Little Dorrit · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.
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Arthur Clennam
major
Also known as Mr. Arthur Clennam, Clennam, Arthur
Arthur Clennam returns to London after decades abroad to find his mother's house as cold as his prospects, and his father's dying words pointing toward some unnamed wrong. He is drawn into the Marshalsea's orbit through Little Dorrit, whose quiet dignity unsettles his inherited melancholy. His search for honest work and honest answers places him at the center of the novel's inquiry into guilt, inheritance, and whether a man can repay debts he never chose to owe.
Little Dorrit
major
Also known as Amy Dorrit, Amy, Miss Amy Dorrit
Amy Dorrit is the emotional center of the prison world, sewing for wages outside the walls while keeping her father's dignity intact within them. Her selflessness is so complete that she trembles at the thought of being thanked, and she corrects no one who calls her a child. Her tenderness toward the broken people around her—her father, Maggy, even Arthur—quietly exposes the moral poverty of those who consider themselves her betters.
Mr. Pancks
supporting
Also known as Pancks, the snorting Pancks
Pancks works the Marshalsea Yard as a human engine of collection, snorting and puffing through his rounds for a master he barely respects. Beneath the mechanical manner lies a restless curiosity that leads him to dig into old records and forgotten claims. His discovery of the Dorrit inheritance makes him the unlikely hinge on which the family's entire transformation turns, and his blunt decency complicates the world of genteel pretension around him.
Fanny Dorrit
supporting
Also known as Fanny, Miss Fanny
Fanny Dorrit has spent her life watching her father's shame and her sister's sacrifice, and she has resolved to escape both. Trained as a dancer and armed with a fierce sense of injury, she pursues position and marriage with a bitterness that masks real vulnerability. Her rivalry with Mrs. Merdle and her marriage to the hapless Sparkler show how the Dorrit fortune becomes both liberation and trap for a woman who cannot forgive the world for what it made her endure.
Mr. Meagles
supporting
Also known as Meagles, honest Mr. Meagles
Mr. Meagles is the novel's most generous spirit, a man who befriends Arthur Clennam without calculation and opens his cottage to the lonely. Yet his affection for his daughter Pet is so possessive that it distorts her choices, and his treatment of the adopted Tattycoram reveals the limits of his benevolence. He embodies the novel's tension between genuine goodness and the unconscious cruelties of even the kindest English household.
Mrs. Meagles
minor
Also known as Mrs. Meagles
The kind and motherly wife of Mr. Meagles, devoted to her daughter Pet.
William Dorrit
major
Also known as Mr. Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea, Edward Dorrit
William Dorrit has spent so many years as the Marshalsea's self-appointed aristocrat that the role has become his identity, complete with elaborate courtesies and a horror of anyone mentioning his debt. His daughter Amy sustains both his body and his delusion, and he accepts her sacrifice as his due. When fortune finally finds him, his brittle grandeur proves more dangerous than poverty ever was, making him one of Dickens's most devastating studies of pride and paternal failure.
Mr. Merdle
supporting
Also known as Merdle, the illustrious Merdle
Merdle is the age's idol: a man so trusted that his very dullness reads as profundity, and his name alone floats shares. He moves through dinner parties and boardrooms as a solemn, dyspeptic oracle, while his wife and son's wife wage genteel war on separate floors of the same cramped temple. His vast, vague enterprises are the engine of the novel's financial plot, and everyone from the Barnacles to the Dorrits wants a hand on his coattails.
Flora Casby
supporting
Also known as Flora, poor Flora
Flora was once the young woman Arthur loved; now she is a sentimental, garrulous widow who greets him with floods of reminiscence and half-finished sentences. Her kindness is real, but her inability to stop talking makes every reunion a comic ordeal, and her old flame flickers somewhere beneath the deluge. She matters because she shows Arthur what time has done to his past, and because her warmth keeps a thread of tenderness running through his return to London.
