Little Dorrit

Arthur Clennam comes home to London after twenty years in China and finds in his cold mother's house a quiet young seamstress, Amy Dorrit. She was born in the Marshalsea, a prison for debtors, where her father William has lived so long that he is called 'the Father of the Marshalsea'. When the Dorrits suddenly inherit a fortune, they travel through Europe in grandeur and become ashamed of their past, while in London the great financier Mr Merdle, worshipped by society, ruins thousands, and Clennam himself ends up in the prison where Little Dorrit was born.

Dickens published the novel in monthly parts from 1855 to 1857. His own father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea when Charles was twelve, and the book's 'Circumlocution Office', whose art is 'how not to do it', mocks the government failures of the Crimean War. George Bernard Shaw called it more seditious than Marx's Capital. Its great companion is Bleak House.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.