Little Dorrit and No Tattycoram

Charles Dickens’ satirical masterpiece on film

Karen Caspersen and Karina Bell in Lille Dorrit (1924, Denmark) dir. Anders Sandberg

Costume Drama. These suggestive words headline the description on the BBC website of the final climactic episode of their 2008 version of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, as though the wearing of period clothes was the most important and interesting thing about it.
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It’s a strange way to categorise drama. After all, the phrase could encompass anything from Nosferatu to Pride and Prejudice and is often deployed colloquially as a pejorative, as if the sight of a pair of knee-breeches or a leg o’mutton sleeve self-evidently makes a film inferior to ‘modern’ films. If it means anything, it’s probably an approximation of the mid-20th century Women’s Picture label, the opposite of the action movie.
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A couple of decades before the BBC took on Dickens’ Little Dorrit, a 1987 version from Sands Films, written and directed by Christine Edzard, famously treated the costuming aspect so reverentially that all three hundred costumes were sewn and embroidered by hand in a labour of love, and possibly of eyestrain, lasting two years and occupying around twenty-five people. One of the most prestigious casts of British actors it would have been possible to assemble in the late 1980s were engaged, including Alec Guiness as William Dorrit, long-term inmate of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, and Derek Jacobi as the diffident anti-hero Arthur Clennam. The story was presented in two parts with a total duration very close to six hours.

The first part, Nobody’s Fault, introduces Amy ‘Little’ Dorrit and the rest of the Dorrit family headed by William Dorrit, as well as Arthur Clennam and the stern recluse Mrs Clennam, who Arthur believes is his mother, and other major characters. This part foregrounds Arthur Clennam’s perspective and covers the main plot developments up to a point where, although old William Dorrit has since encountered good fortune and been freed, Clennam in turn finds himself financially ruined and confined to the Marshalsea Prison.

The second part, Little Dorrit’s Story, brings Amy to the foreground, partially retelling some of the ground covered in part one from her perspective, and bringing the story to its climax and conclusion.  
Critical reception was largely favourable and enthusiastic. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby highly praised the look of the film, the acting, and the casting of Sarah Pickering as Amy but didn’t like the repetitious structure: ‘[T]he movie does a disservice to itself in the cause of a scheme that’s of more interest in theory than in fact. It’s exhausting.’ *

Such flickering reservations about the two-part structure and the excision (in spite of the long running time) of some of Dickens’ key characters were unwittingly fanned into a medium-sized dumpster fire by the socialist historian Raphael Samuel when he published a highly critical essay about the film entitled Docklands Dickens. Among several objections, he compared Edzard’s film unfavourably with David Lean’s 1940s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. These he regarded as embodying exactly the sort of gothic expressionism and optical chiaroscuro that a Dickens adaptation demands and which he found Edzard’s film to lack. For this comparison he was attacked on the extraordinary grounds that Lean was a conservative figure whom no one of the left should be endorsing. Welcome to the future, where binary judgements, cancel culture and the death of nuance have supplanted sensible discourse.

In a later piece addressing film and stage adaptations of Dickens in general, Samuel returns to his misgivings about Sands Films’ Little Dorrit in particular. Although he somewhat revises his rosy recollections of the David Lean films, he repeats his core reservations and recounts that his Docklands Dickens article cost him one friendship of twenty-five years standing and provoked admonishment by the eminent film critic Derek Malcolm as well as outraged letters from a posse of Guardian readers.
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You can’t but feel for Samuel who, in rigorously critically analysing the film so soon after its rapturous reception, was considered as being impertinent towards a whole raft of actual or potential national treasures with Guiness at their head and figures such as Jacobi, Max Wall, Alan Bennett, Joan Greenwood and Miriam Margolyes conspicuous in the roster, along with luminaries such as John Carey, who had furnished a scholarly defence of the film’s rationale in the pressbook, and Lord Snowdon (no stranger to class contradictions) who supplied high quality studio photographs of the main cast in costume which to this day can be purchased as souvenir postcards.

Samuel is so enthused by his case that he perhaps overstates it, and in some matters of fact he is just mistaken. He objects to Amy’s poke bonnet on the grounds that it constantly obscures her features, when in fact it is mainly deployed in exteriors and, far from hiding her features, is judiciously used to focus the gaze on her expression while also serving symbolically as a shell from which she must eventually emerge.

