a debtors' prison, Dickens typically mentions the downtrodden and the poor in his work. This time, he attacks the government and the idea of locking people away for failure to pay their bills and does so with gusto. From the not-so-tongue-in-cheek discussions of a bureaucracy that prides itself on doing absolutely nothing to the mindless following of the masses of the advice of the supposedly very wealthy to the discussions of life inside a debtors' prison, Dickens does not pull any punches in his critique of them all. Through his eyes, the reader understands that those government forms one has to fill out in triplicate are there only to keep you busy while preventing any actual work from occurring, that in London at that time, one could be imprisoned for failure to pay back one pound or one hundred pounds, and that money or piety does not buy happiness. It seems that the more things change, the more things stay the same.I have debated with myself for the last few days on whether I truly enjoyed this novel or not. I cannot say definitively one way or the other. There was a lot to learn about society back then, as there always is in his works. However, nothing took me by surprise, and I had to remind myself that I needed to continue to read it. The idea of a debtors' prison definitely had me thinking about that entire system, why it was ever created, and wondering if we are really much better off without it. There are only a few minor characters which are truly memorable, but most, I feel, are just caricatures of what they could have been. In the end, I would recommend it to others, but I would do so with the utmost caution. While it does have topics that last throughout the ages, it really is not a book for someone who has never before read a classic. I have to say that I am glad I read it, yet even happier I finished it.
    • 5/5
      When I first read Little Dorrit, I felt it was significantly too long for its material. After numerous rereadings I no longer feel that - in fact it may be my favourite Dickens novel. One fascinating feature is the way the theme of imprisonment extends so far beyond those who are pent-up in the Marshalsea debtor's prison; we have the swaggering Rigaud and the cheerful Cavalletto, in prison at Marseilles at the book's start; the imprisonment of Mrs. Clennam in her own room, for some medical reason never disclosed; the imprisonment of ideas by the Circumlocution Office, whose watchword is How Not to Do It; Pet Meagles' self-imposed imprisonment in what we cannot see as a good marriage; and there are numerous other possible examples. Best of all are the wondefully apposite little turns of phrase Dickens uses - and it has my favourite last sentence of any novel at all.
    • 4/5
      As a recent Guardian article pointed out, the financial skullduggery at the heart of all the misery here eerily foreshadows our current economic predicament. I read this one serially over a few months, and enjoyed that rhythm, though I had some quibbles with the plot (most notably Mrs. Clennam's fiddly grand revelation towards the end, which one has to read twice to understand and thus lose the dramatic moment). The novel didn't make as much of an impression on me as Bleak House, but I felt it was on a par with Great Expectations--wonderful language, characterization, dialogue, and sly humor. Lovely final, bittersweet Dickensian line: "They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar."
    • 5/5
      Little Dorrit is one of Dicken's simpler stories (like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist) with a girl als protagonist; but I really like it because it is such a heartrending fable - how little Dorrit selflessly gives herself up for her no good (but nevertheless loving) father to be finally awarded by destiny is an absolutely entertaining, almost romantic fairy tale.
    • 3/5
      I'm afraid I found this largely disappointing, despite a number of positive features.  It started very well with a brooding description of a prison in Marseille that reminded me of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. The atmosphere of hopelessness around the Marshalsea Prison and Mrs Clennam's house is well described (Mrs Clennam's isolation read like a precursor of Miss Havisham's).  The effects on individuals of long term imprisonment were also movingly covered. The satire on government and bureaucracy (The Circumlocution Office) is good. In the early chapters of Book Two the scenery in Switzerland and Italy was a breath of fresh air after the claustrophobia of Book One. But the problem I had with the book was that I found very few of the characters striking or sympathetic, even when placed in situations that might lead naturally to such a reaction. The characters largely lacked colour for me, and many of them I found rather interchangeable. One noteworthy exception was Maggy, an interesting portrayal of a mentally disabled character. Also the flow of the narrative was frequently rather slow and i found much of it frankly tedious. So overall this is among my least favourite of the full length Dickens novels. 3/5
    • 3/5
      A bit too long for my taste, though undeniably a literary work by high standards. Not a Dickens I recommend tot start off with.Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault , highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life. Dickens' childhood experiences inform the vivid scenes in Marshalsea debtor's prison, while his adult perceptions of governmental failures shape his satirical picture of the Circumlocution Office. The novel's range of characters - the honest, the crooked, the selfish and the self-denying - offers a portrait of society about whose values Dickens had profound doubts.
