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Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens which was originally published by London's Bradbury & Evans as a monthly serial from1855 through 1857. The serial comprised nineteen installments in all, with each installment including illustrations by the artist Hablot Knight Browne. Since then, the story has also been published in its entirety multiple times. Dickens was well-established as a writer by the time he began work on Little Dorrit; the novel continues his practice of satirizing and criticizing Victorian society through fiction, in this case focusing on the institution of debtor's prisons, which were common at the time (and in which Dickens' own father had once been imprisoned.) Dickens was also likely influenced in writing Little Dorrit by the collapse of several British banks in the summer of 1855, while he was at work on the novel's early chapters. Though reviewers at the time criticized its bleakness, the novel is now considered a dark, searing example of Dickens at his most incisive.
