Tag Archives: Dombey and Son

A Father’s Cruelty: Dickens’s “Dombey and Son”

“My dear Paul! He’s quite a Dombey!”

I love Dickens’s seventh novel, Dombey and Son, an inter-class portrait of characters connected, however distantly, to Mr. Dombey, the rich, glacially-cold owner of Dombey and Son.

Dickens’ wit and satire radiate from the axis of Mr. Dombey’s draconian manners. Dombey is one of Dickens’s most misogynist characters, who ignores all but a privileged few, his chilliness offset by the lively affections of the lower-classes, among them the sharp-witted maid Susan Nipper, who speaks angrily on behalf of Dombey’s daughter, and Captain Cuttle, a retired sea captain who takes over his friend Sol Gill’s nautical shop without understanding the merchandise.

Dickens not only explores class differences and alliances but highlights Dombey’s contempt for women. Dombey may ignore the lower orders, but he regards women as his slaves.

The women most affected by his attitudes and actions are the first Mrs. Dombey, their daughter Florence, and the second Mrs. Dombey. Yet let us not forget Miss Tox, an impoverished gentlewoman who has a crush on Mr. Dombey and fantasizes about marrying him.

We are introduced briefly to the first Mrs. Dombey on her deathbed. As she lies there dying after giving birth, Mr. Dombey exults in his newborn son.

“The house will once again, Mrs. Dombey,” he said, “be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son: Dom-bey and Son!”

Dombey’s six-year-old daughter, Florence, runs to the bed where her mother is dying and “standing on tiptoe, the better to hide her face in her embrace, had clung about her with a desperate affection very much at variance with her years.”

This scene barely affects Dombey. In fact, he considers it “ill-advised and feverish.” Dickens writes,

But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more.

The upper-class women in Dombey and Son are submissive and maternal. Florence longs for her father’s love, but he ignores her. She continues blindly to love him. Florence is like a mother to her sickly brother Paul. When he is sent at far too young an age to Mr. Blimber’s classics “hothouse” school, she prepares the next week’s Latin ahead so she can teach Paul on the weekends. Many of Paul’s fellow students go slowly crazy because their heads are stuffed – or not! – with declensions, conjugations, and Cicero at too young an age.

An aside: The Dombeys’ Latin lessons must have influenced George Eliot in writing the scene in The Mill on the Floss (1860), in which Maggie Tulliver visits her brother Tom at school and is fascinated by his Latin book. Tom, who struggles to learn Latin or any other subject, is a Victorian sexist who tells her that women cannot learn Latin.

Few writers describe a father’s hatred of his daughter as well as Dickens does. After Paul’s death, Mr. Dombey loathes Florence, the unwanted surviving child. Fortunately, Mr. Dombey’s second wife, Edith, loves Florence and is a second mother to her. But Edith, too, has a complicated relationship with Dombey. She married him for money, at the insistence of her mother. Elegant and beautiful, outwardly the perfect Victorian woman, Edith despises Dombey. She refuses to dress and act like a mannequin. I cannot help but think of Lady Dedlock in Bleak House. In a way, both of them are caricatures, but we especially empathize with rebellious Edith.

The first Mrs. Dombey, Florence, and Edith form a triangle of wronged women. Mrs. Dombey, dead in childbirth; Florence, daughter of a cruel father and surrogate mother of a brother who dies; and Edith, a feminist rebel. Mr. Dombey crushes the first two, though Edith survives and Florence is revived.

Edith pays the greatest price for survival.

One is happy in knowing that George Eliot would have written those scenes differently.

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

An illustration in “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.

Mr. Toots (right) confides in Captain Cuttle.

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!

Are You Pretentious? Cicero’s Book Signing & Other Encounters

“Cicero Denouncing Catiline,” The Comic History of Rome.

Have you ever met one of your favorite writers? Was he/she glazed after lecturing to 100 people and giving autographs to the whole audience? Did he/she get your name wrong? You will hilariously show everyone the signed title page, “Best wishes to Carrie (from illegible).” (Your name is Mary, or perhaps Kelly.)

That writer may not have been at the peak of his/her charm at the event. And the less you expect, the better. Some writers are amiable and make an effort (you have bought their book, after all), others are too busy craning their neck at the editor in the back of the room.

One guesses that Cicero was too busy networking to chat with fans. This, however, would not have bothered Dickens’s Mrs. Blimber, an eccentric character in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. She would make the best of any encounter—because she says she wishes she could have met Cicero.

Mrs. Blimber has not read Cicero, but she is married to one of Dickens’s most rigid classical headmaster/teachers, Doctor Blimber.

Mrs. Blimber…was not learned herself, but she pretended to be, and that did quite as well. She said at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. It was the steady joy of her life to see the Doctor’s young gentlemen go out walking, in the largest possible shirt-collars, and the stiffest possilbe cravats. It was so classical, she said.

She is eloquent about the classics after Mr. Dombey enrolls his six-year-old son Paul at the school. She gushes that she envies Paul.

“Like a bee, Sir,” said Mrs. Blimber, with uplifted eyes, “about to plunge into a garden of the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for the first time. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Cicero. What a world of honey have we here.”

Back to writers: have you met a favorite writer? Was it inspiring, or a let-down?

Tell all, please! I used to go to a lot of readings. Nowadays I stay home and read the book.

NOTE: I may or may not have a signed copy of Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. First I asked his brother, who looked just like him. Then Ken Kesey himself (I think) doodled a flower on the title page. I treasure this book. Signed or not, it’s a good story.