Reading Order
Little DorritCharles Dickens Little Dorrit Reading Order
Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57) is set partly in the Marshalsea debtors' prison where Dickens's own father was imprisoned when Dickens was twelve — the biographical wound that marked all his fiction. The story of Amy Dorrit, who has grown up in the Marshalsea caring for her imprisoned father, and Arthur Clennam, who returns from twenty years in China to find himself implicated in a mystery his family has suppressed, is Dickens's most sustained attack on government bureaucracy and the financial speculation that was restructuring Victorian society.
Where to start
Little Dorrit
Complete Little Dorrit Book List
- 1Buy
Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens·1857·Start here — Dickens's most explicitly political novel after Bleak House; the Circumlocution Office satire is his most sustained attack on government inefficiency, and the debtors' prison setting draws on the biographical wound that shaped all his fiction. - 2Buy
Bleak House
Charles Dickens·1853·The companion piece — also organized around the destruction wrought by an English institution (the Court of Chancery rather than the Marshalsea and the Circumlocution Office); more technically innovative than Little Dorrit and typically read first. - 3Buy
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens·1837·Dickens's first novel — comic, episodic, and containing (in Mr. Pickwick's imprisonment for debt) the earliest fictional treatment of the Marshalsea experience that Little Dorrit addresses most fully; essential context for understanding Dickens's development from comic entertainer to social critic. - 4Buy
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens·1850·Dickens's most autobiographical novel — his portrait of his own childhood (the blacking factory, the difficult mother) in a fictional guise; essential for understanding the biographical sources of Little Dorrit's debtors' prison and its portrait of parental failure. - 5Buy
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens·1859·The novel Dickens wrote immediately after Little Dorrit — his most plot-driven and the one with the most sustained atmospheric tension; contains imprisonment and liberation as central themes, echoing Little Dorrit's preoccupation with both literal and psychological incarceration.
Little Dorrit — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Little Dorrit based on Dickens's own life?
Yes — the Marshalsea debtors' prison was where Dickens's father John was imprisoned for debt in 1824, when Charles was twelve. Dickens was taken out of school and put to work at Warren's Blacking warehouse, pasting labels on boot polish, while his family lived in the prison. This experience — the humiliation of the work, the separation from his family, his father's apparently cheerful adaptation to prison life — was the emotional wound at the center of Dickens's imaginative life, and it informs all his fiction about childhood, debt, and institutional incarceration.
What is the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit?
The Circumlocution Office is Dickens's satirical name for the government bureaucracy he invented for Little Dorrit — a department whose entire purpose is to avoid doing anything by perfecting the art of 'How Not to Do It.' It is a satire of the British civil service and the inefficiency that Dickens believed characterized British government, written in response to the failures of military and government administration exposed by the Crimean War. It remains one of the most brilliant and funny sustained satirical inventions in all his fiction.
Which Dickens novel should I read before Little Dorrit?
Bleak House (1852–53) is the ideal predecessor — it establishes Dickens's mature satirical mode and his ability to organize a large-scale social panorama around a central institutional target. Great Expectations (1860–61) is better if you want to understand Dickens's psychological range before tackling his political anger. Either way, Little Dorrit is most rewarding read after at least one of the major novels rather than as a first Dickens.
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