Pointing to the resounding final sentence of the novel that delivers the newly married Amy and Arthur down into the great throng of London’s humanity – ‘the usual uproar’ – Samuel states that Edzard’s film overlooks it, concluding with the signing of the marriage register. In fact, after the wedding tableau there is a two-and-a-half minute montage of shots of a bustling street that is clearly intended to translate Dickens’ final words into cinematic action. It could be argued that what we see falls short of conveying the majesty and scope of the source text and is anyway overshadowed by its non-diegetic function as a background to the end credits, but it is undoubtedly there.

Such early critical misgivings about the trade-offs between structure, character excision and narrative fidelity are echoed by Grahame Smith in his chapter on Edzards’s film in Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (2003). He argues that the structure, although ‘interesting in itself’, ‘ becomes wearisome’ and ‘is not daring enough to be truly revisionist.’

Here, perhaps, is the nub of things. Is this Little Dorrit adaptation trying to have it both ways? Is it a deconstructive feminist retelling for the turbulent Thatcher era of the essential core of Dickens’ labyrinthine plot, or is it a heritage industry COSTUME DRAMA constructed to solicit our admiration that a reproduction set of Sèvres dinner plates was meticulously produced by an in-house pottery in the cause of authenticity? If the former, would this not have been better achieved by paring down the text and character tally even further and making a much more formally radical film of standard duration, perhaps, for example, with ironic touches of anachronism as deployed a year or two later in Derek Jarman’s Edward the Second?

An essay by Sergei Eisenstein, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today (1944)* analyses some passages from Oliver Twist in meticulous detail to identify Dickens’ style as proto-cinematic — featuring optical elements such as montage and cross cutting, expressionist lighting, and close-up, as well as equivalent techniques of character development. Eisenstein is not concerned here with speculating how film might in turn remediate Dickens, but with demonstrating that film art was nor born fully formed in the wake of the invention of new apparatus but emerged organically from nineteenth century literature and popular culture such as melodrama.

If Eisenstein is right, though, it might be expected that film adaptations of Dickens work would embed, as Raphael Samuel says David Lean does, a broad and dynamic use of the available range of film techniques. Samuel argues that Edzard and her collaborators do not do this, but use a mainly static camera, conventional framing and continuity editing, naturalistic sound effects and a softening of Dickens’ characters, producing a soothing and lyrical effect instead of a disruptive one and draining the story of its terrors.

How might a different approach play out? Take, for example, the scene where Mr Casby, the rack renting capitalist, has his patriarch’s long mane of white hair cut off by his put-upon rent collector Mr Panks.
Mr Casby presents a benevolent face to his impoverished Bleeding Heart Yard tenants who, in a spectacular collective display of false consciousness, have hitherto regarded him as a kindly and benevolent protector whilst fearing his fundamentally decent operative, Mr Panks. Casby is constantly pressing Panks in private to be more ruthless in extracting the rents, deaf to Panks’ entreaties that the tenants have no money. Eventually Panks turns on Casby and, in front of the assembled tenants, knocks off Casby’s identifying signifier of status, his broad brimmed hat, and then cuts off the distinguished silver locks whilst educating the tenants about who their real oppressor is.

On the page, Dickens account of this works tolerably well. Panks has to get a monologue almost three pages long off his chest during which Casby apparently offers no resistance or inclination to escape but appears to be trying to meditate his way out of his difficulty. But transposed into mimetic action and filmed conventionally it feels jarringly odd and interminably long. Casby has nothing to say and is given nothing to do except stand still and make disapproving faces. Apart from the snipping of Panks’s shears it is a verbal event, a naturalistic telling where it could be a surrealist showing.

Imagine instead a treatment that could be more to Raphael Samuel’s liking (or even Eisenstein’s). Panks’s revelatory verbal tirade and the tenant’s reactions are heard on the soundtrack but what we see is a visual montage of extreme close-ups, from Casby’s point of view, of the shears whirling around his head at 4X speed overlaid with slow-motion shots of severed curls of white hair floating majestically to earth and rapid single frame inserts of the changing facial reactions of the astonished tenants. This would dramatize the incident economically while placing the viewer in the conflicted position of simultaneously participating in the deserved unmasking and ritual humiliation of Casby and experiencing his paralysing fear of physical harm from the shears whirling about his face and neck.

