Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'

Abstract

This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son (1848) is ideal for readers who wish to know more about 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 will enlarge 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 will help 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.

This close analysis of Dickens’s working notes uses Zoomify, allowing the reader of the HTML edition to greatly magnify the manuscript photographs and enabling more detailed examination.