Published in 1848, the year before David Copperfield, Dombey and Son heralds the masterpieces of Dickens’s maturity while creating an atmosphere all of its own.
As Lucy Hughes-Hallett shows in her introduction, in the course of describing the rise and fall of a great merchant house, the novel addresses the contemporary world of manufactured things – incidentally involving the first railway death in fiction at its climax – while situating its human participants firmly in their midst.
The result can claim to be one of its creator’s most personal and distinctive novels.
This edition also reprints the original Everyman introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by ‘Phiz’.
