Dombey and Son is one of Dickens’s most sad and psychologically profound novels. At the center of the book is Mr. Dombey, a respectable early Victorian bourgeois obsessed with profit, duty, and external morality, yet deprived of any living human feeling. His coldness destroys the lives of those close to him and his own as well; however, the story of Florence Dombey and Walter Gay leaves room for hope for a different order of life—one in which there is place not only for duty, but also for love, compassion, and human warmth.