Arthur Clennam is back in England after many years abroad. He finds his mother as cold and hard as ever, but his father's recent death has thrown up a mystery, and he is determined to get to the bottom of it. Could it have anything to do with Little Dorrit, the quiet, kind girl who sews for his mother and goes back at night to her home in the Marshalsea Prison? As Arthur gets to know the Dorrit family, he is too busy looking for the truth about his mother's secret to notice that he has perhaps found the answer to his own happiness.