DOMBEY AND SON

CONTENTS

A Dickens Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Text

DOMBEY AND SON

Appendix 1: Preface to the Cheap Edition (1858)

Appendix 2: The Illustrations to Dombey and Son

Notes

A DICKENS CHRONOLOGY

Stephen Wall, 1995

INTRODUCTION

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes some details of the plot explicit.)

Despite its being set firmly in the new railway age, and despite its commercial sounding title, Dombey and Son is less a critique of the social and economic condition of the 1840s than an exploration of emotional deprivation and emotional fulfilment. It was Dickens’s most domestic novel to date and, with its successor David Copperfield, perhaps his most intimate. Its full title, the one originally set forth on the covers of each of the nineteen monthly parts in which the novel was serialized between October 1846 and April 1848, has to be read ambiguously, even ironically. Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation might indeed suggest an account of commercial transactions with a well-established London trading business at the height of Britain’s dominance of international capitalist enterprise. As the first chapters of the novel develop, however, readers become aware that they have learnt very little about what exactly the esteemed firm of Dombey and Son actually does trade in. We are told on the first page that it deals in hides rather than hearts, and it is clear that the decision to send Walter Gay out to a junior post in Barbados in Chapter 13 means that the firm also has financial interests in the West Indies (though whether or not the firm was once involved in the despised slave trade we never know). But these minimal scraps of information are all that Dickens is prepared to vouchsafe. What his title more fully and properly implies is that the ‘dealings’ the novel describes are with a dysfunctional family, a family rendered dysfunctional by its head (the ‘Head of the Home-Department’ as he is referred to in the wry title of Chapter 3). The patriarchal Paul Dombey runs his family as he runs his business: calculatingly, callously, coldly and commercially. There is no room for dealing in hearts, for hearts have no market value for him. The first Mrs Dombey, who dies at the end of the opening chapter from the effects of bearing a male heir to continue the firm, has ‘entered on that social contract of matrimony’, and therefore must, by her husband’s own definition, have been happy because her position meant that she could not help being other than happy. Mr Dombey defines his private relationships exclusively according to what he regards as the pressing demands of his public self and of his worldly success as a businessman. These contorted values are, moreover, available wholesale and retail within the family and for exportation to those beyond it. As the novel shows, Mr Dombey’s stultifying private moral code reaches out to damage the lives both of his immediate family (Florence and the two Mrs Dombeys) and many of those who come into enforced contact with it (Robin Toodle – ‘Rob the Grinder’, Walter Gay and John Carker – ‘Carker the Junior’).

In planning his story Dickens recognized that the relationship between Mr Dombey and his daughter, Florence, was to be what he phrased (using a culinary metaphor) ‘the stock of the soup’, a stock to which ‘all kinds of things’ could be added. As he told his friend and future biographer John Forster in July 1846 Dombey and Son was to prove ‘a Daughter after all’. This vital phrase was to form the climax of Chapter 16, the chapter with which the emotionally charged fifth monthly part ended, when Miss Tox articulates not only her grief at the death of Little Paul but also her sense that the death of the cherished heir now signals a need for essential readjustments. From this point on Dickens may have had to restir and add new ingredients to the ‘soup’ of his story by introducing prominent new characters (most notably Edith Granger and her mother Mrs Skewton), but he was also able to redeploy his essential ‘stock’. As he told Forster, he was determined to change Mr Dombey’s ‘feeling of indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred’ while also altering ‘her feeling towards him for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be loved by him’.¹ In Dombey’s mercantile terms, Florence had always seemed ‘merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more’. When his son dies she seems to be less of an encumbrance and more of an intruder into his memories and into what passes for his hopes and affections. On one level she can simply be ignored (in Chapter 18 he has to be reminded by the stonemason who is carving his son’s memorial that Little Paul was not his ‘beloved and only child’). On other, deeper emotional levels Florence is someone who once took precedence over him in his son’s affections. He can forgive neither that precedence nor her survival. His unhappy remarriage only serves to separate father and daughter still further and by Chapter 43 the now adolescent Florence’s complexly emotional mixture of apprehension, longing, emptiness and love are made explicit:

It had been hard – how hard may none but Florence ever know! – to have the natural affection of a true and earnest nature turned to agony; and slight, or stern repulse, substituted for the tenderest protection and the dearest care. It had been hard to feel in her deep heart what she had felt, and never know the happiness of one touch of response. But it was much more hard to be compelled to doubt either her father or Edith… and to think of her love for each of them, by turns, with fear, distrust, and wonder.

