The story features many Dickensian themes, such as arranged marriages, child cruelty, betrayal, deceit, and relations between people from different British social classes.

The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business.

Dombey already has a six-year-old daughter, Florence, but, bitter at her not having been the desired boy, he neglects her; following her mother's death, her main source of love is her young attendant, Susan Nipper.

Solomon Gills departs London in search of his nephew, leaving his great friend Captain Edward Cuttle in charge of The Wooden Midshipman.

Mr Dombey, on the lookout for a new wife since his son's death, considers Edith a suitable match owing to her accomplishments and family connections.

Her love for Florence initially prevents her from leaving but finally she conspires with Mr Carker to ruin Dombey's public image by running away together to France.

After being transported as a convict, for criminal activities in which Mr Carker had involved her, she returns to England, reunites with her mother, and determines to seek her revenge.

Mrs Brown arranges for Dombey to overhear her conversation with Rob the Grinder – whom Mr Carker has employed as a spy – about the whereabouts of the pair who have absconded.

As he relates to his friends, he received news whilst in Barbados that a homeward-bound China trader had picked up Walter and so had returned to England immediately.

Dombey accompanies his daughter to her and Walter's house, where he slowly starts to decline, cared for by Florence and also Susan Nipper, now Mrs Toots.

"[1]: 801 The final chapter (LXII) sees Dombey now a white-haired old man "whose face bears heavy marks of care and suffering; but they are traces of a storm that has passed on for ever, and left a clear evening in its track".

[1]: 803  Sol Gills and Ned Cuttle are now partners at The Midshipman, a source of great pride to the latter, and Mr and Mrs Toots announce the birth of their third daughter.

Other themes to be detected within this work include child cruelty (particularly in Dombey's treatment of Florence), familial relationships, and as ever in Dickens, betrayal and deceit and the consequences thereof.

Gissing makes a number of points about certain key inadequacies in the novel, not the least that Dickens's central character is largely unsympathetic and an unsuitable vehicle and also that after the death of the young Paul Dombey the reader is somewhat estranged from the rest of what is to follow.

Dickens started with a clear conception of his central character and of the course of the story in so far as it depended upon that personage; he planned the action, the play of motive, with unusual definiteness, and adhered very closely in the working to this well-laid scheme".

However, he goes on to write that "Dombey and Son is a novel which in its beginning promises more than its progress fulfils" and gives the following reasons why: Impossible to avoid the reflection that the death of Dombey's son and heir marks the end of a complete story, that we feel a gap between Chapter XVI and what comes after (the author speaks of feeling it himself, of his striving to "transfer the interest to Florence") and that the narrative of the later part is ill-constructed, often wearisome, sometimes incredible.

He is wholly incapable of devising a plausible intrigue, and shocks the reader with monstrous improbabilities such as all that portion of the denouement in which old Mrs Brown and her daughter are concerned.

He believes that Dombey's power to disturb comes from his belief that human relationships can be controlled by money, giving the following examples to support this viewpoint: He tries to prevent Mrs Richards from developing an attachment to Paul by emphasising the wages he pays her.

Smith notes there are strong similarities between him and the likes of Jaggers in Great Expectations and, even more so, the evil barrister, Mr Tulkinghorn, in Bleak House:From Fagin (Oliver Twist) onwards, the terrifying figure exerting power over others by an infallible knowledge of their secrets becomes one of the author's trademarks ... James Carker's gentlemanly businesslike respectability marks him out as the ancestor of Tulkinghorn in Bleak House and even of Jaggers in Great Expectations.

The fifty-fifth chapter, where he is forced to flee his outraged employer, magnificently continues the theme of the guilt-hunted man from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist and Jonas's restless sense of pursuit in Martin Chuzzlewit.

[5] Gissing looks at some of the minor characters in the novel and is particularly struck by that of Edward (Ned) Cuttle.Captain Cuttle has a larger humanity than his roaring friend [Captain Bunsby], he is the creation of humour.

That the Captain suffered dire things at the hands of Mrs MacStinger is as credible as it is amusing, but he stood in no danger of Bunsby's fate; at times he can play his part in a situation purely farcical, but the man himself moves on a higher level.

He is one of the most familiar to us among Dickens's characters, an instance of the novelist's supreme power, which (I like to repeat) proves itself in the bodying forth of a human personality henceforth accepted by the world.

His sentences have become proverbs; the mention of his name brings before the mind's eye an image of flesh and blood – rude, tending to the grotesque, but altogether lovable.

He observes that the author was in constant communication with Forster, as to the feeling of his readers about some proposed incident or episode; not that he feared, in any ignoble sense, to offend his public, but because his view of art involved compliance with ideals of ordinary simple folk.

An instinctive sympathy with the moral (and therefore the artistic) prejudices of the everyday man guided Dickens throughout his career, teaching him when, and how far, he might strike at things he thought evil, yet never defeat his prime purpose of sending forth fiction acceptable to the multitude.

He observes that this is based in part on Dickens's "recognition that solemn themes require humour and verbal vigour to accompany and complement them" and goes on to conclude: Grim psychological realism, social commentary, comic absurdity and symbolic transcendence are here brought together more than in any previous novel with the possible exception of Oliver Twist.