Rare edition with unique illustrations and elegant classic cream paper. Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens's story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author's gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens's "genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he's planned to give, and then more." Dombey and Son is the earliest novel of Dickens for which a complete set of working notes survives. Dickens called these notes "mems" witch is short for memoranda. The mems allowed him to keep track of complicated plot lines and the many characters that populate his novels. These working notes for Dombey and Son reveal that young Paul Dombey was doomed to die from the first moment that Dickens created him. Although he did live for one chapter longer than Dickens originally intended. Walter Gay was originally intended to go bad was saved from that fate. Edith, the second Mrs. Dombey, was bound for adultery and death, but Dickens spared her character at the urgings of his friend Lord Jeffrey. Includes vintage illustration!