SPOILER ALERT
Below please find Peter Ackroyd’s and G.K. Chesterton’s brief discussions of Little Dorrit, as well as a very recent article by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman.
“. . . in Little Dorrit, it is not the ‘system’ . . . which imprisons people; people imprison themselves.” (141)
Ackroyd comes at the novel via his interpretation of Dickens’s “unsettled” state of mind regarding both his personal and professional life and his continuing dissatisfaction with the condition of England. Of the narrative Ackroyd says “it is a . . . penetrating work” which “provides images, or [a] parallel series of images, which bind together the narrative in an emotional rather than thematic unity”. (141-142)
“. . . when all is said and done the main business of the story of Little Dorrit is to describe the victory of circumstances over a soul.” (183)
Chesterton seems to be to be somewhat dismissive of the novel. I almost think he hadn’t read it closely enough or was in a hurry to write his “Appreciation and Criticism”. While I agree that the novel is dark and Dickens was likely in a depression when he wrote it, I don’t find it as depressing or as hopeless as Chesterton appears to do.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22362/pg22362-images.html#DORRIT
The abstract to Weltman’s article: “This essay challenges prevailing interpretations of Amy Dorrit’s petiteness as a symbol of her abstemious self-sacrifice or of women’s infantilized position in Victorian culture. Examining Little Dorrit literally rather than symptomatically shows that Charles Dickens highlights the protagonist Amy’s small size on a spectrum of human variation, rendering in detail corporeal experiences in a physical world built for taller people. While the plentiful critical readings interpreting Amy as symbolic are illuminating, they depend on the unreliable points of view of other characters. Aware of others’ misperception of her in contrast to her understanding of herself, Amy develops a painful double consciousness that nonetheless gives her a capacity to see from more than one viewpoint. Shifting readers away from seeing Amy through the eyes of her misperceiving friends and family, Dickens critiques symptomatic reading and links Amy’s com- passionate capacity for comprehending multiple perspectives to the omniscient narrator’s expansive point of view.” (1)
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 
If I remember correctly, G. K. Chesterton mostly loved Dickens’s humorous writing and tended to be relatively dismissive of his more dramatic writing, so his take on Little Dorrit should be read in that context.
Ironically, I find Little Dorrit, for all its melancholy, to be more effectively funny than The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit and many other of Dickens’s earlier books that Chesterton praised for their comedy.
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