Recommendations
Books Like Dombey and Son
Best books to read after Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Dombey and Son is the transitional Dickens — the first fully planned novel, the work that marks his development from the picaresque early novels to the great social panoramas. If the portrait of Mr. Dombey's emotional incapacity and the extraordinary death of little Paul moved you, these books share the novel's concern with what pride and emotional coldness cost the people who suffer from them.
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The culmination of everything Dombey and Son begins — Dickens at full stretch with the panoramic social satire that Dombey and Son anticipates; the most natural next Dickens novel for readers who have finished Dombey and Son and want to continue through his development
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Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
The psychological heir to Dombey and Son — another portrait of pride, illusion, and the education in human feeling that follows from their failure; where Dombey is a third-person study of a man incapable of love, Great Expectations is a first-person account of a young man who lets the same incapacity develop in himself through class aspiration
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Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's portrait of Karenin — the formal, emotionally cold husband whose incapacity to respond to his wife's unhappiness drives her to Vronsky — is the European parallel to Dombey's portrait of emotional coldness; reading them together shows how both novelists understood emotional incapacity as a form of violence toward the people who love the incapable person
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
James's portrait of Gilbert Osmond — the cold, proud aesthete who marries Isabel Archer and uses her as an ornament rather than a person — is the most Dickensian of James's villains and the closest James comes to Dombey's portrait of a man who cannot give or receive love; the comparison shows how James refined what Dickens discovered about the psychology of emotional cruelty
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's short novel about a judge who has lived his entire life in pursuit of respectability and finds, as he is dying, that he has missed everything that actually matters — a compressed version of the Dombey arc: the man who organized his life around the wrong values and arrives at the end to count the cost
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David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most autobiographical novel, written immediately after Dombey and Son — the same concern with the emotional damage done by parental coldness and social ambition, but rendered in first-person autobiography rather than third-person satire; the contrast between the two novels shows Dickens processing the same material through different formal strategies
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's masterpiece is the Victorian novel that most directly parallels Dombey and Son in its portrait of people whose self-delusions cost them and the people around them dearly — Casaubon's cold, withholding scholarship is the closest Eliot parallel to Dombey's cold, withholding commerce
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What Maisie Knew
by Henry James
James's portrait of a young girl whose divorced parents use her as an instrument in their post-divorce maneuvering is the most psychologically acute treatment of a child damaged by parental emotional failure in the James canon — the closest James comes to the emotional core of Dombey and Son, which is the portrait of Florence Dombey, the daughter whom Dombey cannot love
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