Little Dorrit

As for many of Dickens' novels, highlighting social injustices is at the heart of Little Dorrit. His father was imprisoned for debt, and Dickens' shines a spotlight on the fate of many who are unable to repay a debt when the ability to seek work is denied. Amy Dorrit is the youngest daughter of a man imprisoned for debt and is working as a seamstress for Mrs Clennam when Arthur Clennam crosses her path. Will the sweet natured Amy win Arthur's heart? And will they ever escape the shadow of debtors' prison?

Tells the story of Hattie Coram, who was abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital. She is trained as a domestic servant and becomes a maid in Charles Dickens' household where she is plagued by the nickname "Tattycoram" and eventually used by Dickens as a character in his novel, Little Dorrit.

'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.' Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made social and mental prisons. Against a background of government incompetence and financial scandal, he searches for the key to the affairs of the Dorrit family, prisoners for debt in the Marshalsea. He discovers through the seamstress Amy Dorrit the fulfilment of which he dreams, but only after he learns to understand his own heart. Revelation and redemption haunt Dickens's portrayal of human relations as fundamentally distorted by class and money. The swindling financier Merdle, the bureaucratic nightmare of the Circumlocution Office, and a teeming cast of characters display the inadequacy of secular morality in the face of contemporary social and political confusion. Mixing humour and pathos, irony and satire, Dickens's eleventh novel reveals a master of fiction in top form. This new edition, based on the definitive Clarendon text, includes all of Phiz's original illustrations and a wide-ranging introduction highlighting Dickens's move to more personal and spiritual concerns. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens’s maturity. When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy's father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea prison. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr Panks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office.