    • 4/5
      It is a rather mixed bag of mystery and intrigue between characters both well-off and not. The theme of prisons and imprisonment permeates this book with the title character residing with her family in the infamous "Marshalsea" prison for the first part of the book. The main plot is focused on the efforts of Arthur Clennam to assist Little (Amy) Dorrit's family in paying their debts so as to escape the prison and Arthur's own quest to solve the mystery of his family & identity. The Dorrits succeed in leaving the prison due to discovered inheritance. The novel moves on to the second part and advancement of the love interests of several characters along with new developments in the life of Arthur. One of Dickens most complicated tales, the novel has several "shady" characters that create difficult situations. Moreover Dickens demonstrates some of his most effective satire in the description of the Circumlocution Office and its administrators, the predatory Barnacles. This novel exhibits some of the characteristic traits for which Dickens is famous, including a plethora of characters, atmospheric descriptions and a somewhat convoluted plot line. While exhibiting these traits it also has two of the most decent and truly good protagonists (if not hero and heroine) in all of the Dickens which I have read. That Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit (Amy) finally join together in wedded bliss is a consummation not unexpected and certainly deserved. Arthur has survived his 'quest' for identity and understanding and while not entirely successful he has reached a point from which he can satisfactorily go forward with his life and with his Amy.For this reader the novel was both satisfying and perturbing. The continual railing against the Circumlocution Office and skewering of debtors' prisons with the 'Marshalsea' was not convincing and the weakness of the plot undermined the quality of the novel. However, the fecundity of curious and wonderful characters who consistently charmed and challenged the reader with their psychological complexity helped to overcome all other weaknesses. And this is the great strength of Dickens as a novelist which he demonstrates again and again as he continues to increase his mastery of this literary form.
    • 4/5
      While I would have preferred to listen to the entire novel, this full-cast dramatization was quite good. I shudder to think what a marriage of the insufficient thought programmers put into electronic versions of government forms and the lack of helpfulness of Dickens' Circumlocution Office could inflict on the public.
    • 1/5
      I admire Dickens as a writer. However, for me, this is by far the worst novel that I have read by him. It's not engaging, pivotal or intriguing. It's trite and dull. There are much better novels to read by Dickens than this one. I do not recommend reading this one at all-- for any reason.

      All in all, a very disappointing read.
    • 3/5
      Free at last, Free at last! Not really, but nearly two months and 32 listening hours later, I can move on!Now I'm a fan of Victorian Lit, and have enjoyed many Dickens adventures, but this one I'd rate as suitable for hard-core fans only. It's dated, with the premise of debtors' prisons and the Circumlocution Office. Yes, we have red tape today, but also Freedom of Information Acts, etc. I just couldn't relate to the circumstances here. As for the writing itself, the subplots seemed to be going nowhere except to serve as serialization fodder (word count). By the middle, I feared the ending would be hurriedly wrapped up; indeed - that turned out to be so true that I swear I missed some points by not paying the strictest of attention every single minute to the audio.Bottom line: I found it a less interesting/exciting/compelling version of "Our Mutual Friend". Those who haven't read (much) Dickens, or are trying this one to "give him another chance" likely won't finish the book ... and I wouldn't blame them.
    • 4/5
      This started slow but picked up steam. Definitely worthwhile if you like Dickens' usual loose to tight plot structure and appeals to morality. Incomparably evil villain gets his comeuppance and nice guy gets the girl, as usual.
    • 3/5
      A typical Dickens novel with a ton of social/ bureaucracy commentary, a couple of subplots that come together by the end and most importantly a submissive female protagonist... not my favourite Dickens but it is worth reading!
