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

Can one lonely little boy show the strength and determination to survive the dangers that lie ahead? Travelling along the rocky road from boyhood to manhood, how can David learn who to trust and who to love? Will David's friends bring him happiness or heartache? In this inspiring tale of trust, betrayal, courage and love, Charles Dickens presents a world of colourful characters to amuse us, astonish us, disgust us and move us to tears. Once encountered, David Copperfield's friends and enemies will never be forgotten.

When seventeen-year-old Silas Umber's father disappears, Silas is sure it is connected to the powerful artifact he discovers, combined with his father's hidden hometown history, which compels Silas to pursue the path leading to his destiny and ultimately, to the discovery of his father, dead or alive.

The book analyses attempts by Dickens and other nineteenth-century writers to challenge established ways of using the distinction between upper and lower case letters, in the interests of a wider radicalism. It discusses Dickens’s satire - on ‘Shares’ in Our Mutual Friend, on Paul Dombey’s position as the ‘Son’ of Dombey and Son - alongside the proto-modernist typography of suffragist poet Augusta Webster and the work of Marx’s translators transforming German conventions of capitalisation into English under the influence of Dickens and Carlyle. Placing these innovations within the history of the dual alphabet from its invention by Carolingian scribes to its rejection by modernist poets and the Bauhaus printers, the book tracks the dual alphabet through Dickens’s manuscripts, corrected proofs, and the ‘prompt copies’ for his public Readings, highlighting distinct ways in which writing, printing and speech produce meaning.