Dombey And Daughter

Wealthy shipping merchant Paul Dombey runs his family like he runs his business, with coldness and calculation. When his wife dies giving birth to their second child and long hoped-for heir, Dombey remains preoccupied only with the importance of passing the firm along to his son. Lost in this narrow, obsessive view is Dombey's older child, Florence, who yearns for his attention but receives only an indifference that eventually curdles into outright hatred. Published midway through the author's career, this 1848 novel marked a new maturity in Charles Dickens' writing. Less an examination of socioeconomic conditions and more of an exploration of emotional deprivation and fulfillment, it offers the satirical indignation of the storyteller's early fiction with an added darkness and narrative complexity. An absorbing plot and memorable characters combine to form a compelling tale of greed, poor judgment, and the redemptive power of love.

Paul Dombey is a cold, unbending, pompous merchant, and a widower with two children - Paul and Florence. His chief ambition is to perpetuate the firm-name. He dreams of passing his business on to his son. Dombey dotes on his son, and neglects and mistreats his daughter.The "son" in the title of the book is incapable of ever joining the firm. A sickly and odd child, Paul dies at the age of six. Dombey pours his resentment and anger out on his daughter, whom he pushes away despite her efforts to earn her father's love.Eventually Dombey remarries, after literally acquiring his new wife from her father in a commercial transaction. Dombey is as bad a husband as he is a father and his marriage is loveless. His new bride hates Dombey and eventually runs off with Canker, his business manager. Dombey characteristically blames Florence for this reversal, and strikes her, causing Florence to run away as well.Abandoned by everyone, Dombey loses his business and goes half insane, living in his decaying house. Dombey is eventually reconciled to his daughter, who always a doormat forgives her father........

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

Paul Dombey is the wealthy owner of the shipping company, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. When his son is born, Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth. The child, named Paul after his father, is a weak and sickly child, who does not socialize normally with others. He is intensely fond of his sister Florence, who is deliberately neglected by her father as irrelevant and a distraction. Young Paul's health declines even further and he dies, still only six years old, and he is left only with his daughter, whom he pushes away while she futilely tries to earn his love.

The book analyses attempts by Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers to challenge established ways of using the distinction between upper and lower case letters, in the interests of a wider radicalism. It discusses Dickens’s satire - on ‘Shares’ in Our Mutual Friend, on Paul Dombey’s position as the ‘Son’ of Dombey and Son - alongside the proto-modernist typography of suffragist poet Augusta Webster and the work of Marx’s translators transforming German conventions of capitalisation into English under the influence of Dickens and Carlyle. Placing these innovations within the history of the dual alphabet from its invention by Carolingian scribes to its rejection by modernist poets and the Bauhaus printers, the book tracks the dual alphabet through Dickens’s manuscripts, corrected proofs, and the ‘prompt copies’ for his public Readings, highlighting distinct ways in which writing, printing and speech produce meaning.