Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'

doi:10.11647/obp.0092

Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son' - cover image

DOI

https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0092

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright

Tony Laing

Published On

2017-09-04

ISBN

Paperback978-1-78374-223-3

Hardback978-1-78374-224-0

PDF978-1-78374-225-7

HTML978-1-80064-511-0

XML978-1-78374-614-9

EPUB978-1-78374-226-4

MOBI978-1-78374-227-1

Language

English

Print Length

224 pages (viii + 216)

Dimensions

Paperback210 x 16 x 273 mm(8.25" x 0.61" x 10.75")

Hardback210 x 14 x 273 mm(8.25" x 0.56" x 10.75")

Weight

Paperback1498g (52.84oz)

Hardback1708g (60.25oz)

Media

Illustrations62

Tables2

OCLC Number

1167155091

LCCN

2019452597

BIC

BISAC

LIT004120
LIT024040

LCC

PR4588

Keywords

critical edition
working notes
Dombey and Son
transcription
commentary
worksheets

Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'

Tony Laing (author)

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.

Endorsements

This book is the result of a huge amount of scholarly labour, is comprehensively thought through, clearly and scrupulously presented, and genuinely useful to Dickens scholars. Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son is more accessible than the equivalent portion of Harry Stone's expensive standard publication, Dickens's Working Notes (1987), and superior in the quality and detail of the presentation, and the useful commentary, both to Stone and the various paperback editions of this pivotal novel in Dickens's career. Above all, it uses the possibilities of digital technology to very good effect: it makes an important advance on existing critical editions in its representation of Dickens's creative process.

Prof. Adrian Poole

University of Cambridge

Reviews

Tony Laing’s Dickens’s Working Notes for "Dombey and Son” offers an extraordinarily thorough editorial apparatus, extensive introductions and appendices, and beautifully reproduced facsimiles and color-coded text. The organization of the book is perspicuous in a way that allows it to be authoritative in its details without being overwhelming.

Andrea Henderson

"Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century". SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (1522-9270), vol. 58, no. 4, 2021. doi:10.1353/sel.2018.0038

Full Review