# Little Dorrit — Character guide

> Key figures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.

- [Arthur Clennam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/arthur_clennam.md): 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](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/little_dorrit.md): 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 
- [Mr. Pancks](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/pancks.md): 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 int
- [Fanny Dorrit](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/fanny_dorrit.md): 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 
- [Mr. Meagles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_meagles.md): 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 ch
- [Mrs. Meagles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_meagles.md): The kind and motherly wife of Mr. Meagles, devoted to her daughter Pet.
- [William Dorrit](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/william_dorrit.md): 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 
- [Mr. Merdle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_merdle.md): 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 so
- [Flora Casby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/flora_casby.md): 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
- [Mr. Flintwinch](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_flintwinch.md): 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 treat
- [Young John Chivery](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/young_john_chivery.md): 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
- [Henry Gowan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/henry_gowan.md): 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 
- [Mrs. Gowan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_gowan.md): Henry's proud, aristocratic mother who disapproves of his marriage.
- [Affery Flintwinch](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/affery_flintwinch.md): 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 
- [Mrs. Clennam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_clennam.md): 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 
- [Daniel Doyce](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/daniel_doyce.md): 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 pu
- [Mrs. Merdle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_merdle.md): 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 
- [Maggy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/maggy.md): 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 t
- [Mr. Plornish](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_plornish.md): A poor, good-natured plasterer living in Bleeding Heart Yard.
- [Mrs. Plornish](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_plornish.md): The kind wife of Mr. Plornish, who helps Little Dorrit.
- [Edmund Sparkler](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/sparkler.md): 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 her
- [Monsieur Rigaud](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/rigaud.md): 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 hous
- [Frederick Dorrit](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/frederick_dorrit.md): William Dorrit's gentle, feeble-minded brother, a former musician.
- [Miss Wade](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/miss_wade.md): 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 Meagl
- [Tattycoram](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/tattycoram.md): 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 vulner
- [Pet Meagles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/pet_meagles.md): 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,
- [Mr. Chivery](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_chivery.md): The turnkey of the Marshalsea, father of Young John.
- [Mrs. Chivery](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_chivery.md): The practical wife of Mr. Chivery, who manages the family tobacco shop.
- [Signor Cavalletto](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/signor_cavalletto.md): 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 i
- [Mr. Casby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_casby.md): Flora's father, a seemingly benevolent but manipulative landlord.
- [Tip Dorrit](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/tip_dorrit.md): Amy's feckless, spendthrift brother who struggles to find work.
- [Ferdinand Barnacle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/ferdinand_barnacle.md): A suave, cynical member of the Circumlocution Office.
- [Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/lord_decimus.md): The pompous head of the Barnacle family and the Circumlocution Office.
- [Mrs. General](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mrs_general.md): 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 su
- [Old Nandy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/old_nandy.md): An elderly, poor inmate of the workhouse, father of Mrs. Plornish.
- [Miss Rugg](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/miss_rugg.md): The daughter of Mr. Rugg, Pancks' landlord.
- [Mr. Rugg](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_rugg.md): A lawyer who assists Pancks in his investigations.
- [Physician](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/physician.md): A doctor attending the Merdle family and high society.
- [Bar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/bar.md): A satirical personification of the legal profession in the Circumlocution Office.
- [Mr. F.](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_f.md): Flora's deceased first husband, often mentioned in her rambling speech.
- [Mr. Tite Barnacle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters/mr_tite_barnacle.md): A senior Barnacle at the Circumlocution Office.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/little_dorrit_se/characters