In the Library
Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens, 1855
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 24 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 71
- Length
- Length 337k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp learns how to live well on nothing a year, and Thackeray's London, like the one that worships Mr Merdle, bows to money it never troubles to check.
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About the book
There is an office in this book whose whole genius is the art of perceiving how not to do it, and once you have met it you will know it again every week of your life, in every form that comes back unsigned. Dickens built the Circumlocution Office out of fury and it came out funny, which is a trick almost nobody else has managed. Around it stands the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison where a young woman was born and where she still carries the dinners in, and the shadow of its wall falls across everyone who believes himself free: the financier the whole city is pouring its savings into, the gentleman rehearsing his own dignity, the man of forty who says he has no will left. Nobody has written money better, its noise, its shame, the way it rewrites a family overnight. This is Dickens at his angriest and his most tender in the same breath.