SOURCE: Peters, Laura. “The Histories of Two Self-Tormentors: Orphans and Power in Little Dorrit.” The Dickensian 91, no. 3 (winter 1995): 187-96.

In the following essay, Peters proposes that orphans and criminals are represented in Victorian fictional discourse in the same way; she examines two orphans in Little Dorrit to illustrate her point.

To make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognised as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.¹

The prison, both literal and metaphorical, in Little Dorrit has received a considerable amount of critical attention in the pioneering work of Philip Collins's Dickens and Crime, Lionel Trilling's metaphorical probing in The Opposing Self,² and more recently in Natalie McKnight's book Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens. However, apart from McKnight's book³ there has been...