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.