Little Dorrit: A Brief Introduction

Professor Hair draws on a lifetime of scholarship and teaching in this brief yet insightful introduction to Charles Dickens's novel . Both readers coming to the novel for the first time and those returning to it will find their enjoyment and understanding enhanced by his analysis of how Dickens uses character, plot and atmosphere to drive home his message of social protest. And that message is as relevant today as it was when Little Dorrit was first published more than a century and a half ago, for in the novel (as Hair points out) "Dickens is exposing and attacking that most difficult of social ills to define precisely, the one that people sometimes refer to as the 'system'... 'Nobody's fault' was Dickens's original title for the novel, and it is of course ironic: something that is 'nobody's fault' is everybody's fault."