Mr. Flintwinch
supporting
Also known as Flintwinch, Jeremiah Flintwinch
Flintwinch is the grim factotum of the Clennam house, shuffling through its dark rooms with his master's secrets and his own designs. He bullies his frightened wife Affery, watches Little Dorrit with suspicion, and treats the family's hidden history as property he can hold over everyone. His sly, menacing presence makes the Clennam household feel like a trap, and his knowledge of what is buried there drives the novel's central mystery.
Young John Chivery
supporting
Also known as John Chivery, Young John, Chivery
Young John is the son of the Marshalsea's turnkey, a soft-hearted young man who worships Little Dorrit with an ardor that everyone but she seems to notice. He courts her father with cigars and small attentions, hoping to win the daughter through the Father of the Marshalsea's vanity, while his own mother watches the wind and shakes her head. His unrequited love makes him both comic and genuinely touching, and his loyalty to the Dorrits makes him a quiet fixture of their prison world.
Henry Gowan
supporting
Also known as Gowan, Mr. Henry Gowan
Gowan is a well-connected but idle painter whose wit and good looks win Pet Meagles despite his family's contempt for trade. Once married, he treats the Meagleses with polite dismissal, arranging to be 'best fellows but best apart,' and accepts their money while disdaining its source. His casual cruelty and self-regard make him a study in genteel selfishness, and his marriage becomes a quiet tragedy at the edge of the novel's social panorama.
Mrs. Gowan
minor
Also known as the Dowager Mrs. Gowan
Henry's proud, aristocratic mother who disapproves of his marriage.
Affery Flintwinch
supporting
Also known as Affery, Mistress Affery
Affery is the battered, bewildered wife of the sinister Flintwinch, living in dread of her husband and of the strange sights that visit her in dreams. She has glimpsed things in the Clennam house she cannot explain, and her muddled testimony hovers between superstition and suppressed truth. Her fear and confusion make her both pitiable and crucial, for she is one of the few who has seen the machinery of the family's secret, and her broken memory keeps the mystery alive.
Mrs. Clennam
major
Also known as Mrs. Clennam
Mrs. Clennam presides over a joyless corner house where religion is punishment and every kindness carries a debt. She employs Little Dorrit as a seamstress and, in a rare unguarded moment, kisses the girl's forehead — a tenderness that startles even her watchful servant. Yet her interest in Little Dorrit is tangled with an old wrong she guards like a relic, and the watch on her table ticks toward a reckoning she cannot outrun.
Daniel Doyce
supporting
Also known as Doyce, Daniel
Doyce embodies the novel's quiet argument that merit and patience go unrewarded while pomp and speculation flourish. His workshop is a refuge of plain dealing, and his partnership with Arthur gives the drifting hero a purpose worth failing at. When the Circumlocution Office buries his engine in red tape, his patient shrug measures the cost of a society that cannot use its own best men.
Mrs. Merdle
supporting
Also known as Mrs. Merdle
Mrs. Merdle is a monument to fashion, her conversation a series of polished dismissals and her marriage a cold arrangement of convenience. She maneuvers her son Sparkler through society and eyes the Dorrits' new fortune with the same calculating calm she brings to everything. In her, Dickens shows how respectability can be a machine for producing nothing but appearance.
Maggy
supporting
Also known as Maggy, the staring Maggy
Maggy's mind stalled at girlhood after a long illness, but her heart kept growing, and she attaches herself to Little Dorrit with a loyalty no hardship can shake. She falls asleep mid-sentence, wakes to announce that a theatre is almost as good as a hospital, and provides comic relief that is also genuine tenderness. Her dependence sharpens our sense of how much weight Little Dorrit carries — and how little she asks in return.
Mr. Plornish
minor
Also known as Plornish, the mild Plornish
A poor, good-natured plasterer living in Bleeding Heart Yard.
Mrs. Plornish
minor
Also known as Mrs. Plornish
The kind wife of Mr. Plornish, who helps Little Dorrit.