Florence has the ability to inspire both affection and protectiveness (as her relationships with Little Paul, Susan Nipper, Polly Toodle, Captain Cuttle, Walter Gay, Mr Toots and even the dog Diogenes serve to prove), but for most of the novel she seems to be incapable of arousing either response in her father, the one for whose attention she most yearns. The title of Chapter 6 refers to Little Paul’s ‘Second Deprivation’ once Polly, the wet-nurse employed following the death of his mother, is removed from the Dombey household, but readers should be equally alert to the larger, deeper and more distressing and systematic deprivation that Florence has to endure. She is not starved of affection, but she is denied it where she most craves it. In Chapter 18 she observes how the daughter in a neighbouring motherless family reacts. Here a widowed father needs his daughter and, moreover, both manage to show the happy nature of their bonding:

… the elder child was always dressed and waiting for him at the drawing-room window, or in the balcony; and when he appeared, her expectant face lighted up with joy… The elder child would come down to the hall, and put her hand in his, and lead him up the stairs; and Florence would see her afterwards sitting by his side, or on his knee, or hanging coaxingly about his neck and talking to him: and though they were always gay together, he would often watch her face as if he thought her like her mother that was dead.

Florence instinctively knows what love is like (and she has clearly known love through her relationship with her own dead mother), but reiterated examples show her what a father’s love might be like. In Chapter 24, when she is staying with Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles at Fulham, she has the further occasion of observing the affection of another widower and his daughter, this time an occasional labourer called John. Florence’s conversation with John might have come directly from an eighteenth-century novel of the sentimental school and in particular from Dickens’s own beloved Goldsmith. Florence, like Goldsmith’s Dr Primrose (from The Vicar of Wakefield) or Mackenzie’s ‘Man of Feeling’ (from the novel of that name) can be schooled in emotion by unfortunates:

‘Are there only two of you, then?’ inquired Florence.

‘Only us two,’ said the man. ‘Her mother has been dead these ten year. Martha!’ (he lifted up his head again, and whistled to her) ‘Won’t you say a word to the pretty young lady?’

The girl made an impatient gesture with her cowering shoulders, and turned her head another way. Ugly, mis-shapen, peevish, ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty – but beloved! Oh, yes! Florence had seen her father’s look towards her, and knew whose look it had no likeness to.

Following this encounter Florence even contemplates the possibility of falling seriously ill and dying, as her brother had done, and thus winning the kind of affection that Paul seemed to have inspired. But in her heart of hearts she knows the fatuousness of such morbid thoughts. Love, she realizes, is a living and revitalizing force, one that masters rather than succumbs to death. As the long-suffering John tells her, he is prepared to endure his daughter’s whims because ‘the day’ll come, and has been coming a long while… when to get half as much from that unfort’nate child of mine – to get the trembling of a finger, or the waving of a hair – would be to raise the dead’.

Florence’s acute feeling of deprivation must to some degree echo Dickens’s own feeling of being a neglected and unloved child, the ‘secret agony’ of his soul which he was to explore in the fragment of autobiography that he wrote in the closing months of 1848, after he had completed Dombey and which was later to be incorporated into Chapter 11 of David Copperfield.² He had dealt with neglected and lonely children before – Oliver Twist, Smike and Little Nell – but never with quite the charged intensity and extended detail that we meet with in Dombey and Son. Yet Florence is more than simply a trans-sexed and up-marketed development out of Dickens’s own melancholy recollections of the blacking-factory and the Marshalsea Prison. She owes something to other elements in his private life, and notably to the examples of his sister-inlaw, Mary Hogarth, and to his sister Fanny Dickens. Mary, who had died in Dickens’s arms at the age of seventeen in May 1837, almost certainly moulded the line of submissive, loving, young heroines, caught in an eternally beautiful, biddable and expressive youth who figure in his early novels. Their bloodlessness, some might even say sexlessness, may also reflect the nature of Dickens’s relationship with his sister Fanny, two years his senior and his main confidante during the most miserable period of his childhood. Dickens seems to have looked to Fanny for comfort and emotional sustenance much as Little Paul looks to Florence. We know from certain of his letters, that Dickens modelled the ogreish Mrs Pipchin on the Camden Town lodging-house keeper of his boyhood, Mrs Roylance.³ It might therefore be inferred that Paul’s sense of weekend release from the ogress’s ‘Castle’ also owes much to Dickens’s excursive escapes from Mrs Roylance’s when he and Fanny jointly visited their parents during the period of their father’s imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea Prison. As has long been recognized, Fanny’s invalid son, Henry Burnett, may also have contributed to Dickens’s portrait of the dying Little Paul, but it was the pious, longsuffering mother and sister who seems most to have fed Dickens’s imaginative portrait of Florence.

