The Times Hearts Little Dorrit

The Times' Alessandra Stanley spends much time, as everyone is rightly doing, pointing out the timely and remarkable parallel between Dickens' great financial swindler Mr. Merdle and the real-life Bernie Madoff. All in all she gives the new series an excellent review and notes, as I did in my review of the book, how superior the "in-between" characters in the novel are to the good and bad ones.

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Both Ms. Foy, as Amy, and Mr. Macfadyen, as Clennam, are persuasive and touching. But William Dorrit is at the core of this tale, and Mr. Courtenay does the role full justice, layering the pathos of the elderly debtor with rich swaths of self-pity and vanity.

Mr. Merdle’s fund is too good to be true, but “Little Dorrit” lives up to Dickens’s every word.

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Make sure to tune in soon for a guest-review from Romancing the Tome's Kim and Amy, and feel free to drop your initial impressions in the comments section below.