1. Charles
Dickens

2.  Biography of Charles Dickens
 Little Dorrit

3.  Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 th of
February, 1812 into a middle class family of civil servant
John Dickens who was an open-hearted and kind man.
Charles spent his childhood in the atmosphere of love and
friendship, though his mother, Elisabeth, was a
snobbish, demanding, rather hard and rather silly.
 The happiest years were between 1817 and 1822, when John
Dickens held a good post in the Chatham Dockyard. It was
an enchanted time for little Charles.

5. • The family lived in poverty. Their household consisted
of Mr. and Mrs. Dickens, their five children, a servant
and James Larmert, a relative by marriage. Charles
schooling came to an end and he had to contribute to
the family funds. John Larmert found him a job in a
warehouse for several shillings a week.
• Meanwhile, John Dickens was put into Marshalsea
Debtors prison for his debts and his family had to
follow him into the prison because the debts were
great and they had nobody in London to address for
money. They had to stay in prison until Mr. Dickens
could pay all his debts

6. • After being released John Dickens
decided to take his son away from the
warehouse, but his mother didn’t want
to lose the money her son was earning.
Charles Dickens could never forgive her.
When Dickens was fifteen he became a
lawyer's clerk. In 1822, having learned
shorthand, he secured a full time
position in the “Mirror of the
Parliament.
• At 25, in 1837, Charles Dickens was already famous. It was a
successful period of his life: his first son was born, his family
moved out of lodgings into a twelve-room house. During the next
six years of writing Charles Dickens observed life and attacked
debtors, prisons, schools and workhouses.

7. • Charles Dickens was a very thoughtful writer. There was
a very important element in his work which is above all
the others. It is the power of characterisation. Most of the
people in his stories are in a sense “types”, they are based
on real life people, though he gave them an independent
vitality.
• In spite of
a large family Dickens couldn’t help travelling.
Dickens and his household left England for Italy. They
came back home in autumn 1845, with the sixth child
born abroad.
•He visited Italy and Paris, took and active part in
political life of England, started “the Great
Expectations”.

8. •Dickens's love of humanity
and the inherent goodness of
common man opposed to the
egoism of the upper classes
makes him a central figure in
the literature of England in
the 19 th century. Charles
Dickens undertook several
trips in 1864-1869 to Australia,
the USA and Ireland.
Afterwards he became ill and
died on 9 June 1870. He was
buried in the Poets’ Corner in
Westminster Abbey in
London.

9. Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens published
originally between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on
the shortcomings of the government and society of the
period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the
institutions of debtors' prisons—in which people who
owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they
have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this
case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had
been imprisoned. Most of Dickens' other critiques in this
particular novel concern the social safety net: industry and
the treatment and safety of workers; the bureaucracy of the
British Treasury and the separation of people based on the
lack of interaction between the classe

11.  Amy Dorrit; The youngest member of the Dorrit
family, Amy is a 20-something woman who looks like an
adolescent. She lives her life in totally unacknowledged
service to her deluded and hapless family. Her main
personality trait is utter selflessness.
 Arthur Clennam; The 40-year-old son of a cold, harsh
woman and a weak man, Arthur struggles to find a place for
himself at a seemingly too-late time of life. After learning a
few harsh lessons about love and finance, he gets a happy
ending.

12. •William Dorrit; At first called "The Father of the Marshalsea," Dorrit is the
oldest prisoner in the debtor's jail, living on selfish pretensions of former
grandeur. After he is discovered to be heir to a huge fortune, Dorrit spends
the rest of the novel trying to live up to his own ideas of his very high social
status, with mixed success
•Mrs. Clennam; A cold and bitter woman, Mrs. Clennam has forced
herself to live the life of a reclusive, wheelchair-bound woman as payment
for her sins. Her stubborn iron will arguably makes her the novel's most
terrifying character.
•Flora Finching and Mr. F's Aunt ; Flora, Arthur Clennam's ex-fiancée, and
Mr. F's Aunt, Flora's aunt-in-law, are another great set of paired characters,
in the Pet and Tattycoram mold. Sure, at first glance Flora is a woman past
her prime who is constantly living in the past and trying to get Arthur to
reignite their love affair.
•Flintwinch ; Initially Mrs. Clennam's servant, Flintwinch becomes a
partner in Clennam & Co. He knows Mrs. Clennam's horrible secrets and
uses them to gain power over her and the business.

13. •Original publication
Little Dorrit was published in nineteen monthly
instalments, each consisting of thirty-two pages
and featuring two illustrations by Phiz. Each
installment cost a shilling, with the exception of
the last, a double issue which cost two shillings.
•Adaptations
Little Dorrit has been adapted for the screen
five times. The first three were produced in 1913,
1920 and 1934. The 1934 German-language
adaptation. The fourth, in 1988, is Little Dorrit,
a UK feature film starring Alec Guinness and
Derek Jacobi The fifth adaptation is a TV series.
The series aired between October and
December 2008 in the U.K. It then aired in
America on 2009. The series was broadcast in
Australia, on in June and July 2010.

14. Poets’ Corner