The last time I ready this was in 1991. Returning to a book I had loved is always risky - will I love it just as much the second time around? Happily, it was a delight to read it again. I have taken so much more from the book, the complexity of the characters and their relationships, the detail that Dickens dwells on as he takes us into the heart of Dombey and Son, house, firm and fractured family. The impossibly innocent and virtuous Florence is without doubt my favourite of all of Dickens's child characters with the death of her little brother Paul, a wave of sentimentalism in all its Dickensian splendour. The book is an interesting reflection of Dickens's view of the ideology of Victorian domesticity, and how his innate cynicism competes with this ideology, particularly when it comes to the relationship between husband and wife, and the constraints that the marital contract imposes on individual self-determination and happiness. A social commentary on industrialisation and the contamination of the home and hearth by capitalist concerns, Dombey and Son is one of Dickens's best works, and certainly retains its status as my favourite of all his novels.