ABSTRACT
To understand the strategy of Little Dorrit, especially in its political and social implications, proper recognition must be given to the plot, which is still too frequently dismissed or undervalued. A more positive recognition of Dickens's achievement as a story-teller is needed, and in the case of Little Dorrit this involves distinguishing between its 'mystery' element and the rest of the action. To say Little Dorrit is a middle-class novel, moreover, is not to deny it a thoroughly effective radicalism in the Bright and Chamberlain tradition. In writing Little Dorrit, Dickens as a moralist and a writer is committed to the view that debts represent inalienable and human obligations. Throughout Little Dorrit the entire class-system is seen in terms of the imposition of roles on other people. Little Dorrit, then, in its complex rejection of violent insurrection against the social system, is an astonishingly courageous statement of political despair.
