Little Dorrit’s Fourth Volume. Twenty-first Century Remediation of a Victorian Classic

The current interest in the Victorian period is particularly evident in the multitude of successful period dramas and cinema productions deriving their inspiration from Victorian history and culture. Dickens’s Little Dorrit, generated by the difficulties of understanding a ‘new’ world dominated by more and more complicated machines, and markets, is possibly the ideal paradigm to explore this ‘Victorianomania’ because this novel strikes us “no less forcefully today in its indictment of society's ability to destroy through greed and crushing self-interest” (Kirschner 2009). This study carries out a threefold analysis of Little Dorrit's remediation in the twenty-first century: visual remediation – Xue’s 2012 Little Dorrit; audio-visual remediation – the BBC series; and web remediation – fan fiction – in order to investigate Dickens’s appeal and longevity in contemporary media.