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Archived Group Reads 2023
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Dombey - Background Info, Reading Schedule, & Additional Resources
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Charles Dickens, (born Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Eng.—died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent), British novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. The defining moment of Dickens’s life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors’ prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks. With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his public readings. Dickens’s works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.
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Here is the link to more information from Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/...
The Charles Dickens Page:
https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/in..."
If you want some more . . . 🙂
Charles Dickens: Tale of Ambition and Genius
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNOug...
This one is short (about five minutes) and has several references to Dombey and Son:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bgvs...
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Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/821/8...
Full Text Archive - https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/...
Audiobook on Librivox: https://librivox.org/dombey-and-son-b...
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My Everyman Edition of the book is 878 pages, so it is not a quick read. I have broken it up into 11 weeks to keep the page numbers manageable. If you do fall behind, please don’t give up! Your contributions to the chats will be welcome even if they are not posted during the scheduled week.
Week 1: April 2 - 8 – Chapter I-V
Week 2: April 9 - 15 – Chapter VI-X
Week 3: April 16 - 22 – Chapter XI-XIV
Week 4: April 23 - 29 – Chapter XV-XX
Week 5: April 30 - May 6 – Chapter XXI-XXV
Week 6: May 7 - 13 – Chapter XXVI-XXXI
Week 7: May 14 - 20 – Chapter XXXII-XXXVIII
Week 8: May 21 - 27 – Chapter XXXIX-XLV
Week 9: May 28 - June 3 – Chapter XLVI-LI
Week 10: June 4 - 10 – Chapter LII-LVI
Week 11: June 11 - 16 – Chapter LVII-LXII
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https://victorianweb.org/art/illustra...
Excellent supporting information and material. I would like to join your group read. I look forward to participating with you.
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Thanks, Francis! I'm glad you are able to join us and look forward to hearing your thoughts during our discussion. See you Sunday! :)
... picking up the courage to give Dickens another chance ... I haven't been a Dickens enthusiast so far despite trying. Maybe Dombey & Son will change my outlook?
sabagrey wrote: "... picking up the courage to give Dickens another chance ... I haven't been a Dickens enthusiast so far despite trying. Maybe Dombey & Son will change my outlook?"Curious. You seem to have no difficulties with George Eliot and yet I find her work much denser and much, much more difficult to read, interpret AND enjoy!
Paul wrote: "Curious. You seem to have no difficulties with George Eliot and yet I find her work much denser and much, much more difficult to read, interpret AND enjoy!"well - de gustibus non est disputandum - as they used to say.
I don't have difficulties reading Dickens, it's just that what I've read so far has not really caught my fancy; the main reason being, I think, that his characters are a bit deficient in the 3rd dimension.
sabagrey wrote: "well - de gustibus non est disputandum - as they used to say.."Since the creation of the written word and the invention of fiction for reading enjoyment, the author who is all things to all people and is universally enjoyed has yet to be born and yet to put pen to paper. I can't wait but I'm not holding my breath, LOL!
This is my favourite Dickens novel! I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.
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I hope that Dombey and Son will turn the Dickens tide for you. I love Dickens and am very excited about this discussion, but I know he's not everyone's cup of tea.
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That's good to hear, Rosemarie! I'm loving it so far.
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Thank you for weighing in with that. Dombey is one of the few I haven’t read. I started it a while back but couldn’t seem to get up a momentum. (Of course, there was a lot going on in my life at that time.) Unlike so many of the others, I have no point of reference for it, so had no idea what to expect. I’m really looking forward to reading it with the group!
Hi Everyone, looking forward to reading along with you! This is my first time reading this book.
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Yay! I'm so glad you can join in!
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Welcome, Erich! Glad you can join us. I look forward to hearing your thoughts as we read.
There is a serialised version of Dombey and Son on You Tube. It is a BBC production from 1983. Florence seems to be at least twice the age she should be at the beginning of this series. Unfortunately, in the first episode at least, the audio seems out of sync.
For those who are interested, the first episode is here….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DyrM...
Shamefully, the BBC scrapped plans to allow Andrew Davies to write a screenplay for a new adaptation of Dombey and Son in 2009. This was after his success with Bleak House and Little Dorrit. And after what has been produced in the last ten years, I entirely agree with his sentiments in the article below.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/200...