Florence offers Little Paul the companionship, emotional security and affection that he is denied in the otherwise cold and impersonal Dombey household and in its oppressive alternative, Mrs Pipchin’s dank Brighton house with its predatory succulents and cacti. Florence, perhaps more than the transitory presence of his wet-nurse, Polly Toodle, gives him the sense of loved selfhood, tenderness and belonging that we traditionally associate with motherhood. In this she contrasts markedly with the two prominent and witch-like mothers who so neatly balance one another in Dickens’s fictional scheme: Mrs Skewton and ‘Good Mrs Brown’. ‘Good Mrs Brown’ first manifests herself as Florence’s tormentor, first waylaying then temporarily kidnapping the fussily dressed middle-class child in order to steal her clothes. She is thus, unintentionally, the initiator of Florence’s first brief period of independence and enforced self-sufficiency. But it is as the mother of the illegitimate Alice that Mrs Brown has acted most damagingly and selfishly. When Alice returns to her mother’s hovel after her years of penal servitude in Australia she is not unnaturally vexed by what passes for maternal affection and maternal complacency:

‘Listen, mother, to a word or two. If we understand each other now, we shall not fall out any more, perhaps. I went away a girl, and have come back a woman. I went away undutiful enough, and have come back no better, you may swear. But have you been very dutiful to me?’

‘I!’ cried the old woman. ‘To my own gal! A mother dutiful to her own child!’

‘It sounds unnatural, don’t it?’ returned the daughter, looking coldly on her with her stern, regardless, hardy beautiful face; ‘but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then – to pass away the time – whether no one ever owed any duty to me… There was a child called Alice Marwood… born among poverty and neglect, and nursed in it. Nobody taught her, nobody stepped forward to help her, nobody cared for her.’

‘Nobody!’ echoed the mother, pointing to herself, and striking her breast.

‘The only care she knew,’ returned the daughter, ‘was to be beaten, and stinted, and abused sometimes; and she might have done better without that. She lived in homes like this, and in the streets, with a crowd of little wretches like herself; and yet she brought good looks out of this childhood. So much the worse for her. She had better have been hunted and worried to death for ugliness.’ (Chapter 34)

Alice has been ‘taught too late, and taught all wrong’. Some of Dickens’s readers may assume that Alice’s complaint is directed against poverty in general and against the exploitation, sexual and otherwise, of the poor by the rich. But the fact that she is blaming her mother for her lack in care, education and moral example is emphasized when we realize how much her case parallels that of Edith Granger, the daughter of a privileged family but of an equally unscrupulous and exploitative mother. In Chapter 40 both mothers and both daughters confront each other on the exposed Downs above Brighton. Not only do the two daughters bear a close physical resemblance, but the two crone-like mothers echo one another’s hypocrisy and lack of self-perception. What at first seems to be a direct and melodramatic confrontation of rich and poor, of pedlars and givers of token charity, turns into a very much more charged moment of recognition:

‘What is it that you have to sell?’ said Edith.

‘Only this,’ returned the woman, holding out her wares, without looking at them. ‘I sold myself long ago.’

‘My Lady, don’t believe her,’ croaked the old woman to Mrs Skewton; ‘don’t believe what she says. She loves to talk like that. She’s my handsome and undutiful daughter. She gives me nothing but reproaches, my Lady, for all I have done for her. Look at her now, my Lady, how she turns upon her poor old mother with her looks.’

