Little Dorrit
A girl born inside the Marshalsea sews for a family that will not admit it lives on her earnings, headed by a father who has been a debtor so long he collects tribute as the prison's resident gentleman. A middle-aged man home after twenty years in China suspects the family firm of an old wrong and tries to get an answer out of the Circumlocution Office, a department whose entire science is how not to do it. Written after Dickens went back to look at the prison that had held his own father, it is his coldest book about money, and the collapse of the financier Merdle anatomises a speculative mania the City had just lived through.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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