Trev wrote: "Shamefully, the BBC scrapped plans to allow Andrew Davies to write a screenplay for a new adaptation of Dombey and Son in 2009. This was after his success with Bleak House and Little Dorrit. And after what has been produced in the last ten years, I entirely agree with his sentiments in the article below."Fortunately, he could do Wives & Daughters long before such policies (1999) - Gaskell, more or less forgotten at the time, would have stood no chance, I suspect.
(I hesitate to watch Dombey and Son after reading the youtube comments)
sabagrey wrote: “ Fortunately, he could do Wives & Daughters long before such policies (1999) - Gaskell, more or less forgotten at the time, would have stood no chance, I suspect..."Definitely one of his best! Worth it just for that (view spoiler).
It’s on my annual watch list.
.…and Middlemarch was pretty good too.
Trev wrote: "Definitely one of his best! Worth it just for that (view spoiler)."the spoilered scene was spoiled a bit for me ;-) because (view spoiler)
A great resource for those who like to get their bearings in and around London is the ‘Dickens London map.’https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/ch...
Almost all the places mentioned in his novels have been mapped. Here, for example, is Polly Toodle’s Camden Town.
Another, more modern version, is here (but beware you may encounter spoilers if you use this map early on in the book.)
https://londonist.com/2016/09/the-lon...
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https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/ch...
Almost all the place..."
What a great resource and visual! Thanks for sharing that with us, Trev!
Spurred on in a quest to find words longer than ‘ tintinnabulation’ in any other Dickens novels (so far I have failed miserably), I have found out that Dombey and Son is almost the longest novel that Charles Dickens wrote. It is just five words short of the longest novel which is David Copperfield.Here is a list of Dickens novels in word count order.
https://normblog.typepad.com/normblog...
Trev wrote: "I have found out that Dombey and Son is almost the longest novel that Charles Dickens wrote. It is just five words short of the longest novel which is David Copperfield.."I won't deny that it begins already to feel long to me.
The serialised novel of the era obviously had a similar role as today's soap operas: you have to get as many seasons out of your material as possible.
ETA (edited to add): ... I've switched to the audiobook, and like it better. - It was the same with David Copperfield. It seems my brain can digest Dickens only while my fingers are knitting ;-)
Dombey and Son was Dickens’ seventh novel. It was first published in installments that began in 1846 and ran through 1848. The novel focuses on what happens when businessman Paul Dombey’s firstborn child is a daughter instead of a son.
Fun facts about Dombey and Son:
It is the earliest novel of Dickens’ for which a complete set of working notes survives. He called these notes “mems” which is short for memoranda. They allowed him to keep track of complicated plot lines and the many characters that populate his novels.
Author George Gissing notes, “Dombey was begun at Lausanne, continued at Paris, completed in London, and at English seaside places; whilst the early parts were being written, a Christmas story, The Battle of Life, was also in hand, and Dickens found it troublesome to manage both together. That he overcame the difficulty—that, soon after, we find him travelling about England as member of an amateur dramatic company—that he undertook all sorts of public engagements and often devoted himself to private festivity—Dombey going on the while, from month to month—is matter enough for astonishment to those who know anything about artistic production. But such marvels become commonplaces in the life of Charles Dickens.”
As Gissing mentions, it was in Lausanne that Dickens gave a reading of the first installment of Dombey to some of his friends. It went so well that he later wrote to his friend John Forster, “a great deal of money might possibly be made by one’s having readings of one’s own books.” This germ of an idea became Dickens public readings.
Karl Smith, author of Dickens and the Unreal City, gives his specific reasons for what makes Dombey and Son – and the works of Dickens as a whole – worth reading again and again. He observes that this is based in part on Dickens's "recognition that solemn themes require humour and verbal vigour to accompany and complement them" and goes on to conclude:
Grim psychological realism, social commentary, comic absurdity and symbolic transcendence are here brought together more than in any previous novel with the possible exception of Oliver Twist. Dombey and Son not only prepares the ground for Dickens's later masterpieces, but demands to be enjoyed for its own energy and richness.