As Mrs Skewton departs, she not only fails to remember vital words (‘You’re all affection and et cetera, an’t you?’), she berates the ‘undutiful’ Alice as she might her own daughter (‘I hope… that you’ll show more gratitude, and natural what’s its name, and all the rest of it… for there never was a better mother than the good old creature’s been to you’). One wonders how she knows. But then her hiatuses are more than simply lapses or what might pass as ‘Freudian’ slips; they are indications of a deeper, and eminently flattering, self-deception.

Mrs Skewton is one of Dickens’s most impressively loathsome grotesques. She not only lives a lie, she acts it out in her dress, her mannerisms, her cultural affectations and in her consistent failure to recognize any truth but that of her intense selfishness. Even her surname, with its overtones of the word ‘skeleton’, hints at her stale deathliness. Edith, inevitably more articulate than Alice, explodes in rage at her mother’s complacency about their relationship. She was, she insists, deprived of a childhood:

‘A child!’ said Edith, looking at her, ‘when was I a child! What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman – artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men – before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride to-night.’

And as she spoke, she struck her hand upon her beautiful bosom, as though she would have beaten down herself.

‘Look at me,’ she said, ‘who have never known what it is to have an honest heart, and love. Look at me, taught to scheme and plot when children play; and married in my youth – an old age of design – to one for whom I had no feeling but indifference… There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years…’ (Chapter 27)

Again we might be tempted to take this as a straight forward diatribe against the Victorian marriage market, a market in which society women were obliged to ‘perform’ in order to attract the right suitors and to win the richest husbands (Thackeray pointedly describes the male and female calculations of this market in The Newcomes). What Edith is really saying, however, is that her mother, rather than society at large, has exploited her. By depriving her of her childhood, her mother has not simply rendered her an object that has to be bought, but also made her into the kind of lie that she herself is. On the night before her second marriage, her second financially secure contract, she again confronts the calculating Mrs Skewton, this time with her own ‘motherhood’ and Florence’s marital destiny haunting her. Her mother provokes her vigorous riposte by insisting that Edith can have no domestic peace until her step-daughter ‘is married, and away’. Again the matter seems initially to hover around the ideas of ingratitude and of what is ‘natural’ in relationships:

‘And am I to be told to-night, after all my pains and labour, and when you are going, through me, to be rendered independent,’ her mother almost shrieked in her passion, while her palsied head shook like a leaf, ‘that there is corruption and contagion in me, and that I am not fit company for a girl! What are you, pray? What are you?’

‘I have put the question to myself,’ said Edith, ashy pale, and pointing to the window, ‘more than once when I have been sitting there, and something in the faded likeness of my sex has wandered past outside; and God knows I have met with my reply. Oh mother, mother, if you had but left me to my natural heart when I too was a girl – a younger girl than Florence – how different I might have been!’ (Chapter 30)

The word ‘natural’ is, as we shall see, one that is echoed throughout the novel. Here, Dickens implies through Edith, a heart has been stifled and a woman deprived of her proper affections and inclinations. Above all, she has been deprived of her freedom. It is in the linkage between what is ‘free’ and what is ‘natural’ that Dickens is to bed the grand social message of his novel. This linkage is also to relate the private fictional worlds of Dombey and Son out to a larger, moral universe, dysfunctional families to a larger, malfunctioning society.