There are, though, some striking stylistic coups in Edzard’s film. At the conclusion of part one, when Arthur Clennam has been ill in his prison room for an indeterminate time, he sits sweating and barely conscious in a chair. We are positioned in his point of view as he painfully raises his head and opens his fevered eyes to see a small vase carrying a modest but delightful bunch of fresh country flowers. A heartstring-tugging Verdi melody swells on the soundtrack and we understand that it is Amy who has put the flowers there. The flowers briefly confirm Amy’s presence metonymically until the camera at last finds her face looking down at Arthur, Sarah Pickering’s gentle expression sufficiently ambiguous for any Kuleshovian response you care to fit to it.
When the same incident is repeated in part two, we first follow Amy as she hurries through the streets to the prison. We see her pause to buy the flowers from a street seller, so alerting us to the transactional origin of the flowers that we have already seen fulfilling their romantic function. This time, there is no Verdi to lubricate our sympathies, just the sound of buzzing insects to remind us that the room probably smells absolutely foul.

Advocates for the two film structure would probably contend that the cumulative effect of such ingenious manifestations of Arthur and Amy’s contrasting perspectives (whether received at the level of conscious awareness or below it) inform the viewer’s reception and justify the repetitions, the character and plot excisions, and the overall running time. But here again, if a key aim of the project was to transform Amy Dorrit from her received status of saintly little carer to assertive womanhood, why not just do so in a single less unwieldy film?

Raphael Samuel also objects that there should be more gloomy weather in the film and that when a thunderstorm finally arrives it quickly clears. He must here be referring to the scene in part two where Amy, her aspirational sister Fanny and Fanny’s recently acquired husband, the large and passably decorative but sensationally dim Mr Sparkler, are sitting in an upper room on a stiflingly hot summer evening immediately after the death of William Dorrit. The windows are open and bright evening sun streams in, but thunder is beginning to rumble in the background. Fanny, having not yet succeeded in going ‘into society’, is as usual bored with everything and irritated by her husband.

The approaching thunder and the tension in the room inevitably signal that something very bad is going to occur shortly. And it does. The speculator Mr Merdle, on whose speculations everyone’s solvency depends, calls in at the house. Mr Merdle is Mr Sparkler’s stepfather and therefore Fanny’s father-in-law, but he is ‘not a calling man’ so the visit is unexpected. He seems distracted and has come to borrow a penknife, having mislaid his own. To a nineteenth century reader of the novel this request would not necessarily be ominous, penknives were common objects in daily use to sharpen quill pens. And Mr Merdle does indeed have a letter to write that evening — his suicide note.

Fanny scolds her husband for having nothing to say, and then for saying something, for standing up and then for sitting down. The thunder grows nearer and we hear the downpour begin, continuing as the scene cuts to the room in which William died, where Amy is lovingly packing away his nightshirt. Her brother Edward (‘Tip’) arrives, drunk and agitated, briefly sprawls thoughtlessly on the vacant bed where his father died, then announces the news of the collapse of Merdle’s financial house of cards and Merdle’s suicide using Fanny’s penknife.
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The visual and aural use of weather here, the bright sunshine we see streaming through the window juxtaposed with the thunderstorm we hear coming, but aren’t shown, is subtle and judicious but nonetheless powerful. The scenes are a key pivot point in the film, sowing the seeds of the eventual happy resolution while signalling the imminent crop of incidental catastrophes and underlining the destructive corruption represented by Mr Merdle and, by association, by the ‘society’ which Fanny is so determined to enter.
Raphael Samuel’s objection that the symbolic underpinning of weather conditions should have figured more generally in the film’s narrative is perhaps a reflection that the film’s studio-based visual logic entailed limitations on the range of effects possible within the project’s spatial and budgetary constraints. It’s certainly the case that the opening out of horizons, both geographically and aspirationally, that takes place in the novel when the Dorrits become rich and undertake the Grand Tour of Europe, feels under-communicated in the optical and aural landscape of the film.

With Charles Dickens you are never far away from a haunting. While actual ghosts may not be ubiquitous, spectre-like figures and creaking resonances of past wrongs that require retribution or restitution are the stuff of his fiction. In Little Dorrit these are multiple, emanating around the haunted pocket watch that carries the Hamlet-like injunction issued by Arthur’s long dead father — Do Not Forget. It's the power of this gothic edge of shadows and optical disturbances that Raphael Samuel charges Sands Films with draining from Little Dorrit in favour of sunshine and fixed camera positions.

