I started reading Dickens Little Dorrit about 18 months ago and got about half way through it before something took me away, though I cannot remember what. Then I began listening to an audio recording, picking up from where I left off. That also fell into abeyance so today I opened my kindle edition again, only to be placed right back where I left off in the first place. It doesn't hurt at all to reread sections, so that is the plan, and to be finished by Christmas, I hope.

Dickens is full of characters that we might regard as 'types', caricatures, and Little Dorrit is no different. Impossibly noble men and women, moustache-twirling villains, pompous matrons, and fly-by-the seat merchants of all kinds are but a few of the colourful array. Most people reading Dickens suspend their disbelief in the reality of such types in the cause of a good story.

But truthfully, if he were writing in the present day, how would he render the current crop of celebrities, sports stars, ego-driven politicians and those who dwell in the slums of social media? They lend themselves readily to caricature. Very little work is needed to transform them into characters that one might reasonably have to suspend disbelief over to get on with the narrative.

One critic of Little Dorrit noted how so many of Dickens middle-class characters, epitomised in this novel by the ghastly Mrs General, seek out 'a cultivation of surfaces.' Everything is in the sheen and nothing runs deep. We could never level such a charge at folks today, could we?