At the moral and narrative core of Dombey and Son is the unbendingly difficult figure who must be seen as its hero. Mr Dombey is scarcely heroic in the conventional sense of the term, but then the predominantly domestic novel was assumed by nineteenth-century critics to have dispensed with the old ‘heroic’ or ‘chivalric’ idea of the hero. Ironically, what renders Mr Dombey even less conventionally ‘heroic’, at least in terms of the nineteenth-century novel’s understanding of heroism, is his essential lack of domesticity. He both defines himself, and is in turn defined by, the business codes with which he runs the firm of Dombey and Son. In the novel’s second chapter Dickens contrasts his stiff and officious manner with that of the ‘shuffling, shaggy’ Mr Toodle and describes him as ‘one of those close-shaved close-cut monied gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank notes, and who seem to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action of golden shower-baths’. Dombey is not a self-made man, but he is a self-fashioned one, fashioned, that is, in accordance with a now defunct nineteenth-century business ethic, an ethic which latter-day readers may find hard to understand. Although he is no gentleman in the strict Victorian understanding of that term (he is in ‘trade’), his money and his style allow him to pass for one and his marriages connect him upwards to the minor gentry. His aspirations for his son are exclusively commercial in that he intends that his son should follow him into the firm, rising from Son to Dombey ‘as his father had before him’. He rarely seeks to express opinions, but those that he does manage to articulate reveal him to be deeply conservative. He believes, as he famously tells his son in Chapter 8, that money can do anything and he informs Polly Toodle in Chapter 5 that education is necessary in order that ‘the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position, and to conduct themselves properly’. When it comes to his relationships with his wives, he seeks submission rather than equality, respect rather than love, meekness rather than passion.

Yet Dombey is no mere monument to the vaunted power of capital. Dickens consistently presents him as essentially a vulnerable man, one who attempts to hide and repress his vulnerability because he finds such weakness both unbecoming and unprofitable. Dickens identifies this trait as pride rather than as a lack of emotion. It is evident in the frustrated tears that he privately sheds in Chapter 2, tears shed because he feels himself humiliated by the need to employ a wet-nurse for his son and because that humbling must perforce be shared by his infant son (‘he wiped blinding tears from his eyes… and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, “Poor little fellow!”’). Nevertheless, Mr Dombey’s careful reserve and apparent self-containment damage all of his personal relationships, even with those who might be regarded as his social equals. When, for instance, his brother-in-law attempts to shake his hand in Chapter 5, Mr Chick feels as if the action might electrify him, while Dombey himself takes the proffered hand ‘as if it were a fish, or seaweed, or some such clammy substance, and immediately returned it to him with exalted politeness’. The longed-for son is duly and validly loved, but that love is conditioned by the unexpressed demands of something beyond pure selfishness or pure possessiveness, by something akin, that is, to commercial and professional aspiration:

Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections. Mr Dombey’s young child was, from the beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced… to a very low foundation. But he loved his son with all the love he had. If there were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if its very hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the image of that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a boy, but as a grown man – the ‘Son’ of the Firm. (Chapter 8)

This desire that his son should jump childhood into adulthood is, of course, to be morally fateful to Mr Dombey. When it becomes obvious that his son is dying at the end of Chapter 14, he again cries, but once more the action is a private expression of frustration coupled with a real enough, but confused, emotion, one that must be kept even from the object of that emotion. (‘“I’m very glad he didn’t cry,” said little Paul. “I thought he did. Don’t tell them that I asked.”’) What succeeds Paul’s death is a period of acute loneliness. Dombey has been defeated by a force that neither he nor his wealth can master, yet his pride, his reserve and his obedience to the demands of ‘the Firm’ seem to forbid his admission of defeat. It is as if he cannot admit to the fact that the commercial principle by which he lives cannot buy him what he most needs, just as it could not avert what he had most dreaded. Because he cannot understand the nature of this defeat, he translates his frustration into jealousy, seeing Florence as ‘the successful rival of his son, in health and life’ and as his own rival ‘in that son’s affections’. But Dickens does not see this jealousy as offering him a fulfilling or lasting raison d’être. Indeed in Chapter 35, when Florence suddenly strikes him as ‘almost changed in to a woman without his knowledge’, there is a moment when he is on the verge of relenting:

as he looked, he softened to her, more and more. As he looked, she became blended with the child he had loved, and he could hardly separate the two. As he looked, he saw her for an instant by a clearer and a brighter light, not bending over that child’s pillow as his rival – monstrous thought – but as the spirit of his home, and in the action tending himself no less, as he sat once more with his bowed-down head upon his hand at the foot of the little bed. He felt inclined to speak to her, and call her to him. The words ‘Florence, come here!’ were rising to his lips – but slowly and with difficulty, they were so very strange – when they were checked and stifled by a footstep on the stair.

