Social and Institutional Secrets in Little Dorrit: A Game Theoretic Reading of Dickens’ Realism

Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit incorporates an appealing realistic treatment of social and institutional secrets. Realism is characterized by its attention to details beyond the story world. This article proposes that Dickens portrays social and institutional secrets as unfair game systems, controlled by dominant authorities and represented by upper-class characters. This study builds on game theory in an effort to spot the game system Dickens utilizes to reflect the unfair interactions resulting from social and institutional secrets. It is concluded that Dickens’ artistic skills as a realist are not limited to faithful narrativity and mere accurate storytelling of events, rather it extends to utilizing systematic and very detailed structural representations of the contest between authorities hiding information and their victims in works like Little Dorrit, reflecting the exact system that underlines similar social, institutional, secret-based situations that Dickens observed in the world around him.