by John Welford

Created on: March 23, 2009   Last Updated: November 30, 2010

Imprisonment is the central theme of "Little Dorrit", whether the prison be one of iron bars, a closed heart or mind, or those of politics, administration and economics. The prison that looms largest is that of the Marshalsea, where people could be consigned for many years for being unable to pay their debts. Dickens is here making use of his own childhood experience, when his father, John Dickens, became a "resident" for a few months in 1824, bringing humiliation on the whole family.

The book opens in a prison in Marseilles, where the chief villain of the story, Rigaud (who also uses the name Blandois) is introduced, along with several people who are detained in quarantine on their way to London. These include Arthur Clennam, who is returning home from China where his father has just died, to London, where he finds his mother living in a dismal first-floor room, confined to a wheelchair from which she conducts the family business.

At his mother's house, Arthur meets Amy Dorrit (usually referred to as "Little Dorrit"), who is doing casual sewing jobs there. He follows her home and discovers that she lives with her father at the Marshalsea prison, where he has long been imprisoned as a debtor. Indeed, William Dorrit has become intensely proud of his status as "the father of the Marshalsea". The Dorrit family also comprises William's brother, another daughter and a son.

Arthur becomes curious as to why the Dorrits are in this situation, which is why he encounters the "Circumlocution Office", a satirical invention on the part of Dickens that represents all the offices of government that exist solely to push pieces of paper from place to place without ever actually doing anything useful.

Arthur also meets the Meagles family (who had been fellow detainees at Marseilles) and the engineer Daniel Doyce. Having decided to have nothing to do with his mother's business affairs, which he suspects are based on sharp practice, he goes into partnership with Doyce, who is a brilliant inventor but no good as a businessman. He also becomes reacquainted with Flora Finching, who had been the love of his life many years before but is now fat and silly. She is the daughter of Christopher Casby, the grasping landlord of a slum tenement, Bleeding Heart Yard, which is not far from the Marshalsea.

Clennam and Doyce visit Meagles at Twickenham, where they meet Henry Gowan, who is courting Pet, the Meagles' daughter. Also there is Pet's maid Harriet, who is known as Tattycoram, having

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