Little Dorrit / Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit / Charles Dickens. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986; 912 bladzijden. This is a long book - it feels like a 1000 pages - but it is a masterpiece. Dickens takes us from Marseilles, home to an evil man whose smile makes his moustache disappear under his top lip and draws us into a dark, damp, murky Victorian London where one's whole future existence seems to be mapped out at birth, and where to escape from one's perceived 'destiny' is both sacriligeous and impossible. The Marshalsea Prison is a place all of us can visualise - a debtors prison from which many fail to escape, the dubious honour of the Father of the Marshalsea bestowed on the longest-serving inmate. Little Dorrit - Amy - is the daughter of the Father of the Marshalsea and this is her tale, one which stretches across the grime of smoggy nineteenth century London to the pollution of Continental Europe. The cast of characters is fascinating and Dickens rarely misses a trick - each is easily comparable to people any of us knows today.