Little Dorrit Summary: Dickens on Debt, Class and the Marshalsea
What it is about
Little Dorrit was published in serial parts between 1855 and 1857. It opens in 1826, partly in Marseille and partly in London, and it turns on two people who should never have met. One is Amy Dorrit, youngest child of a family living inside the Marshalsea prison for debtors. She was born there. The other is Arthur Clennam, a businessman coming home after twenty years in China, where he ran the family firm with his father and where his father has recently died.
Arthur arrives in London carrying a watch his father pressed on him at the end, with the words "Your mother". Inside the casing is a scrap of old silk worked with the beaded initials DNF, meaning do not forget. His mother, Mrs Clennam, will not explain it. Arthur tells her he wants no part of the business and will make his own way. Then he notices that this cold, rigid household shows unusual kindness to one young seamstress, and he follows her back to the Marshalsea.
From there the novel grows outwards. There is a murderer called Rigaud who talks his way out of a French prison and reappears in London under the name Blandois, with blackmail in mind. There is a government department, the Circumlocution Office, whose whole function is to make sure nothing ever gets done. There is an inventor, Daniel Doyce, ground down by that department, and a rent collector, Pancks, who does the dirty work for a landlord with a benevolent face. And there is a discovery that lifts the Dorrits out of prison and into money, which turns out to be its own kind of confinement.
The main characters
Amy Dorrit, called Little Dorrit, keeps her father and herself alive by sewing. She moves freely in and out of the gates and says nothing about her work outside, because her father is embarrassed by his position and she protects his pride at the cost of her own.
William Dorrit has been in the Marshalsea for more than twenty years. He has made himself the Father of the Marshalsea, treated with deference by the other prisoners, as though he lived there by choice. His son Tip is inside too, for gambling debts. His daughter Fanny lives outside with his brother Frederick and dances in a music hall where Frederick plays the clarinet. She has caught the eye of the wealthy Edmund Sparkler.
Arthur Clennam is decent, useful to everyone, and slow to see what is in front of him. He takes up the role of benefactor to the Dorrits, becomes Doyce's partner, and helps the injured Italian Cavalletto when he is knocked down by a carriage in London. He is infatuated with Pet Meagles, who marries the cruel artist Henry Gowan. Little Dorrit falls in love with Arthur. He does not notice.
Around them: Mrs Clennam, immobile in a wheelchair and sitting on a secret; her clerk Jeremiah Flintwinch; Flora Finching, Arthur's former fiancee, now a chattering widow; Mr Casby, the smiling landlord; and Tattycoram, the orphan maid who runs from the Meagles family to the strange, bitter Miss Wade.
The themes
Debt is the engine. A debtors' prison held people who could not work and could not leave until they had paid, which is a trap shaped like a law. Dickens knew it from the inside of his own family. His father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea.
Then there is bureaucracy. The Circumlocution Office is the novel's great comic invention and its sharpest attack, a machine built to absorb effort and return nothing. Arthur goes there to ask a simple question about William Dorrit's debt and gets nowhere.
And there is class. The Dorrits' rise is the book's cruellest joke. Money does not free them. It makes them anxious, performative and ashamed of where they came from. Only Amy and her uncle Frederick fail to take to it.
How it turns
Skip this part if you want the second half fresh. Pancks works out that William Dorrit is the lost heir to a fortune. The debt is paid, the family walks out, and Mr Dorrit forbids his heartbroken daughter from seeing Arthur again. The Dorrits tour Europe, cross the Alps, stay in Venice and settle in Rome, hiding their past from new friends. At a party in Rome, Mr Dorrit's mind slips and he addresses the room as the Father of the Marshalsea. He falls ill afterwards and dies. Meanwhile Rigaud is still working on Mrs Clennam, and the meaning of DNF is still waiting.
Why it still matters
Little Dorrit is Dickens writing about systems rather than villains. The Circumlocution Office needs no evil mastermind to ruin lives. The prison does its work by procedure. Readers who have waited on a decision from an institution that will not explain itself will recognise the feeling exactly. It also contains one of his most unshowy heroines, a woman whose goodness costs her something real. The pairing of satire and patience is what has kept the book alive.
