BUZZon - Something to Re-read

I recently decided to reread, after fifty years, Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. It is a long novel—814 close-printed pages in my copy, the story first published as a serial, a complicated, sensational and suspenseful tale appearing in monthly parts, a bit like a certain kind of television series.

More than one of Dickens’s novels has been adapted for TV. The most gripping and enchanting, the one that catches the energy and theatricality of the young Dickens, the high spirits that made him famous, is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Nicholas Nickleby, a video record of their brilliant eight hour long stage adaptation, performed live in two long parts, with a break for dinner between.

By 1846, though his most recent novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, had shown a falling off in sales, Dickens was growing rich from Nickleby and the other early books. When the monthly parts of Dombey and Son began to appear in the fall of 1846, the first number sold something over thirty-thousand copies, and the success increased as the book went on, even though it is a darker book than the previous ones.

The publication in parts over a year and a half had some strange effects. When the Scottish critic Lord Jeffery sent a letter to express apprehension over where part of the story might be going, Dickens reassured him and explained a brand new plot idea invented in response to his letter. While the book was clearly begun with an overall plan, the narrative was also a series of monthly improvisations. In its early stages Dickens was struggling to complete the material required by the printer while at the same time writing his annual Christmas book.

Like almost all of Dickens’ books, Dombey and Son is a mixture of intense drama (sometimes melodrama) with scenes of sentiment (sometimes sentimentality) and with comedy, both kindly and satirical. The story reflects the odd byways of the city of London. Ships come and go in the docks. City housing is torn down to make way for the new railways. An old woman who calls herself Good Mrs Brown steals young Florence Dombey’s expensive clothes to sell them, and leaves the girl in rags.

Dickens’ grotesques, good and bad, always display a startling a range of verbal inventiveness, some with the magical energy of folk tale or nursery rhyme, but apart from Captain Cuttle, those in Dombey and Son are not among his best creations.

At the core of the book is Mr Dombey, rich, powerful, respectable and respected. Obsessed with his own power and position, he ignores and mistreats his daughter, pays little attention to his first wife and expects to enslave the second. Dombey’s business manager, James Carker, says of him that he is “the slave of his own greatness…yoked to his own triumphal car like a beast of burden.” His only feeling is for his son, who will be part of Dombey and Son, will justify its name, but the weird, gentle boy, a curiously wise, observant creature, is weak and unhealthy, and he dies in childhood.

The complex triangular relationship of the proud Dombey, his loving and long-suffering daughter, Florence, and the darkly proud lost soul who becomes his second wife, becomes the core of the plot. Edith Dombey, the second wife, has unwisely chosen the bleak prostitution of a mercenary marriage, although she is too intelligent and perceptive not to understand exactly what she has done and to suffer for it as her affection for her step-daughter becomes a weapon against her. Eventually she runs off, assisted by the villainous Carker.

Escape, abandonment, death: the dramatic scenes have a chilling concentration. Though showing off the usual Dickensian omnium gatherum of narrative fireworks and finally ending with forgiveness and consolation, Dombey and Son, I thought as I once more turned the pages, also achieves some of the inwardness and intensity, of a certain kind of tragedy.

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by David Helwig