ABSTRACT
When the first instalment of Dombey and Son appeared on 30 September 1846 in the familiar green covers, Dickens was embarking once more upon his favourite form of publication. Since the early numbers of Pickwick he had been paying increasing attention to problems of structure, as previous essays have shown. In the Preface to his latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), he had claimed that he had from time to time ‘put a strong constraint’ upon himself and had kept ‘a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design’. This and other statements indicate his belief that there was no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated’ 231 plot as he had once felt that he must eschew. In Dombey and Son, when for the first time he planned each instalment on paper before he began writing, he went a great way towards realizing the intention he had so clearly formulated. It may, in fact, be said that with Dombey and Son he began a new chapter in his work.
