Little Dorrit

Amid the shadow of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where the gentle Amy Dorrit is born and raised, Dickens weaves a sprawling story of imprisonment both literal and social—of families ruined by debt, fortunes lost and found, and a monstrous financial swindle that anticipates the crashes of our own age. Around Little Dorrit and the melancholy Arthur Clennam gathers an unforgettable cast, from the pompous Circumlocution Office to the sinister Rigaud. A savage satire of bureaucracy, wealth, and the prisons people build for themselves, it is one of Dickens’s darkest and most ambitious novels, rich in pathos, comedy, and moral force, and a profound meditation on freedom, guilt, and love.