Abstract
Generally speaking, despite the joys offered by Mrs Skewton and Captain Cuttle, Dombey & Son1 is not the novel in which to look for lavishly varied idiolects full of wide-ranging eccentricity and humour. In his desire to achieve a well-formed integrated structure, Dickens had perforce to put the reins on the spontaneity of his easy-going, natural joviality and comic fluency. This in turn gave him less scope for exercising, in his highly stylised fiction, his unique talents as a theatrical storyteller. Moreover, in spite of Dickens’ determined efforts to balance the novel’s structure, it somehow managed to get out of control after the death of young Paul at the end of the fifth number. For these reasons, then, Dombey & Son must be considered a relative failure.
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Notes
This is a mode somewhat reminiscent of the kind of technique George Eliot uses in similar circumstances, especially in Middlemarch (published a generation later than Dombey & Son), for the development of the inner life of Dorothea Brooke or Lydgate (cf. Riverside Edition, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Cambridge, 1956) chs 20 and 73, for instance).
J. Hillis Miller, CharlesDickens:TheWorld ofHis.Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) pp. 145–6.
In a discussion of the restraints put on Victorian writers by the conventions of the time, Steven Marcus draws attention to the ingenuity exhibited by Dickens in his depiction of Bagstock ‘without having recourse to open sexual language … from his very name, which conceals a sexual pun, to the descriptions of him swilling hot spiced drinks and then swelling apoplectically and turning red and blue, to his frequent reference to the old “Bagstock breed”’ (The Other Victorians (New York, 1964) p. 110).
In his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (London, 1960) p. 190, George Steiner refers to the ‘borrowings from the figure of Steerforth’ for Stavrogin in The Possessed. Dostoevsky’s interest in certain aspects of Dickens’ art — particularly in his presentation of the warped mind — is not, perhaps, generally realised. In his book Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence (London, 1973), N. M. Lary traces the effect of this interest above all in The Idiot and The Devils ( The Possessed); he, too, points out Stavrogin’s origins in Stecrforth (pp. 119–23), a theory first propounded by G. Katkov in his ‘Steerforth and Stavrogin: On the Sources of The Possessed’, Slavonic and East European Review, 27 (1949) 469–88, and also followed up by Loralee MacPike in her Dostoevsky’s Dickens (London, 1981).
Cf. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. House, Storey and Tillotson, vol. v, 1847–1849, pp. 674–5, 676, 676–7, for details of the subsequent complications, which even involved threats of legal action.
In a novel that is as full of name-calling as perhaps no other by Dickens, Uriah is forced to endure a great many derogatory appellations, most of which stem appropriately enough from the animal world (it will be observed that the book as a whole is full of animal imagery): ‘red fox’ (518), ‘serpent’ (71 1), ‘red-headed animal’ (381), ‘Ape’ (516), ‘eel’ (517), ‘malevolent baboon’ (573). In addition, we are told that ‘his hand felt like a fish’ (236), that when reading his finger ‘made clammy tracks along the page … like a snail’ (234), and of his ‘snaky undulation’ (378).
K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: a Critical Introduction (London, 1958) p. 130.
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© 1985 Robert Golding
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Golding, R. (1985). Dombey & Son to Bleak House. In: Idiolects in Dickens. Macmillan Studies in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18021-9_10
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