    • 4/5
      Recently returned to London after spending twenty years abroad working in China, Arthur Clennam finds himself taking an interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and her father, William Dorrit, a long-time inmate, due to his debts, in the Marshalsea Prison. As Arthur befriends Little Dorrit, he encounters a wide cast of characters on whom the shadow of the Marshalsea falls. While there are dark and conniving characters and others whom are simply superficial and flawed, Little Dorrit remains constant and is the impetus for far more changes in his life than Arthur ever could have imagined.Charles Dickens, for all his flaws, knew how to create a compelling novel. While there's no denying that he created some hefty tomes (my edition of the novel comes in at 860 pages), they are filled with rich characters and expansive and intricately detailed plots. In this novel, Dickens begins with a mystery that slowly unravels over the course of the narrative, shedding new light on relationships and characters but always leaving the reader wondering just where the plot might be going. The characters are vivid from Amy Dorrit's diminutive stature to Pancks and his hair that defies gravity to Rigaud with his terrifying smile. And while Little Dorrit is very demure as all of Dickens' idealized heroines are, she still has an independent spirit that is never quite subdued regardless of her circumstance. In addition to the plots and characters, Dickens includes some truly delightful turns of phrase. His wit comes through in a multitude of places, whether he be ranting about the general ineffectualness of government or describing a character with a healthy dose of snark. Full of sympathetic characters and a plot that pulls you on to discover what will happen to all of them, Little Dorrit also explores the long-term effects of imprisonment and poverty on the psyche with pathos. A delight throughout, the novel will leave you with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when you reach the final page.
    • 4/5
      I love the story of Little Dorrit. Not one of Dickens most well known novels, but it should be. It took me quite a while to get through this novel (my first doorstep size book of the year) and often found it difficult to keep the characters straight. The dull parts are detailed and long, but the intresting and romanctic parts are wonderful. Little Dorrit is my second Dickens, Great Expectations was my first, and I think it is far superior. Dickens fans need to read Little Dorrit.
    • 4/5
      Corruption; inept officialdom; capitalism, the pretensions of social class and status: few elements of Victorian life seem to escape Dickens’ scrutiny in Little Dorrit. Published in monthly instalments between 1855 and 1857, first reactions from the critics were not very favourable. They completely overlooked the social critique element and focused their attention instead on what they considered an unnecessarily incoherent plot and insubstantial, two-dimensional figures. Fortunately the mid twentieth century saw a revival of interest in the novel and a significant shift in attitude. In fact attitudes shifted so far that George Bernard Shaw claimed Little Dorrit was a more seditious text than Marx’s Das Kapital while George Orwell declared that ”in Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.”Much of Dickens’ ire in Little Dorrit is focused on government bureaucracy. He brings it to life with the wonderfully imaginative invention of the Circumlocution Office. It’s a government department run entirely it seems by the incompetent and the inept (ring any bells???). Its sole purpose is to frustrate and obstruct anyone who has the temerity to ask for information or assistance. Forms need to be filled in just to request permission to fill in more forms to ask for an appointment.(the Soviets learned a thing or two from the Circumlocution Office methinks).Some of his greatest anger is directed at debtors’ prisons such as the notorious Marshalsea in which people who owed money were imprisoned until they repaid their debts. It was an impossible situation because they were not allowed to work so had to rely on family or friends to help pay bills and to provide food and clothing. Such becomes the fate of William Dorrit who moves his entire family into the Marshalsea when he becomes a bankrupt. His youngest daughter Amy (the Little Dorrit of the title) is born within its walls, becoming a true child of the Marshalsea.But even in prison the appearance of gentility and the gradations of class and status must be maintained. The Marshalsea inhabitants refer to themselves as “collegians” rather than prisoners; Papa Dorrit pretends ignorance about the fact his daughters go out to work every day to put food on the table, and openly solicits financial gifts from visitors, masks their true nature by calling them “tributes” and ‘testimonials’. As his status within the prison rises and he becomes the longest-serving resident, so his consciousness of his status increases, going into orbit when he is released upon discovery that he is in fact a very wealthy man.What Dickens shows is the personal cost of such esteem for one’s position in life. Mr Dorrit is so blinkered by his sense of his own importance that