Product Description

Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens’s story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author’s gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens’s “genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1867 “Charles Dickens” edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #592631 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-08
• Released on: 2003-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Review
?There?s no writing against such power as this?one has no chance.??William Makepeace Thackeray -- Review

Review
“There’s no writing against such power as this—one has no chance.”—William Makepeace Thackeray

From the Publisher
Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. All books published since 1993 have also been completely restyled: all type has been reset, to offer a clarity and ease of reading unique among editions of the classics; a vibrant, full-color cover design now complements these great texts with beautiful contemporary works of art. But the best feature must be Everyman's uniquely low price. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards.

Customer Reviews

A Very Good Place To Start
Upon finishing Dombey and Son this morning, I thought back to the first Dickens work I ever read, which was David Copperfield, as a freshman in high school. Since then I have read many others, all with the same extensive cast of characters, side plots, etc.....

Except this one....which makes me question why it is not used as an introduction to the works of Dickens in school curriculums.

Dombey and Son, as a title, refers to the business which provides wealth, title, and position to Mr. Dombey, the aforementioned father. The 'son' refers to a succession of partners in that business, as well as an arrival at the opening of the book, which leads to the demise of Mrs. Dombey. But little Paul Dombey, sharing in his father's first and last names, joins an already present sibling in the world, his sister Florence.

Through the course of the novel, you realize that Dombey and Daughter are really the focus of this story....the fortunes and misfortunes that befall them both, the grievous neglect of one for the other, despite the efforts of the one neglected to reconcile...and a host of others that enter and exit from their lives.

But to recapture and jusitfy my initial point, this book is a marvelous starting point to read Dickens. It is far easier to keep track of the cast of the story, as it is more limited than other Dickens novels, while sharing the same length as most others. The story lines all really do feed into the central plot, and while the 'comedy' that I so enjoy in Dickens's prose is, admittedly, more limited here...it still is a highly enjoyable tale, and a great place to get your feet wet with one of history's best tale-weavers.

Although bittersweet and melancholy in tone, for the majority of the story, Dombey and Son holds up with Dickens's other novels as a true classic.

Ponderous portrait of pride
If you love Dickens, you'll like this book. If you're not committed to the work and style of Boz, you may have a hard time getting through it. It gets off to a very slow start; it wears its didactic aims more prominently on its sleeve than most of Dickens' novels do (the preceding novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, having been a study of the perils of greed, this one is likewise a study on self-destroying pride.) Its heroine is so self-sacrificing, uncomplaining, sweet and forgiving that a modern reader is likely to feel the impulse to throttle her more than once. I found it the least satisfying of the dozen Dickens novels I've read, and have rounded its three and a half stars up rather than down, in honor of all the other good stuff he's produced.

All that being said, the book contains plenty of rewards for the persevering. Dombie's daughter, the over-gentle Florence, is more than made up for by a string of sharply drawn women who are nobody's wallflowers: the peppery Susan Nipper, the fearsome landlady Mac Stinger, and the magnificent second Mrs. Dombey, whose inflexible, bent pride puts steel to her husband's flint as the story gains headway halfway through. The plotting is intricate and tight, the peeks into Victorian hypocrisies (never far removed from our own) are trenchant, and we are treated to what is possibly the most riveting death scene in the whole oeuvre, which Dickens chose to present from the decedent's point of view in a stream of consciousness passage as remarkable for its technical daring as its sentimentality.

Throw in the superbly menacing, dentally impeccable villain, Mr Carker, and a rogue's gallery of lesser despicables from the streetwise dunce Chicken, to the blustering toady Joe Bagstock, to the second Mrs. Dombey's outrageous tin magnolia of a mother, and it's a book you'd be happy to stumble across in the cabin some snowbound weekend.

The Oxford World Classics edition has an extremely useful set of notes, which includes in full Dickens' initial outline of the work.

Dickens' First Mature Novel
I was not overly thrilled with Dickens' previous novel Martin Chezzlewit, despite those amazing American scenes. That was a transitional work - where Dickens was going can be seen quite clearly in Dombey and Son.

In Dombey and Son we have the biting satire (the title being the biggest black joke of all) and the more expansive social criticism of Dickens' later work. Dombey is a proud business man and wants an heir. What he does to his children is chilling and his second marriage becomes its own nightmare. Dombey is also where Dickens starts using an overriding symbol for his longer works - here the railroads as a symbol of progress and brute force.

The plot is surprisingly linear for such a long Dickens novel - it lacks the myriad of subplots that his other novels have. The going is slow at times but the psychology gets deeper and more intricate as you continue. This novel is too often overlooked but it is a fine work of the author's early maturity. It points the way to Dickens' two best novels which immediately follow - David Copperfield and Bleak House.