For Dombey and Son, his seventh novel, Charles Dickens once again enlisted Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) as his illustrator. Bradbury and Evans, who replaced Dickens's former publishers, Chapman and Hall, serialised Dombey and Son in twenty parts from October 1846 through April 1848. The last of these monthly instalments was a "double number," as was the case with Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby. The book differed from Dickens's previous novels because its serial publication involved unusually careful planning and symmetrical composition of instalments.

After a successful string of novels which began with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in 1836, Dickens had split with publishers Chapman and Hall over the less than stellar profits for A Christmas Carol in 1844. Throughout the remainder of the 1840s, Dickens published both the seasonal Christmas Books and his serialised novels through the firm of William Bradbury and Frederick Mullett Evans, formerly only printers until they became the proprietors of Punch. Through them Dickens published both The Battle of Life in December 1846, and in monthly parts his seventh full-length novel, Dombey and Son, Wholesale Retail & for Exportation in nineteen shilling numbers, with the final instalment as a double number (April 1848: Ch. 58-62) containing four plates: two regular engravings, a frontispiece, and an engraved title-page. At the conclusion of serialisation, Bradbury and Evans issued the novel in a single volume.

A typical instalment contained three uniform chapters, the exceptions being no. 12 (September 1847: Ch. 35-38) and no. 19 (really 19-20, a double-number, April 1848: Ch. 58-62). Although he does not reproduce the wrapper in Chapter 16 of The Dickens Picture-Book (1910), on p. 294 J. A. Hammerton gives the frontispiece (also provided by Michael Steig in Dickens and Phiz), thirty-seven of the thirty-eight plates issued two each for every monthly part, and five so-called "character plates" from Phiz's correspondence: Little Paul, Florence, Alice, and Edith. Paul Schicke in The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens (1999) notes that Phiz also supplied "the wrapper design, frontispiece, and vignette title-page" (85), for a grand total of forty-six illustrations associated with the serial.

According to Hammerton, "Kitton chronicles the fact that all the the plates were etched in duplicate, and the greater number were drawn on quarto plates with two subjects on each. In Dombey Phiz first made use of the oblong form of illustration, all his earlier plates having been designed as uprights, often to the ruin of the subject" (295).

Some of the following illustrations, a number of them colourised, come from the Caxton Publishing Company’s so-called "London Edition," and are identical in scale to the plates in the original monthly numbers. Since this volume, however, does not contain all of the original thirty-nine engravings,the copy text for these has been the 1880 two-volume Illustrated Library Edition. —  Philip V. Allingham

The Forty Plates, plus colourised versions from 1910 and working sketches

Other material, including front matter and sketches

Eight coloured lithographs bassed on the original engravings (1910)

Related Material, including Other Illustrated Editions of Dombey and Son

Bibliography

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "Part Two: Dickens and His Principal Illustrator. 4. Hablot Browne." (Part 1). Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio U. P., 1980.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by  H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880. Vol. II.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. L. Sheppard. The Household Edition. 18 vols. New York: Harper & Co., 1873.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

__________. Dombey and Son> Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow, 1900, rpt. 1934. 2 vols. in one.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 9.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 16: Dombey and Son." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17, 294-337.

Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London (1899) edition.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Ch. 12, "Work, Work, Work." Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. 128-160.

Lowens, Peter. "How Charles Dickens Came to Vancouver Island." Dickensian No. 525, Vol. 121, Part 1 (Spring 2025): 67-75.

Schlicke, Paul. (Ed.). "Dombey and Son." The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. 183-88.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 86-112.

Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablot Knight Browne — "Phiz.". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.

Vann, J. Don. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, October 1846-April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 67-68.


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Created 8 August 2015

Last modified 15 June 2025