Recommendations
Books Like Little Dorrit
Best books to read after Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit is Dickens's most explicitly political novel after Bleak House — an attack on government bureaucracy, debtors' prison, and financial speculation, drawn partly from the most painful experience of his childhood. If Amy Dorrit's quiet strength and the novel's moral outrage at the systems that grind people down moved you, these books share its portrait of institutional power and its conviction that the poor are human beings whose suffering is a social crime.
- 1Buy
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The natural predecessor to Little Dorrit in Dickens's catalog — both are organized around a specific institutional target (the Court of Chancery; the Circumlocution Office and the Marshalsea) and both use the same technique of interweaving a panoramic social cast with a more intimate personal story; Bleak House is more formally innovative, Little Dorrit more personally felt
- 2Buy
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
The novel Dickens wrote after Little Dorrit — his most psychologically sophisticated portrait of how the expectation of money and the reality of class shape a character's entire self-understanding; where Little Dorrit is about the damage done by institutions, Great Expectations is about the damage done by the social imagination of money and status
- 3Buy
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's debut novel, which contains in Mr. Pickwick's imprisonment for debt the earliest treatment of the Marshalsea experience that Little Dorrit addresses most fully; reading The Pickwick Papers before Little Dorrit traces how Dickens returned to the same biographical wound across his career
- 4Buy
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's panoramic novel about justice, mercy, and what society does to the poor — the most direct European parallel to Little Dorrit in its conviction that the law, as it exists, is an instrument of the powerful against the weak, and in its portrait of a society that punishes poverty as a moral failing rather than addressing it as a social condition
- 5Buy
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Kafka's nightmarish portrait of a man arrested for an unspecified crime and destroyed by a bureaucratic legal process he cannot understand — the modernist descendant of Little Dorrit's portrait of institutions that crush individuals; the Circumlocution Office, dedicated to 'How Not to Do It,' anticipates Kafka's faceless and impenetrable bureaucracies
- 6Buy
The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's satire of Victorian financial speculation and social corruption — written twenty years after Little Dorrit but treating the same themes of financial fraud, speculative investment, and the corruption of social institutions by money; the most direct Victorian companion to Little Dorrit's financial speculation subplot
- 7Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's industrial novel treats the same conflict between industrial capitalism and human values that Little Dorrit approaches through its portrait of the Circumlocution Office and the financial speculation plot; where Dickens's satire is institutional, Gaskell's is personal — the conflict between a mill owner and his workers humanized through a romance
- 8Buy
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most autobiographical novel and the essential companion to Little Dorrit for understanding the biographical sources of both — the blacking factory in David Copperfield corresponds to the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit; reading both shows how Dickens transformed the same childhood trauma into very different kinds of fiction
More Little Dorrit Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.