A Newberry Library adult education class. Fall 2026. Tuesdays 2:00-4:00pm (CT), online, September 15 through November 3. Registration information forthcoming.
“In fact it was not at all like a dream; it was so very real in every respect.
It happened in this wise. . . .”
From prisons literal and figural, through the streets of London and the cities of Europe, Little Dorrit follows strikingly original characters through a multilayered story of greed, hope, memory, and love. In this class we will read and discuss the novel in manageable weekly installments (with no plot spoilers) as we bring to life Dickens’s timely examination of privilege, poverty, and the human faculty of fiction-making.
Materials List
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. Oxford World’s Classics. ISBN: 978-0199596485
For the first session, please read only chapters 1 – 4. Do not read the book’s introduction or preface.
Class Description
This class employs the format of serial reading in order to immerse readers in the literary, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of a novel. In our case, the novel is Little Dorrit, one of Dickens’s most pointed critiques of social and economic inequality.
“Little Dorrit” is Amy Dorrit, who lives with her father in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in London. During the course of the novel fortunes shift, mysterious strangers appear, marriages are made and ruined, family secrets are revealed—and readers are treated to expected Dickens names like Meagles, Flintwinch, Tattycorom, and Sparkle. But the novel also features, I think, some of the best writing of all Dickens’s works, and the most sensitive symbolic architecture of all the writer’s long novels.
Little Dorrit was first serialized from November 1855 to June 1857 in monthly parts. For this Newberry class, we will begin with two sessions that consider very brief portions of the novel (one original serial installment each, in fact). Thereafter, each session asks participants to read roughly 100 pages (three of the original installments), starting and stopping according to Dickens’s original arrangement. The purpose of this schedule is not to recreate a Victorian reader’s experience (although that issue will come up in discussions), but to help us focus on the details of the narrative from the very beginning of our experience with the novel. I have long felt that two weeks of close attention to the start of a good novel helps turn good readers into even better readers, able to appreciate and trace subtle developments throughout the reading experience.
Sessions will also include clips from an outstanding BBC mini-series adaptation starring Claire Foy, Tom Courtenay, Matthew Macfadyen, and Andy Serkis, with a screenplay by Andrew Davies (screenwriter of Bleak House and Daniel Deronda, among other adaptations). I will provide weekly study guides that include key quotations from the reading at hand, spoiler-free excerpts from scholarly materials, and suggestions for discussion points. Presentation slides will serve to highlight some of the historical, artistic, and literary references in the novel, offering a kind of “annotated novel” experience prompted by the specific experience art of Little Dorrit itself.
This class will also feature images from the Newberry Library’s holdings, including a wonderful set of the original installments of Little Dorrit.
No AI technology will be used in the development or presentation of lectures and class materials.
Schedule
To be read ahead of time: Only Book 1, Chapters 1 – 4 (1.1-1.4). Please do not read the introduction or the preface.
9/15/26, Session One: 1.1-1.4
9/22/26, Session Two: 1.5-1.8
9/29/26, Session Three: 1.9-1.18
10/6/26, Session Four: 1.19-1.29
10/13/26, Session Five: 1.30-2.4
10/20/26, Session Six: 2.5-2.14
10/27/26, Session Seven: 2.15-2.26
11/3/26, Session Eight: 2.27-2.34 (end). The complete introduction, as well as Dickens’s preface in our edition, is also optional reading at this point.
Illustration: Frontispiece (detail) by H. K. Browne, from the first edition of Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens.
