Little Dorrit

Little Dorrit (c. 1910–1930) by Charles Dickens – Collins Clear-Type Press

ISBN: None
Condition: Good
Published: Circa 1910–1930 (undated)
Illustrations: A. A. Dixon
Engraved Title Page: Harry Furniss
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

I have repaired the inner front hinge which was split with a cloth reinforcement but its quite discrete, else the binding etc is good. 

There was a time when being poor was considered a personal failing, being wealthy was regarded as evidence of moral superiority, and government departments existed principally to ensure that absolutely nothing useful was ever accomplished. Charles Dickens, observing nineteenth-century British society with his customary mixture of amusement and fury, decided that these arrangements deserved a novel.

The result was Little Dorrit, one of his most magnificent assaults upon bureaucracy, social pretension, financial speculation and the extraordinary British talent for making life unnecessarily difficult.

At the centre of this sprawling Victorian masterpiece stands Amy Dorrit, born and raised within the walls of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where her father has spent so long incarcerated that imprisonment has become something approaching a respectable family tradition. Known affectionately as Little Dorrit, Amy possesses a degree of kindness, patience and moral intelligence conspicuously absent from much of the supposedly superior society surrounding her.

Enter Arthur Clennam, a thoughtful gentleman attempting to unravel family mysteries while navigating a world populated by financial opportunists, social climbers, pompous officials and people whose principal occupation appears to be preventing other people from accomplishing anything whatsoever.

Particularly memorable is the Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s glorious fictional government department, whose guiding philosophy is essentially How Not To Do It. Nearly two centuries later, readers familiar with modern administrative procedures may find this particular institution disturbingly recognisable.

But beneath the satire lies a rich and often moving exploration of imprisonment, both literal and psychological, and the peculiar ways in which wealth, pride and ambition can become prisons of their own.

This attractive early twentieth-century Collins Clear-Type Press edition is particularly appealing for its period presentation. It features an engraved title page by Harry Furniss and illustrations by A. A. Dixon, providing a splendid visual accompaniment to Dickens’s gallery of eccentrics, villains, innocents and bureaucratic obstructions.

Dating approximately from 1910–1930, the volume belongs to an age when publishers took pride in producing handsome, readable editions of literary classics, rather than attempting to convince readers that a novel required an accompanying mobile application.

Condition: Good. A respectable vintage hardback, showing the expected signs of age and previous ownership. Its traditional cloth binding and decorative spine have survived many decades, two world wars and countless opportunities for somebody to consign it to a charity shop.

Naturally, there is no ISBN. The book predates such modern administrative conveniences, which Dickens himself might well have regarded as another triumph of the Circumlocution Office.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where venerable literary survivors are welcomed, bureaucracy is viewed with appropriate suspicion, and no government department need approve your purchase.

A handsome, illustrated Dickens classic, and a reminder that while fashions, technologies and governments change, human absurdity remains reassuringly dependable.

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