SOURCE: Manning, Sylvia. “Social Criticism and Textual Subversion in Little Dorrit.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 127-47.

In the following essay, Manning examines the way Dickens undermines the narrator in Little Dorrit and the ideological contradictions that this causes.

Little Dorrit proffers a deal of ideological discourse, some of it ironic explication in the service of the novel's satirical stance, such as the analysis of How Not To Do It, and some of it wholly solemn expostulation to the same moral purpose, such as the narrator's commentary on Little Dorrit's suggestion that, because her father has paid with his life, he should not also have to repay his debts in money. Apparently congruent with this discourse are the Christian ideology implicit in the tale and the ideology of the novel form itself, which is the epistemological ground for the moral implications.

The ideology implicit in the story is constituted of...