Upon its publication in 1857, "Little Dorrit" immediately
outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William
Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughter
and helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progress
of the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction,
David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift from
which Dickens's other great attributes derive: his eye and ear, his
near-universal empathy, his ability to entertain both a sense of
the ridiculous and a sense of ultimate significance." This Modern
Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1857
edition.