ABSTRACT
Critical studies of Little Dorrit usually emphasize Amy Dorrit as the central illuminating presence of the work. Some, Ingham, Michie, or Langland, for instance, more carefully concentrate on the challenge Little Dorrit poses to the Victorian heroine: she is a working woman whose employment, denied by other characters, holds up the myth of a privileged family structure in which a lady need not work. “Working women” was a topic with which many have argued Dickens had a qualified familiarity and the extensive scholarship documents his many and varied appreciations for the feminine influence in the work force. During the novel’s progress, changes in its title prefigure Dickens’s emphasis on the elision of male responsibility within the unacknowledged performance of a woman’s sewing, and on Little Dorrit as the stable female-type key to preserving the façade. Little Dorrit’s corporeal invisibility and her significance to Clennam’s maturity contrast most strikingly with Flora Finching’s verbal assaults and the space her overblown figure commands.
