Theme: 10 The Development of the English Realistic Novel.

Dombey and Son (1846–48) was a crucial novel in his development, a product of more thorough planning and maturer thought and the first in which “a pervasive uneasiness about contemporary society takes the place of an intermittent concern with specific social wrongs,” as the scholar Kathleen Tillotson observed. Using railways prominently and effectively, it was very up-to-date, though the questions posed included such perennial moral and religious challenges as are suggested by the child Paul’s first words in the story: “Papa, what’s money?” Some of the corruptions of money and pride of place and the limitations of “respectable” values are explored, virtue and human decency being discovered most often (as elsewhere in Dickens) among the poor, humble, and simple. In Paul’s early death Dickens offered another famous pathetic episode; in Mr. Dombey he made a more ambitious attempt than before at serious and internal characterization.
David Copperfield (1849–50) has been described as a “holiday” from these larger social concerns and most notable for its childhood chapters, which the critic Edmund Wilson described as “an enchanting vein which he had never quite found before and which he was never to find again.” Largely for this reason and for its autobiographical interest, it has always been among his most popular novels and was Dickens’s own “favourite child.” It incorporates material from the autobiography he had recently begun but soon abandoned and was written in the first person, a new technique for him. David differs from his creator in many ways, however, though Dickens used many early experiences that had meant much to him—his period of work in the factory while his father was jailed, his schooling and reading, his passion for Maria Beadnell, and (more cursorily) his emergence from parliamentary reporting into successful novel writing. In Micawber the novel presents one of the “Dickens characters” whose imaginative potency extends far beyond the narratives in which they figure; Pickwick and Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff, and Scrooge are some others.