Between the appearance of his last Christmas Book and the publication of Little Dorrit in 1855–7, Dickens wrote three more novels: David Copperfield, Bleak House and Hard Times. Engaging with a range of topics related to the family – mothers, nurses, orphans, single-parent homes, young couples, family bereavement and so on – David Copperfield shows how the hero's quest to establish his social and sexual identity is bound up with the formation of a suitable family. As Chris R. Vanden Bossche has argued, in the process David demonstrates the extent to which his middle-class identity is dependent upon a commitment to the morality of domestic economy. Bleak House has a good deal to say about homemaking and housekeeping, female sexual transgression, illegitimacy and the consoling function of the middle-class family as a precarious site of privacy and personal freedom (as analyses by D. A. Miller and Monica Feinberg show in detail), and Catherine Gallagher has demonstrated the importance of the relationship between social paternalism and domestic ideology in Hard Times. However, the issues associated with the formation of the family and middle-class self-making in these novels are dealt with in more complex ways in Dickens's later fiction, and Little Dorrit provides a particularly illuminating illustration of the narrative workings of familial ideology.

The family and the prison are the two central metaphors of Little Dorrit and their significance as part of Dickens's social and moral analysis is widely recognised. What has not been duly acknowledged, however, is the ideological function of the family in the novel's analysis of social and economic transformation.