he fails to connect with the one person who loves him without question – his daughter Amy. Though she has loved him without question for decades, cared for him and undergone personal suffering so that he would be spared, he does not recognise the debt he owes her. Instead he subjects her to criticism over petty mistakes and castigates her when she doesn’t wholeheartedly welcome and adopt the trappings of the family’s new-found wealth. Does he repent on his deathbed as characters do in so many novels? I won’t spoil the plot by disclosing that; you’ll just have to read the novel yourself.The Dorrits are a far cry from the epitome of the happy loving families found in Dickens’s earlier works. None of the families in Little Dorrit actually fit that particular description being neither loving nor happy. They’re all rather dysfunctional in fact. When Arthur Clenhome, one of the book’s good guys, returns to London from China where he ran the family business for twenty years he gets as much of a welcome from his mother as if he’d just returned from a weekend in Brighton.Like most of Dickens’ big novels, the plot does require attention to keep all the threads intact but this book isn’t anywhere as complicated as Bleak House. It also relies on a remarkable series of coincidences – the first two characters we meet in a prison in France not only turn up again in London many many chapters later and somehow manage to play key roles in the plot. But it wouldn’t be Dickens without coincidence would it. Nor would it be Dickens without a wildly extravagant female character. Just as Dombey and Son has the dippy Miss Lucretia Tox, and Martin Chuzzlewit has the drunken nurse Sarah Gamp, in Little Dorrit Dickens serves up the garrulous Flora Finching to entertain with her gushing and breathless simpering talk of nothing in particular. A brilliant invention.So in case you haven’t twigged by now, yes I did enjoy this book. And yes I would definitely read it again.
    • 4/5
      Little Dorrit, the daughter of a debtor, is born and raised in a debtor’s prison in England. Gentle and self-sacrificing, the motherless child grows up to be a generous young woman, an angel of mercy to her father and numerous others, as well as her thankless brother and sister. She is delivered by Arthur Clennam, the true protagonist here, a middle-aged man who was raised in a cold and cruel household. He sets out to discover the source of his own father’s unspoken regret at the time of his death, and settles on the Dorrit family as a vehicle by which to make amends. The book is peopled by the most extensive and amazing cast of characters I have yet discovered in a Dickens novel, and each and every one simply walks off the page. I’m sure I shall live with them for the rest of my life, just as if they had peopled my neighborhood as a child. This is Dickens’ great gift, and it is not in short supply here.This book was originally written in magazine installments, and so it does seem to last longer than necessary. For my taste, Dickens wastes too much time attacking his favorite targets: Society and Bureaucracy. Whole chapters are devoted to satirizing them, and although admittedly humorous, most of the characters thus employed play no other part in the novel except to be the butts of his jokes. Still, the story is a pleasant journey for anyone who likes to be immersed in a complex human tale that ultimately ties up every one of its dozens of plot threads.
    • 3/5
      Not a review. (How can anyone review Dickens, after 150 years, after his books have been read by 2B people??) So, here are my notes on Little Dorrit.......Long at 855 pages, often boring. Paragraphs ran on for more than two pages. It often took a character 5 pages to make a point, and even then the point was often unclear. Amy Dorrit, sooooo, soooo good you wanted to retch, and couldn't help praying for the same fate as befell Little Nell. It took Arthur 750 pages to realize they were in love, then another 50 before he shared that revelation with LD, or did he??? Then monumental turns and twists in the plot would be quickly executed with a sentence or two. I finally began to get some enjoyment from the story once into the second half, but the ups and downs continued. LD was a poor choice, I should have read Tale of 2C, or Great E ( dual Oprah choices recently announced and pub'd as one book). Will I read more Dickens - not likely but if so it will be a long time..
    • 4/5
      Good book by Mr. Dickens although didn't blow me away. In fact some of the book was very tough going. But there are good themes and the usual great characters and settings which is pretty much standard. The ending was confusing I ended up having to read it a couple of times before I got it.
    • 4/5
      Originally published by installments from 1855 to 1857. This is a good book - the plot is a little fantastic, but is developed progressively, not requiring the crazy devices at the end like some others (Great Expectations). The characters are rich and believable. Ms Wade is almost a text paranoid, 40 years before the syndrome was medically described. Flora has the speech babble of a Valley Girl. I find Dickens highly variable, but this is one of the books that justifies his reputation as a master. Read June/July 2009.
