Little Dorrit was published in twenty monthly parts by Bradbury & Evans from December 1855 to June 1857 and is Dickens’s most personally painful novel. Its central setting — the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark — was the prison where Dickens’s own father had been incarcerated in 1824, an experience that scarred the twelve-year-old Charles for life and that he had never publicly acknowledged before this novel.
The Novel
William Dorrit has been imprisoned in the Marshalsea for so long that he is known as the “Father of the Marshalsea” — a title he accepts with pathetic dignity. His daughter Amy — Little Dorrit — was born in the prison and has spent her entire life caring for her father, her vain sister Fanny, and her feckless brother Tip. When an inheritance is discovered, the Dorrits are freed and travel to Italy as wealthy tourists — but the prison has marked them permanently. William Dorrit, at a grand dinner in Rome, lapses into his Marshalsea manner and addresses the assembled guests as fellow prisoners. He dies shortly afterward.
The novel’s other great target is the Circumlocution Office — Dickens’s satire of government bureaucracy, whose operating principle is “HOW NOT TO DO IT.” The Barnacle family, who staff the Office through generations of nepotism, are Dickens’s most devastating portrait of institutional inertia.
The Circumlocution Office
The Circumlocution Office is Dickens’s most sustained piece of institutional satire — a government department whose sole function is to prevent anything from being done. The Barnacle family staffs the Office across generations, each member more complacently obstructive than the last. Dickens modelled the Office on the actual Civil Service, and the satire was so accurate that the term “Circumlocution Office” entered the language as a synonym for bureaucratic obstruction.
Arthur Clennam
Arthur Clennam, the novel’s nominal hero, is Dickens’s most psychologically modern protagonist — a man returning to England after twenty years abroad, haunted by the sense that his family has committed some wrong that he must atone for. His quest to uncover the secret connects the Dorrit plot to the Clennam plot, and his growing love for Little Dorrit gives the novel its emotional resolution.
Collecting Little Dorrit
First edition in parts (Bradbury & Evans, London, 1855–1857): Twenty monthly parts in blue-green wrappers. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne with 40 plates.
Approximate market values:
- Complete in original parts, fine: $5,000–$15,000
- Very good: $2,000–$5,000
- First edition in book form (1857): $1,500–$4,000
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Steady appreciation. The 2008 BBC adaptation with Andrew Davies increased awareness.
Projected values (2026–2036): Fine sets should reach $15,000–$30,000.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is this considered one of Dickens’s greatest novels? Modern critics — particularly Lionel Trilling, whose 1953 essay rehabilitated the novel — value Little Dorrit for its psychological depth, its structural ambition (the novel’s two books, “Poverty” and “Riches,” mirror each other), and its unflinching analysis of how institutions — prisons, bureaucracies, families — deform the people within them.
Was Dickens’s father really in the Marshalsea? Yes. John Dickens was imprisoned for debt in 1824. The twelve-year-old Charles was sent to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory, pasting labels on bottles. The experience was so traumatic that Dickens told almost no one about it during his lifetime; Little Dorrit was his most direct reckoning with the shame.