Amy Dorrit spends her days earning money for the family and looking after her proud father who is a long term inmate of Marshalsea debtors' prison in London. Amy and her family's world is transformed when her employer's son, Arthur Clennam, returns from overseas to solve his family's mysterious legacy and discovers that their lives are interlinked.

Beginning in 1861 England, and moving through a number of years, a maid helps raise two children, a boy and a girl, all the time talking about her methods in doing so.