For years I thought this book was some sort of a universal joke, because at the end of Evelyn Waugh's novel, A Handful of Dust, one of the characters ends up trapped in a jungle by a madman who forces the character to read Little Dorrit aloud — I figured this was clearly meant to be a fate worse than death. Turns out, however, that Little Dorrit was merely an appropriate choice because of its themes of imprisonment, delusion, and reversals of fortune. Ah ha!

Little Dorrit (the character) is the diminutive, angelic daughter of Mr. Dorrit, the “father of the Marshalsea”, which is the debtor’s prison where he resides in a self-manufactured state of importance. Every day while he holds court with the other debtors, his three children leave the Marshalsea to work — a fact nobody ever mentions in order for Mr. Dorrit to maintain the fiction that the Dorrits are people of quality and leisure; their unfortunate 20 year-long incarceration is because of some nebulous financial mismanagement on someone else’s part.

Other families with even greater levels of dysfunction and delusion populate this wonderfully rich novel, making the rather daunting 900 pages zip right along. If you’ve read any Dickens, you know to expect plot twists, reversals, dark secrets and convoluted connections — Little Dorrit does not disappoint. As with several of Dickens’ later works that take on various institutions, this novel skewers the penal system and government bureaucracy (with the wonderfully named “Circumlocution Office”). Little Dorrit doesn’t have nearly the same level of intrigue as A Tale of Two Cities, but Dickens certainly does know how to turn a phrase, and his funniest characterizations never grow old.