In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the comic genius of Dickens in one of his less well-known novel
Dombey and Son is some way from being Charles Dickens’s most popular novel. Indeed, of his fifteen full-length novels, it’s probably down there at the bottom, alongside Barnaby Rudge. The last television adaptation of Dombey and Son was back in 1983 (you can watch this adaptation online here; I used to work with the chap who played Mr Toots, who went on to become a lecturer and Baptist minister).