SOURCE: Hennelly, Mark M. “‘The Games of the Prison Children’ in Dickens's Little Dorrit.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20, no. 2 (1997): 187-213.

In the following essay, Hennelly claims that games and play in Little Dorrit are not redemptive as they tend to be in Dickens's other works, suggesting that this is in keeping with the generally dark tone of the entire novel.

When dealing with a work of art we must always bear in mind that art is a divine game. These two elements—the elements of the divine and that of the game—are equally important. It is divine because this is the element in man which comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own right. And it is a game because it remains art only as long as we are allowed to remember that, after all, it is all make-believe, that … we are, as readers or...