The unexpected appearance of Edith now offers him the excuse for denying himself this moment of surrender to Florence. Her overt show of affection for her step-daughter seems to him to intrude into his possessiveness, a new pang of jealousy strikes him and the moment passes. Perversely, wife and daughter seem now to conspire against his carefully constructed shell of selfhood and he feels obliged to ponder this fresh challenge in bitter and silent isolation:

He sat in his shadowy corner so long, that the church clocks struck the hour three times before he moved that night. All that while his face was still intent upon the spot where Florence had been seated. The room grew darker, as the candles waned and went out; but a darkness gathered on his face, exceeding any that the night could cast, and rested there.

Dombey is trapped, not by an idée fixe, but by an intense self-consciousness, by something Dickens describes in Chapter 40 as ‘the imperious asperity of his temper… that cold hard armour of pride in which he lived encased’, and which he refuses to relax.

The widowed, unresponsive Mr Dombey finds his second marriage deeply troubling to his ‘imperious asperity’ of temper. He is far from being the easiest or most pliant of husbands, of course, but the inability to compromise which he shares with Edith makes for a disaster which is as much emotional as it is social. He demands duty from his wife, by which he means the kind of submission to which he is accustomed in his business life, only to discover that Edith responds with cold defiance. His only recourse, as it had been with the young Florence, is to begin to hate her. Dickens describes this stage in his emotional life with a pointed care, employing one of the marine metaphors with which the novel abounds:

It may have been that in all this there were mutterings of an awakened feeling in his breast, however selfishly aroused by his position of disadvantage, in comparison with what she might have made his life. But he silenced the distant thunder with the rolling of his sea of pride. He would hear nothing but his pride. And in his pride, a heap of inconsistency, and misery, and self-inflicted torment, he hated her. (Chapter 40)

In his reserved and utterly private way Dombey is somehow articulating this ‘heap of inconsistency’, but he is in no sense resolving it. When one kind of resolution comes in Chapter 47 it is not the one that any character really desires. Having confessed that ‘it is not the rule of my life to allow myself to be thwarted by anybody – anybody’, Dombey discovers the emptiness of his marital relationship with Edith, and that she is now determined to leave him. Thwarted in the extreme he blames Florence for his ills, and strikes his daughter ‘in his frenzy’. The chapter is tellingly entitled ‘The Thunderbolt’, yet the blow across Florence’s breast is more than physically bruising, it also, symbolically, strikes at her loving, giving heart.

Nevertheless, this chapter is more than simply an account of the calamitous end of family relationships. Before the thunderbolt falls and the blow is struck, Dickens uses the chapter’s opening paragraphs to explore the relationship between the domestic and the public, between the Dombeys and society at large. He begins with a moral generalization hinged on the vital words ‘Nature’, ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’:

Was Mr Dombey’s master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has never risen up upon the wings of a free mind – drooping and useless soon – to see her in her comprehensive truth!

Here is Dombey, the victim – or the prisoner – of his self-consciousness, and of a pride which restricts his ability to see beyond the single dominating idea of himself which he perceives as a defining and validating truth. What Dickens’s narrator is arguing is that Dombey is denying himself the freedom to rise above his contained selfishness. He is sinning both against Nature in that he is denying himself love, and, moreover, against a divine moral order in that he is denying the very existence and power of love. Dickens’s narrator does not leave his argument here, for he launches into a scathing criticism of the so-called ‘unnatural’ vices of society at large. It is a diatribe which both revisits the horror of Scrooge’s vision of the scrawny child figures of Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol and which also prefigures the social world of Bleak House:

Alas! are there so few things in the world about us, most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights – millions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth – at the lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops her ears, and lisps ‘I don’t believe it!’ Breathe the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life; and have every sense, conferred upon our race for its delight and happiness, offended, sickened and disgusted, and made a channel by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed, that, set in this fœtid bed, could have its natural growth, or put its little leaves forth to the sun as GOD designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness, and lament its being, so early, far away from Heaven – but think a little of its having been conceived, and born, and bred, in Hell!

