Readers of Dickens commonly note significant differences of design, structure and social vision when comparing his earlier and later novels. An increasing complexity is evident in the works produced during his middle years, and Dombey and Son is often discussed as the novel which most clearly exhibits this transition in Dickens's artistic practice. Its position as the harbinger of the later novels is largely determined by the function of the railways as an ambiguous symbol of bourgeois industrial progress in the book: a symbolic function that looks forward to the role played by more complex unifying images, such as the Court of Chancery or the Circumlocution Office, in the later novels. What generates the complexity and darker social vision of the later fiction is Dickens's attempt to offer a symbolically coherent account of a divided society whose problems are now shown to be systemic. It is hardly surprising, then, to find that the later novels, from Bleak House onwards, offer more complex renditions of the politics of the family.

However, it is nevertheless true that Dickens's interest in the family is pervasive in all his writing. The prevalence of fractured families, and the relegation of idealised ‘happy families’ to the margins of the narrative, are features evident in the early, as in the later, novels. Some of the more complex ideological functions performed by the figure of the family in the later works are shown in the early fiction too.