Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens · 1812–1870 · England

Why it matters

A woman born and raised in the Marshalsea debtors' prison finds herself, and her family's ruinous secret, entangled with the Circumlocution Office's bottomless bureaucratic indifference. Among Dickens's darkest and most structurally ambitious novels, and (his own father having been jailed for debt) his most personal indictment of the system.

At a glance

His longest and most tightly plotted late novel, layering deep social satire onto a sprawling cast.