SOURCE: Holoch, George. “Consciousness and Society in Little Dorrit.” Victorian Studies 21, no. 3 (spring 1978): 335-51.

In the following essay, Holoch discusses the relationship between the individual and the social system in Little Dorrit.

The later novels of Charles Dickens are often concerned with the ways in which character and action are determined by the internalization of sometimes contradictory sets of social values. Plots turn on the conflicts between individuals and hostile social forces, but individual values are themselves shaped by social contexts, so that the conflict is often between two variants of the same set of beliefs. These conflicts generally arise over questions of respectability or gentility, and one of the great accomplishments of the late novels is to uncover the economic foundations of what had become by the middle of the nineteenth century an apparently disinterested ethical and social code.

In Dombey and Son, for example, the rigid...