This seems to have drifted a long way from Mr Dombey’s pride. Nevertheless, what Dickens’s narrator is saying is that his ‘master-vice’ does have a consequence beyond the confines of his home. Just as he thinks, broods and then acts according to his ‘unnatural’ denial of love, so society at large suffers the consequences of a more general denial of responsibility, sympathy and mutuality. Here we glimpse the consequences of the fact that the hard-headed commercial values of Dombey and Son are ‘Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation’. Mr Dombey’s consistent refusal to take on the full moral and emotional burden of his fatherhood stands parallel to a desuetude in society, a society that declines to recognize the mutual relationship of the rich and the poor. Poverty, as it is lived out in the disease-ridden London slums, is both ‘unnatural’ and a ‘natural’ breeding-ground for crime, ignorance and death. Dickens’s emphatic evocation of the names of Heaven and Hell also points his readers to the clinching issue in his argument. The failure of Dombey’s fatherhood stands in marked contrast to the Christian concept of the loving fatherhood of God, a God who unstintingly cares for each and every one of his children. Furthermore, a divine moral imperative directs those children to love one other, and not to see love as selective or selfish. Dickens’s narrator, in prophetic mode, insists that ‘a Christian people’ needs to know ‘what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes’ and he evokes a ‘good spirit who would take the house-tops off’ in order to expose the reality of this hidden but pervasive evil. Thus, provoked and enlightened, ‘Christian people’ might take social action in order to remedy that evil:

Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owning one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to make the world a better place! (Chapter 47)

The dysfunctions of the Dombey family are, therefore, magnified in a dysfunctional society. Both dysfunctions, the novel seems to insist, deny not just proper mutuality, but the very nature of intertwined human and divine love.

The opening pages of Chapter 47 introduce larger, but classically Dickensian social themes, themes which link the essentially domestic Dombey and Son to those of Dickens’s novels with a distinctive and broadly based argument about the shortcomings of society. Yet even without the intrusion of that emphatic, ‘prophetic’ voice at this point in the narrative, Dombey and Son remains a novel based optimistically around the ideas of transience and dynamic change. Old orders change; sons die and are succeeded by daughters; businesses decay and businesses are regenerated; and lives are steadily, and sometimes unexpectedly, changed for the better. Typically enough, however, Dickens’s optimism is frequently tinged with ambiguity, contradiction and even doubt. Having made a good deal of verbal play with Little Paul’s ‘old-fashionedness’, he lets the child succumb to the ‘old, old fashion – Death!’ and to ‘that older fashion yet, of Immortality!’ What he means by that ‘old-fashionedness’ has been much debated by critics, but it may well be that he simply saw Little Paul as grown up before his time and therefore somehow not like a Victorian child whose essential childishness might have been esteemed by a post-Romantic generation, a generation tutored by Rousseau and Wordsworth. What is clear, however, is that in Chapter 15 Dickens is prepared to link Paul’s dying both to the ‘natural’ flux of the tides and the ripple of the waves, and to contrast it with the ‘human’ energy released by new developments in engineering. Much as the ‘old-fashioned’ Paul is transformed by death and eternity, so Staggs’s Gardens (where Walter goes to look for Polly Toodle) has undergone a physical transformation thanks to the arrival of the railway. This metamorphosis is, moreover, dynamic and pulsating (‘To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night, throbbing currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life blood’). The account of the disappearance of Staggs’s Gardens is no mere digression, or temporary relief, from the emotional intensity of Paul’s death-bed. Throughout the novel, the railway brings new life and it disturbs and disrupts the old. It is the new fashion, which, like the ‘good spirit who would take the house-tops off’, exposes a sometimes uncomfortable truth about society. It is a truth which Mr Dombey refuses to acknowledge. While Dickens’s description of Dombey’s railway journey to Leamington in Chapter 20 is exhilarating, Mr Dombey himself experiences only the dreariest of emotions, refusing to notice the significance of the stark contrasts between rural variety and urban slum, and seeing the steam engine only as a type of ‘the indomitable monster, Death!’:

So, pursuing the one course of thought, he had the one relentless monster still before him. All things looked black, and cold, and deadly upon him, and he on them. He found a likeness to his misfortune everywhere. There was a remorseless triumph going on about him, and it galled and stung him in his pride and jealousy, whatever form it took: though most of all when it divided with him the love and memory of his lost boy.

Obsessed by death and by his own sense of defeat, Mr Dombey cannot recognize either the force or the blessings of change. He acknowledges failure and decay, while the railway seems to proclaim an alternative