'You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?' When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy's father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens's maturity. This revised edition includes expanded notes, appendices and suggestions for further reading by Helen Small, a chronology of Dickens's life and works, and original illustrations.

Charles Dickens (1812-û1870), born in Portsmouth, England, one of eight children, grew up in poverty and had little formal education, yet became the most prominent and revered of all English Victorian writers as well as a political reporter and journalist.

Stephen Wall edited Anthony Trollope-'s Can You Forgive Her? for Penguin Classics and is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

Helen Small is a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford.