SOURCE: Barnard, Robert. “The Imagery of Little Dorrit.” English Studies 52, no. 6 (December 1971): 520-32.

In the following essay, Barnard examines recurring images and motifs in Little Dorrit as clues to Dickens's worldview.

To many critics Little Dorrit is the crowning achievement of Dickens's maturity. Born out of depression and disillusion, it is a hideous vision of imprisonment and disorder, a despairing plea to a whole people to find out how it had gone astray, how it had entrapped itself in decaying institutions and perverted modes of thinking. The revolution which has occurred in Dickens criticism since the publication of Edmund Wilson's great essay has added a new dimension to our understanding of this novel in particular, and the revaluation which has followed would, on its own, justify the high esteem in which Wilson's essay is generally held. That Wilson's insights have sometimes been pursued uncritically by others, and that...