Dickens’ novels usually contain some secondary characters who carry a frisson of transcendence, some faculty of perception or action that others do not, whether for good or evil. In Little Dorrit we have Maggy, the perpetually ten-year-old holy fool. Maggy is splendidly invoked in the Danish 1925 silent film, Lille Dorrit, where Karen Caspersen’s astonishingly timeless appearance and physical performance seem to cut through the film’s stylistic anachronisms and narrative simplifications.

Another such character is the novel’s Miss Wade, excised entirely in Edzard’s film along with the object of her discomforting manipulation, the ‘dark eyed’ foundling Tattycoram. In the novel, the orderly and contented rural homestead of the benevolent Mr and Mrs Meagles is disrupted by Tattycoram with the unpredictability and fury of a poltergeist. Her very name suggests the reduction to tatters of decorum. The excision of Miss Wade and Tattycoram in Sands Film’s Little Dorrit is not trivial, it impoverishes the richness of the story by removing at a stroke two of the plot’s significant carriers of troubling otherness. John Carey justifies the exclusion of Miss Wade (without mentioning Tattycoram) on the grounds that she ‘belongs to another story’ which Dickens wouldn’t have been permitted to write because of the prurience of his times*. If so, then all the more reason, in 1987 when such constraints had long disappeared, to include or indeed amplify the presence of Miss Wade.

The BBC TV 2008 Little Dorrit subtly acknowledges the aspect of Miss Wade that goes beyond creepiness and into the realm of the uncanny. She appears suddenly and inexplicably in rooms or church porches when required by Tattycoram’s narrative strand – logical explanations as to how or why she got there neither forthcoming nor necessary – and Maxine Peake plays her sotto voce and mostly with an almost somnambulant poker-face, along with the occasional intimation of an imminent smirk, until her final bitter confessional revelations to Arthur.

Carey also believes that Edzard was wise to remove the moustachioed villain Blandois because he has ‘nothing whatsoever to do with the story’ and was anyway a stereotypical villain based on Napoleon III. Blandois only has nothing to do with the story if you have already decided that the story is primarily a love story about Amy and Arthur set in an à-la-carte buffet of satirical sketches, beloved character actors and exquisitely crafted garments and props. On the contrary, Blandois is essential to the unravelling of the central Do Not Forget mystery and the unearthing of the notoriously elaborate Will. The denouement in fact becomes more complicated without Blandois since it becomes necessary to create convolutions involving the remaining characters to replace his initiatives.

Writing about Edzard’s casting of Sarah Pickering as Amy, Carey takes the view that the resulting performance so successfully vivifies the character that for the viewer and reader it becomes inextricable from the source itself. It would be difficult to disagree with this. Given the familiar and prestigious aspect of the rest of the main cast, it must have been essential to cast someone who was unfamiliar to viewers as well as having the essential physical characteristic of littleness. Little Dorrit is little. She’s little because she spent her childhood malnourished in a prison, because she later slaved to support her insufferably self-regarding father and siblings, and because of every social and political ill that Dickens rages against in his work. We should be subliminally reminded of the material causes of her littleness every time we see Amy.
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As well as smallness, Amy must be able to evince quiet resilience, patient tenacity, intuitive wisdom, and eventually sensual desire. Pickering fulfils all this. Now, almost four decades after the creation of the film, we know that she either wasn’t interested in pursuing a further film acting career or for whatever reason was unable to. We might think this regrettable although, viewing the film today, it adds a layer of imaginative credibility that would be weakened if the actor now had a long back catalogue of major roles. It’s almost as though she arrived through a temporal portal straight from Charles Dickens’ dreams and onto our screens to provide an ideal manifestation of Amy Dorrit for the late twentieth century and then, job done, moved on.

The BBC 2008 Andrew Davies adaptation stars Claire Foy as a slightly taller but suitably lean and wholly credible Amy, Matthew Macfadyen as Arthur Clennam, and Tom Courtney as William Dorrit. It was aired as twelve half-hour TV broadcasts bookended by two one-hour episodes — around eight hours total airtime. But BBC programmes are delivered one-minute shorter than their broadcast slot and, subtracting every episode’s titles, credits and the obligatory ‘earlier’ and ‘coming up’ teasers, the actual dramatic diegesis of Little Dorrit probably occupied closer to seven and a quarter hours, so somewhat, though not substantially, longer than Edzard’s six hours but telling the story linearly and with comparatively minor plot-point and character excisions. Fortuitously, but coincidentally, the series was broadcast in the year of the international banking crisis so viewers had no need of internal pointers to the parallels between Mr Murdle’s criminal investment scams and those of his neoliberal descendants, and the casting and pace appear calculated to appeal to a broad contemporary demographic.

