Little Dorrit
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Little Dorrit Details
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
Reviews
For years I hesitated to read the longer and lesser known of Charles Dickens’ novels, worrying that they would be too painful to really enjoy. In fact, some of them have been, and others, while being less depressing overall, have still had some stretches so overshadowed by poverty and the like that they were depressing to read. Little Dorrit is no exception to this; since a large part of it takes place in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, there is a certain drabness to some parts. However, this was only a slight damper to the story as a whole, and the characters were interesting enough that you wanted to see how they came out.Of particular interest as a group (although they were individually rather boring) were the Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office. Dickens’ portrayal of these people and the institution they infested (whose avowed purpose was to see that nothing got done) was hilarious. The Barnacles bear too much resemblance to people still living and serving in the government of our own country to suppose that they, in particular, were not drawn true to life.The Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office, however, are really only tangential to the lives of the main characters. True, they may have caused the financial ruin of some of the parties at various times, but this seems to have been more of an accident than anything else. They are too large an interest for anything or anyone else to be of much consequence to them.Poor Arthur Clennam seems unable to win for losing. Raised by a mother so strict she seems to be made of ice or metal, he was sent to China with his father twenty or more years earlier expressly to keep him away from a girl he had taken a fancy to. Now returning to London all these years later after his father’s death, he renounces all interest in the family business (which seems to be some sort of banking and/or money-lending business). He visits his old love, to discover that she is now another man’s widow and a hopeless airhead, although she evidently still has a basically good heart. He visits a friend he met on his way back to England several times, but deliberately decides not to court the friend’s daughter, telling himself he is now too old for that sort of thing. Partly as a consequence of this, she winds up married to a man who turns out not to be worthy of her.In the process of winding up his father’s affairs at this mother’s house, Clennam sees but isn’t more than barely introduced to, a young woman who is referred to there as Little Dorrit. Clennam takes it into his head that his mother has taken this obviously poor girl on to do sewing as a sop for some serious injustice done to her family at some time in the past, and he resolves to do his best to make it up to her somehow. This resolve is reinforced when he finds out that Little Dorrit and her father live in the Marshalsea Prison.The strange turns their lives take after this are enough to keep you reading all through the long novel.