Edmund Sparkler
supporting
Also known as Sparkler, Mr. Sparkler, Edmund
Sparkler drifts through the novel's drawing-rooms like a well-meaning weather balloon, blushing, agreeing, and occasionally proposing. His pursuit of Fanny Dorrit is managed almost entirely by his mother and by Fanny herself, and he never quite understands the game he is a piece in. Dickens uses him to skewer the marriage market — and to show that even a fool can be a kind one.
Monsieur Rigaud
supporting
Also known as Rigaud, Blandois, Monsieur Blandois
Rigaud — also calling himself Blandois — is a predator in evening dress, his greed barely concealed beneath elaborate courtesy and his violence always one polite sentence away. He insinuates himself into the Clennam household and into Mr. Dorrit's vanity, sensing weakness the way a hound scents blood. He is the novel's shadow, the reminder that respectability and villainy often share the same drawing-room.
Frederick Dorrit
minor
Also known as Frederick, Mr. Frederick
William Dorrit's gentle, feeble-minded brother, a former musician.
Miss Wade
supporting
Also known as Miss Wade, Wade
Miss Wade moves through the novel as a figure of cold, withheld grievance, someone whose past has curdled into a general suspicion of kindness and an appetite for others' resentment. She singles out Tattycoram, the Meagles' adopted daughter, and speaks to the girl's smoldering sense of injustice in a way no one else bothers to. Her presence sharpens the book's questions about who gets to belong, and at what cost.
Tattycoram
supporting
Also known as Tattycoram, Harriet
Tattycoram lives as a charity child in a household that means to be kind and cannot stop reminding her of it. Her temper, her pride, and her hunger to be seen as Harriet rather than as a rescued curiosity make her vulnerable to anyone who flatters her grievance. She matters because she tests the novel's faith that benevolence is always benevolent, and because her restlessness gives the plot a live wire.
Pet Meagles
supporting
Also known as Pet, Minnie, Minnie Gowan
Pet is the adored center of a family that has arranged itself around her, and Dickens renders her as the pretty young portion of the house grafted onto the older brick. Her gentleness is real, but so is her inexperience, and the men who circle her bring complications her parents cannot manage. Her choices in the early middle of the book set the emotional weather for Arthur Clennam's own disappointments.
Mr. Chivery
minor
Also known as the elder Mr. Chivery
The turnkey of the Marshalsea, father of Young John.
Mrs. Chivery
minor
Also known as the prudent Mrs. Chivery
The practical wife of Mr. Chivery, who manages the family tobacco shop.
Signor Cavalletto
supporting
Also known as Cavalletto, John Baptist Cavalletto, John Baptist
Cavalletto arrives in the novel as a stranger in a strange country, cheerful, voluble, and entirely without the English instinct for keeping one's business to oneself. His loyalty to Arthur is offered freely and repaid in kind, and his foreignness makes him both a comic presence and a moral one. He matters because he shows the story's warmth is not reserved for the respectable.
Mr. Casby
minor
Also known as Casby, Christopher Casby, the Patriarch
Flora's father, a seemingly benevolent but manipulative landlord.
Tip Dorrit
minor
Also known as Tip, Edward Dorrit
Amy's feckless, spendthrift brother who struggles to find work.
Ferdinand Barnacle
minor
Also known as Ferdinand, the engaging young Barnacle
A suave, cynical member of the Circumlocution Office.
Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle
minor
Also known as Lord Decimus, Tite Barnacle
The pompous head of the Barnacle family and the Circumlocution Office.
Mrs. General
supporting
Also known as Mrs. General
Mrs. General is engaged to give the newly wealthy Dorrit daughters the surface of ladies, and she does it with a vocabulary of genteel euphemism and a horror of anything that might be called 'vulgar.' Her method is to substitute form for feeling, and the results are both comic and quietly cruel. She matters because she embodies the novel's suspicion that refinement, pursued for its own sake, is a kind of erasure.
Old Nandy
minor
Also known as Old Mr. Nandy, Mr. Nandy
An elderly, poor inmate of the workhouse, father of Mrs. Plornish.
Miss Rugg
minor
Also known as Miss Rugg
The daughter of Mr. Rugg, Pancks' landlord.