    • 3/5
      The theme of this Dickens novel is imprisonment, and many of the characters are in prisons, either of their own making or forced on them. As usual with Dickens, it is long, convoluted, full of coincidences and fortunate happenstance, but still satisfying.
    • 3/5
      Decent story, but too long. The criticism of bureacracy and high Victorian society is scathing and illuminating, but an 800 page novel can't rely on satire alone, however witty. Some of the satire just feels like overkill(thinking specifically of all of the hoopla surrounding the princely Mr. Merdle and Society). The psychological study of the Dorrit family -- from William and Edward's denial to Fanny's aggression to Uncle's quiet dignity -- was perhaps the most valuable part. William Dorrit's character itself was fascinating. Frustrating, to be sure, but Dickens really handled him expertly, showing how a man accustomed to nobility will grasp at the flimsiest of straws even in the face of a quite disparate reality. The scene at the Marshalsea when they have gained their fortune and Tip comes in accusing Clennam of ungentlemanly conduct for not lending him money was fantastic -- it left me cringing in outrage. But there is a lot of truth in those characters' rationalizations.

      It was refreshing, after Hard Times to read a Dickens book with some emotionally appealing characters. Unfortunately, in his return to a novel of Bleak House proportions, Dickens isn't able to sustain the narrative over the story's entirety. The book really bogs down about midway through, after picking up a lot of steam by the end of Book I. It struggles to regain momentum, even at the climax, and it left me frustrated at the long, aimless descriptions not only of different setpieces, but of the tedious Society. That said, the characters -- particularly Arthur, Little Dorrit, the Italian, and Pancks -- are some of the most memorable I have read lately, and the first two some of the most emotionally impactful. They were honorable to a fault, even sacrificing their own egos when they had every justification to defend them. There were other characters, like Flora, that were just annoying. I got the point after Clennam's first meeting that she was a prattler. After that, I pretty much skipped everything she said and was none the worse for it. Overall, I wish Dickens had spent more time with the Arthurs and Amys, and less time with the Floras, Merdles, Gowans and Wades.
    • 5/5
      I have a really close friend - let's call him Charlie. Charlie began college at 18, like most of us did. Then he sort of started drifting, and his friends began to suspect he wasn't sitting his exams. The years went by, and gradually they began to realize he wasn't even enrolling. He just avoided the issue, or made such an elaborate pretense of being terribly busy during exam season, they tacitly left the whole thing alone. To this day, he hasn't officially quit university or laid out any alternative plans for his life - he's just frozen. But he's made such a good job of obliterating the issue, he firmly believes he's eventually finishing law school. He's 30 now. We talk on an almost daily basis, and I have never discussed this with him.

      I thought a lot about Charlie while reading Little Dorrit.

      I'm not going to dwell on the main themes in this novel. Firstly, because I have nothing to add that hasn't already been covered in the previous reviews. The imprisonment motif, the dysfunctional families, the criticism of Victorian society and of government incompetence - they're all there, and they're probably what the novel is about, mostly. But they didn't exactly surprise me - rather, those are topics one can always count on Dickens for covering in his, at the same time, sarcastic and empathic style. In this respect, the book delivers better than almost any Dickens I've read to date. The whole subplot concerning the fictional Circumlocution Office is borderline Kafkian, and the family melodrama gets dark. Like, really dark.

      But that is not the novel I have read. Which is embarrassing, because it's the novel all of the scholars have read, and all of GR's reviewers too. Meaning what I'm going to say now is going to sound, really, really pretentious. Okay, here I come: that's not what Little Dorrit really talks about. *ducks*

      I don't know if it was intentional on Dickens's part or just a result of his criticism of Victorian society, but if you pay close attention to the character development, you'll realize what I mean. Almost every main character in this novel (and a good portion of the secondary ones as well) are bent on deceiving themselves as methodically as possible. Sure, there are a couple of people here and there who pretend in front of other people, but they aren't believing their own lies. Still, pretty much everybody else is investing so much energy on self-deception, and making such a point of believing their own lies, I sometimes felt exhausted just watching them.

