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    Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Audiobook35 hours

    Little Dorrit

    Written by Charles Dickens

    Narrated by Anton Lesser

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    William Dorrit has been a resident of the Marshalsea debtors prison for so many years that he has gained the nickname ‘The Father of the Marshalsea’. However, his suffering is eased by his close bond with youngest daughter Amy, or ‘Little Dorrit’. The dashing Arthur Clennam, returning to London after many years in China, enters their lives and the Dorrits’ fortunes begin to rise and fall. A biting satirical work on the shortcomings of nineteenth-century government and society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateSep 1, 2008
    ISBN9789629547653
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

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    Reviews for Little Dorrit

    4/5

    78 ratings44 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title spellbinding and masterful, with excellent voicing of characters. The weaving together of colorful and lovable characters is truly astounding. The protagonists, Arthur Clennam and Little Dorritt, are highly praised. Highly recommend.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      A decided Dickens masterpiece. Compelling but it bogs a bit in the middle (Italy) and it suffers from a few of the Great One's particular flaws. On the whole I liked Bleak House better and this is just a slight cut above Our Mutual Friend.
    • 5/5
      I just finished Little Dorrit and feel that it speaks to our contemporary social, political and moral problems. This novel seems to me to be quite different from so many of Dickens' novels; the main character is introduced not as a child but as a middle-aged man. The main female character is not vapid, but an interesting person. The writing seems to be even more symbolic than usual. Of course one might consider the main characters to be the Office of Circumlocution and the Marshalsea Prison. Both of these institutions represent the class-bound corruption of England. The Office of Circumlocution is, of course, the corrupt civil service system. It was supposedly reformed in 1855, but in reality the senior civil service remained in the hands of the upper classes. Dickens called them the Barnacle and Stiltstocking families. Their power was later illustrated in a novel, and then mini-series, entitled A Very British Coup. One important part of Little Dorrit is that the English aristocracy had little interest in, and actually opposed, the progress of invention in England and indeed tried to stifle it. Dickens was prophetic when he has the engineer Doyle begin to work for a foreign power (obviously Germany) from whom he received many honors. Germany, with its Realschulen and technische Hochschulen and emphasis in engineering and other practical matters (such as the health and education of its citizens) moved ahead of Britain by the end of the century. The Marshalsea Prison also illustrates the power of the wealthy in that it was run for profit and clearly favored the well-established. The article about the Marshalsea in Wikipedia is quite enlightening. The brilliance of Dickens is shown in how he parallels the lives of the prisoners of Marshalsea and the prisoners of Society. Of course Dickens indicated this duality by dividing the novel into two books: Poverty and Riches. I was very much taken by how this novel speaks to our present condition; the English and increasingly the American senior civil services seem to be reserved for the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings. The disregard for progress in engineering is certainly prevalent in the U.S. and probably England. In today's CBS News Money Watch section on the internet, there is much information about the banks' loan modification programs which seem to be run by the Office of Circumlocution. The character of Merdle appears again regularly in the news media. Suicide is no longer required. Of course we must remember that the reason we read Dickens is that he always has a compelling story; I became quickly involved in the affairs of Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit and fascinated again by the great eccentric characters always present in a Dickens novel.
    • 3/5
      This is a dark, even cynical look at 19th century British society in general and the effects of imprisonment on the soul. The first two reactions I had upon finishing was that no one should try to read it in its entire version, get an abridged copy. It was originally puplished in 19 monthly installments, and to read it in the complete version all at once is as nauseating as eating an entire chocolate cake at one sitting. Dickens belabors every point and over emphasizes most characteristics. After the 100th time Rigaud's moustache went up under his nose and his nose came down over his moustache I found the characterization rather like nails on a chalk board. As cute as Flora's rambling stream of consciousness monologues were, we didn't need quite so many to get the point.My second observation was that perhaps if Mr. Dickens had been able to see both halves of humanity as being equally human he wouldn't have been so imprisoned in his own bigotry and perhaps would have been less cynical. There's not a fully realized, psychologically healthy woman in the whole 895 page (Penguin edition) book. There's the Good Mother, Mrs. Meagles(who serves no other purpose), the Bad Mother, Mrs. Clennam - imprisoned in her unrelentingly, impersonal Calvanism; the romantically deluded Minni Meagles; the haughty Fanny, imprisoned though not at all unhappily, by her social climbing; the pitiful Affery imprisoned by both class and sex; the Strong Woman - Miss Wade - very accurately depicted as a pre-Freudian paranoid; Mrs. Merdle, The Boosom; and the poodle-named Tattycoram who could have been whole, and would have been had she been an adopted orphan boy named Fido, but as a mere female needed only to fight the temptation to consider herself anyone's equal. Oh, and let us not forget Little Doormat herself. One sentence from the book gives a complete description: "Little Dorrit yielded willingly." That she did, to everyone in everything. There's not an ounce of self preservation about the little woman. The interplay of the need for self preservation and the urge toward altruism makes for human drama. There's no drama in this character, because she has no self, only the urge to be of service. If one is willing to overlook Dickins' sexism, as one must overlook other authors' racism, we can appreciate the book as excellent social commentary and for the perfect construction of the Circumlocution Office - the epitomy of bureacracy, and a wonderful foreshadowing of our financial collapse and the effects of Bernie Madoff in the person of Mr. Merdle.
    • 5/5
      Audiobook. I do love this book and loved it again. A good book for our times with the ponzi scheme that is one of its major plot schemes. The world would be a tricky place right now if all debtors were sent to prison. This is a complex, somber, fine book.
