A Glorious Read: Dickens’s “Dombey and Son”

I went to London (primarily) to visit the Charles Dickens Museum.  I came home (primarily) to reread Dickens.  Last month I enjoyed  Great Expectations,  but I have been spellbound by the great Dombey and Son (all 878 pages). 

Many years ago, a friend and I read Dickens and agreed that Dombey and Son was “not bad.”  I loved it and I suspect he did, too, but we tried to be nonchalant:  we never knew when someone would take us down for liking the wrong book.  (This was graduate school.)

My favorite Dickens is Bleak House, with its perfect structure and rich language,  but Dombey and Son is perfect in a different way. The plot may ramble, but the prose is exuberant and vibrant, and every character, even the mere caricatures, are colorful.   I find even the most outrageous comic scenes believable.

One of my favorite characters  is Mr. Toots, a foolish young man who writes letters to himself from famous people and keeps saying to Florence Dombey, his crush, “it’s of no consequence.” I am also enthralled by Mrs. Skewton, the lively, flirtatious elderly woman who dresses in the latest fashion–much too young for her–and becomes Mr. Dombey’s second mother-in-law.

H. W. Garrod, who wrote the entertaining introduction to the Oxford Illustrated edition, is not enthusiastic about Dombey and Son.  He finds several characters unbelieveable, and asserts that the book  goes downhill after the death of little Paul.  He writes, “Of the death of little Paul, Anna Marsh-Caldwell (but who now remembers her novels?) said, without much exaggeration, that it threw a whole nation into mourning.”   But then, according to Garrod,  Dickens’s  interest in new characters and subplots takea him away from the original plan of the book.

Oh, well, plans?  It’s Dickens.    

I should say a little about the Dombeys.   Mr. Dombey, proprietor of Dombey and Son, is so  ecstatic to have a son and heir that he does not care about his wife’s death in childbirth.  He ignores his daughter Florence, no use to him because she is a girl; she brings up Paul, with the help of Susan Nipper, her sharp-tongued nurse.  And then they are sent to Brighton to live in Mrs. Pipchin’s strange, surreal, bleak boarding house for children, recommended by Miss Tox,  a friend of Mr. Dombey’s sister.  The sickly Paul dies after being sent, at age 6,  to the school next-door, which force-feeds the classics.  (Mr. Toots, who is grown-up, is apparently doing post-graduate work there.)

And then there’s the language.  Dickens is a master of rhetoric, and an incipient modernist, or post-modernist. Like Lucy Ellman, whose novel Ducks, Newburyport was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, he makes good use of anaphora, the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive clauses or phrases.  Ellman keeps repeating “the fact that,” and Dickens manages to do three pages of the repetition of “of.”

It was a vision of long roads, that stretched away to an horizon, always receding and never gained; of ill-paved towns, up hill and down, where faces came to dark doors and ill-glazed windows, and where rows of mudbespattered cows and oxen were tied up for sale in the long narrow streets, butting and lowing, and receiving blows on their blunt heads from bludgeons that might have beaten them in; of bridges, crosses, churches, postyards, new horses being put in against their wills, and the horses of the last stage reeking, panting, and laying their drooping heads together dolefully at stable doors; of little cemeteries with black crosses settled sideways in the graves, and withered wreaths upon them dropping away; again of long, long roads, dragging themselves out, uphill and down, to the treacherous horizon.

Pretty good, huh?

Dombey and Son is a glorious read!