Online Exhibition: Character Sketches from the World of Charles Dickens
This exhibition celebrates one of the most enduring legacies of Charles Dickens's genius: the unforgettable characters he brought to life.
Little Amy Dorrit was born in the Marshalsea, where her father, William, is imprisoned for debt. Amy is resourceful and hardworking, managing the family’s meager finances and caring for her father. She is seen here with the prison turnkey.
Child Characters from Dickens. Illustrated by Arthur A. Dixon. London: Ernest Nistar.
Pancks is an agent who collects rents for Christopher Casby from the poor people living in the Bleeding Heart Yard slum. He redeems himself when he exposes Casby and helps the Dorrits regain their fortune. The way he snorts and sniffs is evocative of “a little labouring steam engine.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Little Dorrit
The aunt of Casby’s daughter Flora Finching’ late husband, this strange old lady had a “face like a staring wooden doll.” Her grim taciturnity “was sometimes interrupted by a propensity to offer remarks . . . totally uncalled for by anything or anybody . . .”
FOC Darley. Illustrations from the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. n.d.
Tite Barnacle is the nephew of the Minister of Circumlocution and one of the senior officials in the Circumlocution Office. “He wound and wound folds of white cravat round his neck, as he wound folds of tape and paper around the neck of his country.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Little Dorrit
Young John Chivery is the son of the turnkey of the Marshalsea and is in love with Amy Dorrit. He teams up with Pancks to help restore the family’s fortune. “Young John was gentle . . . but he was great of soul. Poetical, expansive, faithful.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Characters in Dickens's Little Dorrit
Christopher Casby is a slumlord and extortionist known as “The Patriarch.” ”Various old ladies in the neighbourhood spoke of him as ‘The Last of the Patriarchs.’ So grey, so slow, so quiet, so impassionate, so very bumpy in the head.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Little Dorrit
A frail and helpless William Dorrit is freed from prison after twenty-five years. Little Dorrit “knew well – no one better – that a man so broken as to be The Father of the Marshalsea, could be no father to his own children.”
Print and Picture Collection #1462