Little Dorrit (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Charles Dickens and Grace Moore

One of Charles Dickens’ most personally resonant novels, Little Dorrit speaks across the centuries to the modern reader.  Its depiction of shady financiers and banking collapses seems uncannily topical, as does Dickens’ compassionate admiration for Amy Dorrit, the “child of the Marshalsea,” as she struggles to hold her family together in the face of neglect, irresponsibility, and ruin.  Intricate in its plotting, the novel also satirizes the cumbersome machinery of government.  For Dickens, Little Dorrit marked a return to some of the most harrowing scenes of his childhood, with its graphic depiction of the trauma of the debtors’ prison and its portrait of a world ignored by society.  The novel not only explores the literal prison, but also the figurative jails that characters build for themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411427990

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk. Living in London in 1824, Dickens was sent by his family to work in a blacking-warehouse, and his father was arrested and imprisoned for debt. Fortunes improved and Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a parliamentary reporter. His first piece of fiction was published by a magazine in December 1832, and by 1836 he had begun his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. He focused his career on writing, completing fourteen highly successful novels, as well as penning journalism, shorter fiction and travel books. He died in 1870.