Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics)

by Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Stephen Wall (Editor), Helen Small (Editor)

• Used

  Illustrated
  2003

  $11.97

  A novel of serendipity, of fortunes won and lost, and of the spectre of imprisonment that hangs over all aspects of Victorian society, Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit is edited with an introduction by Stephen Wall in Penguin Classics . 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. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens's maturity. Stephen Wall's introduction examines Dickens' transformation of childhood memories of his father's incarceration in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. This revised edition includes expanded notes, appendices and suggestion for further reading by Helen Small, a chronology of Dickens' life and works, and original illustrations. Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist , Great Expectations , A Tale of Two Cities , David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers , have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions. If you enjoyed Little Dorrit , you might like Dickens's Barnaby Rudge , also available in Penguin Classics .

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.35

  Reality proposes, but Dickens metamorphoses...to create not so much a veritable picture of life as a living alternative to it , Stephen Wall writes in the Introduction to this brand-new edition of Little Dorrit. The novel is set in Marshalsea, the debtors' prison where Amy Dorrit, the title character, has spent her entire life caring for her imprisoned father (and where Dickens's own father had been imprisoned). Amy's devotion to her father and her love for Arthur Clennam, a young man who eventually helps secure her father's release from prison, form a small center of light in an otherwise dark portrayal of both the physical and psychological horrors of imprisonment and the hypocrisy of a society that allows them to continue. Although Dickens railed against society's inequities in earlier books, his social criticism here is more radical and his comedy, harsher and more pointed.