Why a Booktrail?
1820s – The novel of imprisonment and Dickens real life
Little Dorrit
What you need to know before your trail
When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother’s seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy’s father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea prison. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr Panks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office.
Travel Guide
The Marshalsea Prison
In London, William Dorrit, imprisoned as a debtor, has been in Marshalsea debtors’ prison for so long that his three children – including little Dorrit) — have all grown up there, although they are free to pass in and out of the prison as they please.
Dickens’s own father had been imprisoned here and so Dickens got to know and experience for himself the trials and poverty associated with the prison. He also attacks the class system and the goverment calling the British Treasury, in the form of his fictional “Circumlocution Office”
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Little Dorrit
Author/Guide: Charles Dickens Destination: London, Venice, Rome Departure Time: 1800s
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