A major strength of the BBC film is its portrayal of William Dorrit’s brother, Frederick (James Fleet), a down-at-heel clarinettist in the pit orchestra of a rundown music hall. William’s characteristic predisposition is to haughtily accuse Frederick of dishonouring the family by his shabby demeanour and lack of gentlemanly aspirations, oblivious to the irony that Frederick, however humbly, earns his own living while he, William, a prisoner, exists by shamelessly sponging from his visitors and exploiting his daughter’s devotion. Dickens puts key descriptive passages about Frederick in the mouth of William, whose relationship with his brother is predicated on comparing him unfavourably with himself.

Frederick Dorrit might easily be a thankless role. On a superficial reading of the story, the character could be required to do little for most of the duration except to represent an old man with diminished abilities. Until, that is, his two moments in the spotlight – his sudden tirade, years in the festering, against Amy’s exploitation by her father and her siblings and then his own death from grief at William’s bedside during the night following his demise. Edzard's 1987 version opted not to show Frederick’s death (probably wisely given that notorious up-stager Cyril Cusack was cast in the role) but instead to notionally postpone it and have Amy briefly report it as a bare fact in a later scene.

The BBC adaptation’s foregrounding of Frederick’s kindly disposition, his shrewd introverted watchfulness and the late revival, nurtured by Amy, of his abandoned love of music are important for the denouement’s lucidity. Frederick, although he doesn’t ever know it, is the vector, the unwitting ghost-carrier who connects the Clennam and Dorrit families in the novel’s backstory.

Only at the conclusion do we learn that the embittered recluse Mrs Clennam is not Arthur’s real mother and that this was a young singer who had been nurtured in her career by Frederick Dorrit when he ran a boarding house for musicians and actors many years ago. Arthur’s father, before being forced by his guardian, Gilbert Clennam, to marry the Mrs Clennam of Little Dorrit, passionately loved this nameless singer and Arthur is their child. Mrs Clennam, motivated by spite and vengeance but cloaking her actions in the rhetoric of Christian piety, requisitioned Arthur and brought him up herself while having the singer confined until she died insane. Gilbert Clennam eventually repented the harm he had caused and, unable to compensate the singer directly but aware that Frederick had once supported her, left a complicated bequest that is rightfully Amy’s and which triggers many of the convolutions of the plot. Once you know all this, the experience of re-reading or viewing the story imbues every appearance of Frederick with additional significance and poignancy.

Phiz, Dickens’ illustrator, depicted Frederick as, if anything, even more decrepit than the text suggests, a shrunken shuffling dribbler. In James Fleet’s empathetic portrayal of the worn down but fundamentally kindly and perceptive Frederick Dorrit, however, it’s possible to perceive the attractive and youthful bohemian he once may have been.

Tom Courtney has the vantage of being recognised as a great actor, as distinct from Guiness’s canonical, and burdensome, status as Great Actor. Courtney subtly channels William Dorrit’s tremulous vulnerability and inner hurt, largely masked in the earlier episodes by his venal pomposity and delusional self-regard, but flickering through in his private moments with Amy, such as when, after railing at length against the very thought that his daughter could be engaged in paid work, his expression meekly acknowledges that it is necessary.

The difference between Courtney’s humanitarian portrayal of William Dorrit and Guiness’s more externalised, theatrical performance is exemplified in the death scenes in the two films. Edzard’s staging of William Dorrit’s death is exquisitely framed on a relatively plain set and contains some of the film’s most eloquent close-ups of Sarah Pickering’s Amy. But for all the brilliance and physical subtlety of Guiness’s performance, which is clearly based on a close study of the physiological manifestations of the final moments of life, we are not watching the death of the self-regarding Father of the Marshalsea or of Amy’s dearest father, we are inevitably observing how Sir Alec Guiness does William Dorrit’s death. Maybe this is why Raphael Samuel found that after the scene he remained dry-eyed having been ‘witness to a spectacle rather than engaged by a drama.’

