The vast # of characters in Little Dorrit and what that signifies

Again, I have to note that I'm by no means a Dickens expert and some of these observations about Little Dorrit may be off the mark, but it does seem to me that this novel represents another - a final - step in Dickens's work, in particular regard the structure and the panoply of characters. Yes, of course, many of his early and mid-life novels involve multiple characters, but LD seems to be the first that introduces the characters, initially, as if they're unrelated; it's a challenge for readers (or listeners) to keep the cast of characters strait, and there are sometimes long gaps between the appearances of the characters - for ex., at about the 1/3 mark I'm reading a chapter about a young woman who, hilariously, talks nonstop, w/out commas, as the narrator notes (funny to draw our attention to the text - breaking the 4th wall so to speak) and I had no recollection of who she was or how she fit in (she was the woman whom the protagonist, Arthur Clennom, would have married had he not followed his father into business in China). Note in particular the first three chapters that introduce sets of characters who have yet to play any significant role in the narrative. Dickens is clearly pushing narrative to its limits - I have no idea whether he might have been able to read translations of Russian novels, but the great Russian novelists did so as well, albeit most of them in Dickens's wake) - and it would help to have a cast of characters at the front of the novel (maybe some editions do). The effect - and this is true throughout Dickens - is a peculiar double-vision: Seen in one way, the collection of initially unrelated characters show the complexity and vastness of the human populace; seen another way, the sudden interactions of these characters w/ one another - running into one another unexpectedly on various jaunts and rambles - suggest that London is like a village, where everyone knows everyone else and where you're likely to run into acquaintances every time you go out on the street.