“Little Dorrit”. A Novel By Charles Dickens. Published 1855 - 1857.

“Little Dorrit”.

Front Cover of the serial by Charles Dickens.

Date: 1855.

Source: NYPL.

Author: Bradbury and Evans.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Text is from Wikipedia - the free encyclopædia,

unless stated otherwise.

Little Dorrit is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857.

The story features Amy Dorrit, youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London.

The First Marshalsea Prison, Southwark, London.

18th-Century.

The caption states that this is the Marshalsea Prison in the 18th-Century, which would make it the first Marshalsea Prison (14th-Century – 1811).

The second Marshalsea Prison existed 1811 – 1842. 

The image was published in England in 1878.

Source: Edward Walford, “Southwark: High Street,”

in Old and New London, Volume 6, 1878. [1] [2]

Author: W. P.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a twenty-year absence, ready to begin his life anew.

The novel satirises some shortcomings of British society and government at the time, including the institution of debtors' prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work, and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts.

Prison courtyard of the former Marshalsea Prison, 

circa 1897, when the buildings were being let as rooms 

and shops.[j] The Prison had closed in 1842.

Photo: Unknown, but probably around 1897.

Source: John Lawson Stoddard (1850 – 1931), 

England and London: John L. Stoddard’s Lectures, Volume 9, part 14, Norwood Press, p. 298. First published 1897 – 1898. Taken from here and here.

Author: Unknown Author.

(Wikimedia Commons)

The prison in this case is the Marshalsea, where Dickens’s own father had been imprisoned.

Dickens is also critical of the inert bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional “Circumlocution Office”.

In addition, Dickens satirises the stratification of society that results from the British class system.