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Little Dorrit
Dickens, Charles
Published:
1857
Type(s):
Novels
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
1
About Dickens:
Charles John Huffam Dickens pen-name "Boz", was the foremost English novelist of the
Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Considered one of the English
language's greatest writers, he was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and memorable char-
acters, and achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime.
Later critics, beginning with George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton, championed his mas-
tery of prose, his endless invention of memorable characters and his powerful social sensib-
ilities. Yet he has also received criticism from writers such as George Henry Lewes, Henry
James, and Virginia Woolf, who list sentimentality, implausible occurrence and grotesque
characters as faults in his oeuvre.
The popularity of Dickens' novels and short stories has meant that none have ever gone
out of print. Dickens wrote serialised novels, which was the usual format for fiction at the
time, and each new part of his stories would be eagerly anticipated by the reading public.
Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Dickens:
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2
Preface
I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must
have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a whole, to ex-
press themselves on its being read as a whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that
I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have
given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving
may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished.
If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and the Circum-
locution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an Englishman, without pre-
suming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done that violence to good manners,
in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold
as to defend that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated after
the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other
equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the preposterous
fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design,
it would be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these pages, in
the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But, I submit
myself to suffer judgment to go by default on all these counts, if need be, and to accept the
assurance (on good authority) that nothing like them was ever known in this land. Some of
my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Mar-
shalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present
month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, meta-
morphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost.
Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey’, I came
to ‘Marshalsea Place:’ the houses in which I recognised, not only as the great block of the
former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s-eye when I became
Little Dorrit’s biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby
I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses,
and was very nearly correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came by
his information, I don’t know; he was a quarter of a century too young to know anything
about it of himself. I pointed to the window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and
where her father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger who tenan-
ted that apartment at present? He said, ‘Tom Pythick.’ I asked him who was Tom Pythick?
and he said, ‘Joe Pythick’s uncle.’
A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to enclose the pent-up
inner prison where nobody was put, except for ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Mar-
shalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the
very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to
the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got
free; will look upon rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding
ghosts of many miserable years.
In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many readers. In the
Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have still to repeat the same words. Deeply
sensible of the affection and confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Pre-
face, as I added to that, May we meet again!
3
London May 1857
4
Part 1
5
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