Shortly preceding his death, William Dorrit suffers a serious and very public episode of cognitive confusion, imagining that he is back in the Marshalsea Prison and that those around him are inmates or visitors. This calamity is heralded by small incidents of memory loss and comes to a head at a grand society event hosted by Mrs Merdle, wife of the speculative banker, mounted when she is still at the pinnacle of society before the ruinous financial crash and her husband's search for a penknife.

In Edzard’s film, as in the novel, William Dorrit’s mental crisis takes place at a lavish seated banquet (featuring the aforementioned Sèvres dinner plates). In a brilliant visual and dramatic transposition, Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation has the scene take place at a Venetian masked ball where the sight of a looming, grotesque throng of uncanny figures at the top of a palatial staircase finally untethers the weary old man from reality.
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Believing himself back at the Marshalsea and trying to get up the narrow stairs to his prison room as the evening bell goes to banish visitors, William frets for Amy to help him and then, to the bemusement of the assembled society guests, begins a ghastly, confessional reprise of his habitual begging address to his visitors. Tom Courtney here brilliantly and movingly registers the pitiful struggle of a dementia sufferer who realises that he’s become the object of attention, concern and ridicule because his wits are failing and that his proud efforts to pretend otherwise are undignified and hopeless, but he must nevertheless persist with them. Later, as William lies on his deathbed with Amy beside him, Courtney convinces us, at a depth that Guiness did not, that this vain deluded man has at last understood how much he loves his daughter and how very much she has sacrificed in return.

Little Dorrit is not a historical document but, as Raphael Samuel points out, it’s an imaginative fiction that conflates Dickens’ memories of his childhood time in the Marshalsea in the 1820s and the speculative bank scandals of the 1850s into an 'about-thirty-years-ago' fictional timeframe. One person’s authenticity is the next person’s nitpicking — where do you stop in pursuit of it? Does too much of it inhibit art and imagination? If authenticity requires a character's undergarments to be hand stitched, then might not the handstitchers also be required to work by candlelight and live on bread and dripping?

Dickens himself robustly defended his own laissez faire attitude to historical detail when a correspondent accused him of anachronism over his description of a stained-glass window depicting Christ in Majesty in the church where Amy and Arthur are married: 'As the window in St George's Church appropriately carried out the pervading spirit of the tale at its conclusion, Mr Dickens made reference to it. He knew it was not as old as the date of the story, but did not consider that slight anachronism of any importance'.
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Quite so. His opinion on the visibility of machine stitching on costume corsets is not believed to be on record.

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*RESOURCES & REFERENCES

FILMS
A 24 minute silent film of Little Dorrit (1920) made by the Progress Film Company of Shoreham (UK) is held by Brighton University and is streaming at: https://screenarchive.brighton.ac.uk/detail/3473/

​A 131 minute Danish silent film Lille Dorrit (1924) with Danish intertitles translated as English subtitles is streaming at: https://www.stumfilm.dk/en/stumfilm/streaming/film/lille-dorrit

Christine Edzard’s 1987 Little Dorrit is available as a two-disc set with accompanying illustrated booklet. If purchased direct from Sands Films website you will be helping to fund current projects: https://www.sandsfilms.co.uk/shop-1.html

The BBC’s 14 episode Little Dorrit adapted by Andrew Davies (various directors) can be found streaming on the BBC iPlayer or is available on DVD or Bluray 4 disc box sets.

AUDIOBOOK
An unabridged Audiobook of Little Dorrit read by Anton Lesser (who plays Mr Merdle in the BBC  TV adaptation) is available here:  https://naxosaudiobooks.com/little-dorrit-unabridged/

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Canby, Vincent. Review/Film; A Dickens Adaptation In Novelistic Detail. The New York Times. 26 March 1988. Archived from the original on 2 April 2024. Retrieved 25.01.2025

Carey, John. Little Dorrit, An Introduction by John Carey. In Little Dorrit, A Story Told in Two Films. Sands Films Ltd, 1987

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. (1857). Into and notes by Steven Wall and Helen Small, Penguin Classics edition 1998.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today. In Mast, Cohen and Braudy, Film Theory and Criticism (Fourth Edition). Oxford University Press,1992.

Naremore, James [Editor and Introduction]. Film Adaptation. Rutgers University Press [Depth of Field Series], 2000.

Samuel, Raphael. Dockland Dickens and Who Calls So Loud. In Theatres of Memory Vol.1, Verso, 1994.

Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester University Press, 2003

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