Dombey Son

This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son (1848) is ideal for readers who wish to know more about Charles Dickens’s craft and creativity. Drawing on the author’s manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London—and containing hyperlinked facsimiles—Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son offers a new digital transcription with a fresh commentary by Tony Laing. Unique and innovative, this is the only edition to make Dickens’s working methods visible. John Mullan has called Dombey and Son Dickens’s 'first great novel.' Set amid the coming of the railways, it tells the story of a powerful man—typical of the commercial and banking magnates of the period—and the effect he has on his family and those around him. Laing presents the worksheets and other materials (transcribed for the first time) that together grew into the novel. Reading the book alongside this edition of the notes enlarges the understanding of Dickens’s art among teachers, students, researchers and Dickens enthusiasts. As cultural tastes shift from print to digital, Dickens’s Working Notes helps preserve Dickens’s work for the future. The magnifying and linking functions of the edition mean that the notes are more easily and usefully—not to mention accessibly—exhibited here than elsewhere. Laing gives present-day readers the chance not only to recapture the effect of serial publication but also to gain greater insight into the making of a work which, by general agreement and Dickens’s own admission, has a special place in his development as a novelist.

'The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light' Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family and the ambiguous connection between public and private life lies at the heart of Dickens' novel. Paul Dombey is a man who runs his domestic affairs as he runs his business: calculatingly, callously, coldly and commercially. Through his dysfunctional relationships with his son, his two wives, and his neglected daughter Florence, Dickens paints a vivid picture of the limitations of a society dominated by commercial values and the drive for profit and explores the possibility of moral and emotional redemption through familial love. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.