    • 4/5
      Dickens functions in his books the way people wish God did in our world, always arranging every little event and chance encounter and directing them towards a neat and tidy moral finish where the good prosper and the wicked die in house fires. Very satisfying.
    • 3/5
      I listened to this book. I can't say it was my favourite Dickens. There was too much extremism in living circumstances for it to be really enjoyable. However, it does give one a flavour for the English legal system at the time. Dickens' opinion of the system and government bureaucracy is quite evident.
    • 4/5
      One of his best books! I am currently on a mission to read all of Dickens' books with about 4 to go and this book had such memorable characters which will stay with me forever.
    • 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
      "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.)
    • 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.
    • 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
      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
      Little Dorrit, published in 1855–1857, is often described as Dickens' creative re-imagining of his experiences at the Marshalsea Prison, where his father was imprisoned for debt in 1824 when Charles was twelve. The Marshalsea looms over this story in various forms; sometimes it feels ominous and other times it is congenially familiar. The characters are wonderful, as is usual with Dickens. I think John Chivery is my favorite. He proves that heroism doesn't have to be dashing. More often than not, it's humble. I also love the Plornishes, especially Mrs. Plornish's linguistic abilities. Flora is also so much fun... I know people just like her, who never use punctuation in either their speech or writing. She drove me crazy at first, especially with her constant silly references to her previous love for Arthur. But she grew on me and I started to enjoy her scenes. Dickens can be so funny!Little Dorrit herself is so sweet and selfless that she is a little hard to believe, though most people will be able to empathize with her when she is walked over by her family. She is a character that I would seek to emulate, rather than immediately identify with. I don't know anyone in real life who would be so patient with selfish, thoughtless family members; I know I couldn't! The villains are as varied as in real life. Rigaud Blandois, that "gentleman," is insufferable. His speeches of self-justication and self-satisfaction are just sickening. Miss Wade is simply mesmerizing... so much of what she says *could* have a basis in reality, but is so twisted. Is it really okay to adopt an orphan and raise her to be a servant to one's own daughter? But it's all in the interpretation of reality, and her bitterness is clearly wrong. It's the same with Mrs. Clennam, that merciless, religious woman. She is legalism personified. And who could forget Mr. Merdle! I knew we were setting up for a big fall when Dickens was hyping him so much, but I didn't suspect what actually happens. Other "public" villains include the family Barnacle, who cling stubbornly and uselessly to the ship of State, and also what Dickens is pleased to call the "Circumlocution Office." This is his name for all the bureaucracy in English government that ever stifled good sense and public well-being — and he is not kind to it. Unfortunately for this novel, I have been reading it since May (it's now August), due to various life circumstances and general busyness. I usually read very quickly and it's unusual for me to spend over two months in one book. And so I felt that this story dragged, and my emotional involvement with its characters was less than it might have been. I have enjoyed many of Dickens' books and am used to his sprawling plots, but this one had so many subplots going in so many different directions, it rather faltered at the end. So much was left unresolved. It isn't that everyone has to have a happy or at least satisfying ending. They just need to have an ending, period! Also, the plot device by which Little Dorrit becomes possessed of her fortune is so convoluted. I was shamefacedly thankful for the breakdown in my Penguin Classics copy which explained all the events that transpired before the story started. Arthur Clennam's intuition that there was some dark dealing in his family's past that wronged the Dorrits was also a little too precipitate; how could he have known? There were moments when I was overtaken by the mastery of Dickens' storytelling, like when the businesslike Pancks betrays a fondness for the happy little Italian, Baptiste Cavalletto. It is also very poignant when Arthur keeps trying to convince himself he is not in love with Pet and when Mr. Meagles tells him about Pet's dead twin sister. I was rather in awe of Dickens right there; it was perfectly put. I felt so much for the Meagles and for Arthur at that moment.However, despite its great characters and moments of genius, Little Dorrit is not one of my favorite Dickens novels. In fact, it's probably my least favorite thus far. That isn't to say that I did not enjoy it, but it just didn't have the overmastering, unifying idea that it needed to bring everything together at the end. It was just about too many things. Sometimes it was about the asinine abuses of the Circumlocution Office; sometimes it was about feminism and the unspeakable insult of charity; sometimes it was about financial devastation by swindlery; sometimes it was about the deterioration of personality brought about by imprisonment. At the end, I felt that I was left still holding the strings of some of the subplots. I wasn't sure how to put them down and Dickens did not gently take them from my hands and lay them to rest. This is a good novel, but flawed. I would not recommend this as one's first foray into Dickens.
    • 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.
    • 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
      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
      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
      It’s truly astounding how Dickens manages to weave together so many colorful, lovable characters. Every one has their purpose in the Grand Scheme and every one feels like an old friend by the end. This may be a matter of opinion, but there never were two better protagonists than Arthur Clennam and Little Dorritt.
    • 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.
    • 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 pretty good book until the ending. The explanation for all the machinations of the plot and the motivation of the characters didn't even make sense. At least Dorrit finds happiness in the end.
    • 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
      Excellent audio book, wonderful voicing of different characters. It's quite long at 35 hours so I think a lot of people will pick the abridged versions.
    • 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.