Charles Dickens

                                 Little Dorrit

                                 Book the First

                                    Poverty

                                    Preface

I was occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. I must
have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits and demerits as a
whole, to express themselves on its being read as a whole.
    If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles
and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an
Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having done
that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian war, and of a Court of
Enquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend that extravagant
conception, Mr. Merdle, I would hint that it originated after the Railroad-share
epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and of one or two other equally
laudable enterprises. If I were to plead anything in mitigation of the
preposterous fancy that a bad design will sometimes claim to be a good and an
expressly religious design, it would be the curious coincidence that such fancy
was brought to its climax in these pages, in the days of the public examination
of late Directors of a Royal British Bank. But, I submit myself to suffer
judgment to go by default on all these counts, if need be, and to accept the
assurance (on good authority) that nothing like them was ever known in this
land.
    Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any
portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I myself did not know, until
I was approaching the end of this story, when I went to look. I found the outer
front court-yard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I
then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a
certain adjacent »Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,« I came to »Marshalsea
Place:« the houses in which I recognised, not only as the great block of the
former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's-eye when I
became Little Dorrit's Biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with,
carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent
explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly correct. How
this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came by his information, I don't
know; he was a quarter of a century too young to know anything about it of
himself. I pointed to the