61 pages • 2 hours read
Little Dorrit
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Background
Cultural Context: Class in Victorian Britain
Little Dorrit is, first and foremost, Dickens’s satire of the class system in 19th-century Britain. Though the Victorian era saw some flexibility in class structure, many previous notions about social and economic classes persisted from even more conservative times. A person’s position in society was primarily determined by two things: birth and wealth, with the former typically being more important. The upper classes in society were made up of those who were considered “high-born” or “well-bred” and had inherited wealth, land, or titles within the family. A common notion among these classes was that labor was incompatible with gentility. Those who earned their wealth—even if they were wealthier than those who inherited it—were typically considered to be a step down from the highest classes. Though notions about earning a living were changing in the Victorian era with the expansion of industrialization, the stock market, and the middle class as a whole, this burgeoning middle class was kept out of the upper crust of society unless they made the proper connections or had a title conferred upon them.
The people who made up the lower and working classes, on whom many of Dickens’s novels tend to focus, were highly disadvantaged compared to the wealthy and well-bred. In addition to this, certain moral implications were tied to people of different classes; those who were born into the land-owning gentry, in particular, felt that they were morally superior to the supposedly inferior people of the lower classes. Even when people of the upper classes were imprisoned for their debt—as seen in Little Dorrit—they were afforded certain comforts that working-class people who were in debt did not have. Debt was also viewed in different ways by people of different classes. Whereas the rich could refuse to pay their debt and still maintain their status within and outside of the debtors’ prisons, working class people who could not afford to pay their debts were often considered lazy and reckless. Little Dorrit explores The Complexities of Wealth and Class along with the human effects of these frivolous classifications.
Authorial Context: Charles Dickens and his Work
Charles Dickens is among the most well-known authors in Western literature, and his own body of work forms a canon of its own with a distinct “Dickensian” style. Many Dickens novels are in some respect autobiographical or influenced by his own experiences. Dickens often draws on the experiences of his family’s struggles with debt and his father’s imprisonment when he was a boy. Like William Dorrit, Dickens’s father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison because he could not pay his creditors. Dickens didn’t live at the Marshalsea like his mother and younger siblings—instead, he spent time in a workhouse to help support his family. He would often visit his family and witness the inhumanity and unfairness of life in the prison. In his adult life, Dickens was a legal clerk and journalist before his career as a novelist began, and this, along with his childhood experiences, made Dickens a strong supporter of government and prison reform, especially as it impacted the working class. These ideas often appear in Dickens’s novels, including Little Dorrit, which details the inefficiency of the government and the inequity of life in a debtors’ prison.
While working as a journalist, Dickens began to write and submit short stories known as “sketches” under the pen name “Boz,” and their popularity led to his writing The Pickwick Papers. This helped establish the style of his later serials like Little Dorrit. Dickensian novels are known for their many, interwoven plotlines and characters who form a tangled web of relationships. Dickens’s novels often rely on coincidence and satire, which the short, episodic structure of serial publishing enhanced. Nevertheless, Dickens adhered to the conventions of Victorian literature as much as he invented them, and his novels often ended by foregrounding traditional Victorian themes related to morals, divine providence, and character growth.
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