Mr. Rugg
minor
Also known as Rugg
A lawyer who assists Pancks in his investigations.
Physician
minor
Also known as Physician
A doctor attending the Merdle family and high society.
Bar
minor
Also known as Bar
A satirical personification of the legal profession in the Circumlocution Office.
Mr. F.
minor
Also known as the late Mr. F., poor Mr. F.
Flora's deceased first husband, often mentioned in her rambling speech.
Mr. Tite Barnacle
minor
Also known as Mr. Tite Barnacle
A senior Barnacle at the Circumlocution Office.
Mrs. Bangham
minor
Also known as Mrs. Bangham
A garrulous charwoman who assists at the Marshalsea prison.
Mrs. Finching
minor
Also known as Mrs. Finching, Flora
Flora's married name after her first husband; same as Flora Casby.
Monsieur Lagnier
minor
Also known as Lagnier
An alias used by Rigaud while in hiding.
Altro
minor
Also known as little Altro
A nickname for John Baptist Cavalletto, meaning 'another' in Italian.
Madame Rigaud
minor
Also known as Madame
Rigaud's deceased wife, mentioned in his backstory.
Mr. Tinkler
minor
Also known as Tinkler
A servant in the Meagles household.
Mrs. Tickit
minor
Also known as the faithful Mrs. Tickit
The housekeeper at the Meagles' country home.
Bob
minor
Also known as Dear Bob
A minor character, possibly a servant or acquaintance.
Mrs. Sparkler
minor
Also known as Mrs. Sparkler
Fanny Dorrit after her marriage to Edmund Sparkler.
Captain Maroon
minor
Also known as Captain Maroon of Gloucestershire
A friend of the Meagles family, briefly mentioned.
Mr. Cripples
minor
Also known as Master Cripples
A schoolmaster who teaches Tip Dorrit.
Mr. Wobbler
minor
Also known as Mr. Wobbler
A clerk in the Circumlocution Office.
Clarence Barnacle
minor
Also known as Clarence, poor little Clarence
A minor, ineffectual member of the Barnacle family.
John Barnacle
minor
Also known as John Barnacle
Another minor Barnacle family member.
William Barnacle
minor
Also known as William Barnacle
A Barnacle family member, possibly a clerk.
Barnacle Junior
minor
Also known as Junior
A young Barnacle working in the Circumlocution Office.
Young Barnacle
minor
Also known as Young Barnacle
A generic term for a younger Barnacle, possibly Ferdinand.
Ephraim
minor
Also known as Ephraim
A minor character, possibly a servant or prisoner.
Sally
minor
Also known as Sally
A minor female character, possibly a servant.
George
minor
Also known as Uncle George
A minor relative or acquaintance mentioned in passing.
Mary Anne
minor
Also known as Mary
A minor servant or acquaintance.
Dirty Dick
minor
Also known as Dick
A minor character, possibly a prisoner or local figure.
Bawkins
minor
Also known as Bawkins
A minor character mentioned in the Marshalsea.
Signor Panco
minor
Also known as Panco
A minor Italian character, possibly a musician.
Captain Martin
minor
Also known as Captain Martin
A minor military acquaintance.
Mr. Eustace
minor
Also known as the celebrated Mr. Eustace
A minor character, possibly a writer or traveler.
Dr. Buchan
minor
Also known as Buchan
A physician mentioned in the novel.
Old Christopher Casby
minor
Also known as old Christopher Casby
Another reference to Mr. Casby, the patriarch.
Gilbert Clennam
minor
Also known as Monsieur Gilbert Clennam, old Mr. Gilbert Clennam
Arthur's deceased uncle, whose will is a source of mystery.
Cornish Clennam
minor
Also known as Cornish Clennam
A branch of the Clennam family from Cornwall.
Brother Bellows
minor
Also known as Brother
A minor character in the Bleeding Heart Yard community.
The Collegians
minor
Also known as Collegians
The collective term for prisoners in the Marshalsea.
The Bleeding Hearts
minor
Also known as Bleeding Hearts
The residents of Bleeding Heart Yard.
