Dombey and son

Charles John Huffham, DICKENS (1812-1870), son of a clerk in the Navy pays office. His father was imprisoned for debt and this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him. When he was 12 year old worked in a blacking warehouse. This painful period inspired much of his fiction. Then he worked as an office boy, studied shorthand and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the "Morning Chronicle", collaborating later with other newspapers. These attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in twenty monthly numbers of "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club". Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and was admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high spirited humour and genius for caricature.
"Dombey and Son" (1848). Mr. Dombey, the rich owner of the shipping house of Dombey and Son, has concentrated all his love and ambition in his son and heir Paul, an odd, delicate and prematurely old child, who is sent to Dr Blimber´s School, under whose strict discipline he sickens and dies. Dombey sinks in the desperation and his house fails. By this way he begins his slow decrease to the hells.