      There's of course the Dorrit family, with their airs of self-importance and wounded pride, overcompensating for the fact that they've been penniless for the last 25 years. Flora Finching insists on behaving like the 15-year old she once was, in the hopes that her old lover will propose to her again. Arthur insists on shutting off his feelings for Minnie Gowan, even after it becomes obvious that he's feeling deeply disappointed - the whole subplot is told in the third person, in a way that strongly reminded me of a depersonalization episode once recounted to me by a schizophrenic patient. And on, and on, and on.

      Of course I'm not claiming to know Dickens's mind better than the Harold Blooms of this world. But trust me - if you're at all interested in why people do what they do, you'll find Little Dorrit isn't just about bureaucracy and poverty. In fact, it might be that it's about the power of the human nature for believing its own lies, and how everyone else is just too polite to tell you to shut up.
    • 4/5
      I so enjoy the artful prose of Dickens and "Little Dorrit" was no exception. Some of the passages are so beautifully written that I found myself rereading them aloud. The tale that he creates with a rather large cast of characters is nothing short of brilliant. A large cast of characters is introduced throughout the course of the first part and their lives and fortunes are neatly interwoven by the end.
    • 5/5
      It was a happy day when I, for whatever reason, elected to sample Charles Dickens. Having read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, I digressed to more popular fiction (Michener, Clavell, McMurtry, King, Grisham), as well as periods of science fiction and even non-fiction (Ambrose, McCollough for example), before making an effort to upgrade my reading list.I read some Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck and Hemingway with mixed success before reading Great Expectations. I liked it enough to read David Copperfield, and I was hooked. A Tale of Two Cities followed and then Oliver Twist (not my favorite), Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Son before taking on this door stop of a novel.Many of Dickens’s works tend to be lengthy and excessively wordy, perhaps due to their nature of having been serialized prior to being printed in a single volume. Truth be told, after having read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities I confess to being disappointed with several of the following Dickens novels, particularly Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. This novel however restored my faith. While Dickens is certainly famous for character development, and I’ve found no one better, the novels that I’ve truly enjoyed have been those that also feature an advancement of story line and this one is no different in that regard. It is simply an outstanding story, with all of the outrageous characters that you’ve come to expect in any Dickens work. As in other Dickens works, a period of acclimation is required to become comfortable with the vocabulary and social conventions of the era. Having read almost all of Dickens’s work, I would have to rank this as my third favorite, after David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities.
    • 4/5
      The story of Little Dorrit, born and brought up in a debtors' prison and her father, the hopeless debtor in question, who eventually inherits a fortune and is thus released. Their lives are entwined with those of the Clennan family: Arthur, recently returned from China, and his miserable mother, who employs Little Dorrit as a needlewoman.I enjoyed most of this novel, until the end, which seemed very rushed and even more of a series of coincidences than is usual even for Dickens. I was puzzled to see Arthur, who had been a character of such maturity and integrity, make the error he did with the partnership's money, especially as he had been uneasy about Mr Merdle's financial dominance. I was also sad to see him lose his autonomy and become passive in the closing chapters. On the other hand, I enjoyed Mr Meagles' way of communicating with "foreigners", all Flora's conversations, the chapters describing the Dorrit family during the period of their great wealth, the chapter in the voice of Miss Wade, and even Mr F's aunt. The Flintwich/Blandois storyline got tiresome and the truth of Arthur's past could have done with a bit of foreshadowing as it seemed to come out of nowhere and the link with the Dorrit family was a stretch.
    • 4/5
      So for the last two days I've wanted to post "Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms, prunes and prisms" as my Facebook status except that I fear no one would get it and everyone would think I am crazy.

      This is one of the really underrated Dickens books, in my opinion. I've read it four or five times and I've enjoyed it thoroughly each time. I think Little Dorrit herself is a great character and the plot is somewhat less complicated than the machinations in Bleak House. If you can find time for 1000 pages of Victorian prose, it will be worth the effort.