Literary Significance and Reception
Like much of Dickens' later fiction, this novel has seen many reversals of critical fortune. It has been shown to be a critique of HM Treasury and the blunders that led to the loss of life for 360 British soldiers at the Battle of Balaclava. Imprisonment—both literal and figurative—is a major theme of the novel, with Clennam and the Meagles quarantined in Marseilles, Rigaud jailed for murder, Mrs Clennam confined to her house, the Dorrits imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and most of the characters trapped within the rigidly-defined English social classes of the time.
Read more about this topic: Little Dorrit
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“Carlyle, to adopt his own classification, is himself the hero as literary man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)