ABSTRACT
The last number of Dombey and Son was published in April 1848, and before the year was out Dickens was brooding upon his next novel David Copperfield. As for Dombey, no master plan survives, and there is no reason to suppose that such a plan was set on paper. Other evidence bearing upon the nature of his first design is slight, and when compared with what survives about the design of Dombey 280 is disappointing. It is true that on one page of the manuscript are written as many as seventeen draft titles, but all are variants upon a single pattern. What began as ‘Mag’s Diversions: Being the personal history, experiences, and observations of Mr. Thomas Mag the Younger, of Blunderstone House’ ended as ‘The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger’. After promising so much in the title of Dombey, he would seem to be returning to the noncommittal type of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby: even ‘Mag’s Diversions’, an old saying like ‘the deuce and all’, was no more compromising than As You Like It. The cover-design of the monthly numbers, which had foreshadowed the drift of Dombey, tells no secrets here. It shows indeed that the story will begin in earliest childhood, but that is no more than the first number itself reveals. Forster, it is true, found the ‘unity of drift or purpose . . . apparent always’, and added, in explanation:
By the course of the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable; and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. 281
