"Little Dorrit" (1857) by Charles Dickens

In this very big and wide-ranging opus Dickens follows his eponymous heroine from the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in south London, where she had lived for the first twenty-plus years of her life and the first half of the book, across France and Switzerland with her newly-rich family on a Grand Tour to Italy, where she spends a couple of years rubbing shoulders with the hordes of semi-expatriate upper-class English that congregated there at the time — the novel is set in the mid-1820s — and then back to London, where the Marshalsea Prison again features prominently, to deal with the dramatic events and revelations and turns of plot with which the last part of the novel is filled in this masterful novel, one of Dickens’s finest.

With all of the 40 splendid captioned illustrations by Phiz [1] that appeared in the first publication of Little Dorrit in 19 monthly issues of an illustrated magazine between December 1855 and June 1857.

(339,000 words)

An e-book, with all of the illustrations, is available for downloading below.

Little Dorrit (e-book)