Welcome to our 2010/2011 monthly meetings for 105 years and going strong: Saturdays 1 – 4 PM at the 67^th Street Library - 328 E. 67 St. (1st & 2nd Aves.) with elevator to basement room.

It is the Dickens Fellowship policy (worldwide) to select a Dickens work for the year to read/discuss. Our latest choice is Little Dorrit, his 11th novel, published in 20 monthly parts between December 1855 and June 1857. Each meeting also has readings, films, special events: all relevant to the life and times (Victorian) of Dickens.

The most politically outspoken, somber and oppressive Dickens novel, Little Dorrit is organized

around a pervasive central system of imprisonment, manifest in a wide variety of instances. The novel begins in an actual cell in Marseille then moves to a group of travelers detained in quarantine and on to a woman confined to a wheelchair. The most prominent is the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in which the Dorrit family is incarcerated. As the book proceeds, examples of imprisonment, physical and psychological, institutional and individual, political, administrative, and economic proliferate. The vision of society entraps everyone save those who can find spiritual freedom through the power love.

 Little Dorrit was born and raised in the Marshalsea and grew to think of it as “home”. This book exposes how detrimental debtors’ prisons proved to be for the families who were sent there (In fact, Charles Dickens’s own childhood experience inspired him to write Little Dorrit.) Little Dorrit’s life with her father and his female travelling companion and her sisters was far from happy. Money and the subject of “society and government inefficiency/delay” were major problems. Through it all some romance comes through.

Try to read the assigned chapters in advance of the meeting. You can also read, share, discuss, passages you found very interesting.

2010  LITTLE DORRIT - BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES