DICKENS' OLDER PEOPLE: TRANSITIONAL AND MIDDLE NOVELS

                                                         ( 1842-1861) 

                                          DOMBEY AND SON (1846)

                        Dealing with the Firm of Dombey and Son 

                            Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation

                        Part One: Introduction and Context: 

 

       The Curse of Middle Class Assumptions and Presumptions 

                                      

                          

                     The first full-page illustration. Sol Eyting Jr. The Diamond

                   Edition of Dickens Works. Vol 111. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, (1867)

                                            Front Piece: The Victorian Web

This is Dickens' seventh major work and a significant departure from his earlier novels. The focus is less on the poor and lower classes and more on the middle and upper-middle class, with Mr Paul Dombey as the significant protagonist. Dickens, now a highly successful author and a father, was touching the borders of the upper middle classes.  The focus of this Introduction and Context is to discuss Dickens in time and place, and the shaping of Dombey and Son. 

Dickens began conceiving the story in January 1846, and by June, he was writing to his friend John Forster whilst staying in Lausanne that he 'had begun' putting pen to paper. (1) 

Paul Dombey Sr. is generally considered to be in his late forties. Still, as explained in my discussion on Martin Chuzzlewit, I must consider the portrayal as that of an older adult. In terms of social class, Dickens's first significant novel, The Pickwick Papers, depicts Pickwick as a retired character who is considered part of the middle class, rather than the lower class. He was comfortably well off. Chuzzlewit and Dombey, on the other hand, are set in the wealthy middle class. We therefore need to examine our understanding of the Victorian middle-class roots and status.

VICTORIAN MIDDLE CLASSES, DOMBEY AND DICKENS

According to historian George Young, 'the central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt when it was happening' (2) Nowhere is this more relevant than in understanding Dickens' feelings about the times he was living, both personally and professionly as he thought about and wrote Dombey and Son. Some may think this is a distraction. I believe the opposite. Dickens was a product of the late Georgian and Hanoverian eras, as reflected in his thoughts and feelings about his life to date, as well as the societal and economic transitions unfolding at the time. Pickwick Papers, for example, was set in rural England, and Dombey and Son was set in a time of significant industrialisation, with the growing influence of the middle and upper middle classes.  As a writer, he was, for the first time, more methodical and now using working notes as he prepared each edition of his Dombey serialisation. (3) It is why most scholars accept that it was his first mature work. (4)

At a personal level, Dickens had resigned from the editorship of The Daily News and taken his family off to Lausanne. During this time, he would travel to Paris. His seventh child, Sydney, was born, and he became involved in amateur dramatics. He was also heavily involved in establishing Urania House, the Home for Homeless Women. His beloved sister, Fanny, died on June 2, 1848. Dickens was an emotional man, and he and Catherine found the whole period physically and emotionally challenging. 

Dickens was always on top of the national and international news. During the years 1846-1848, several significant events occurred that he was undoubtedly aware of, not least of which were the Factory Act, the devastating Irish Famine, and the repeal of the Corn Laws. A series of revolutions was raging across Europe, and here in England, the demise of the Chartist movement was underway. A raging cholera outbreak would have sent many of the upper middle class scurrying to their country estates.'  How far the California Gold Rush piqued Dickens' interest, I'm not so sure. There was, therefore, both at home and away, much to exercise the opinionated middle and higher classes.

Young spotlights that the Victorian era was indeed one of opinion:    'Ideas embodied themselves in parties and institutions: institutions and parties closing in upon ideas; positions once thought impregnable abandoned overnight, and forces once thought negligible advancing to unforeseen victories'. That, said Young, 'is to understand Victorian history'. (5) 

                            

Victorian Middle Class

Family. Stock illustration 

In the early 19th Century, rightness, righteousness, morality, integrity, honour and probity were the virtues ' advancing on a broad invisible front.' (6) By the accession of Victoria in 1837 (and the somewhat arbitrary and artificial start of the Victorian era), these were increasingly becoming embedded within middle-class structures and public and private spaces. Dickens was but five years old during the succession crisis of 1817.  His world collapsed four years later when he moved to London, and his father was imprisoned for debt, Dickens' nightmare in the Blackening Warehouse began. The rural ways of Pickwick had been internalised and framed as a 'golden age', with cognitive dissonance playing a part in his early adulthood.  Dickens's middle class had arrived, but as the rephrased saying goes, 'you can take the boy out of  Kent, but not Kent out of the boy'. 

'BECOMING' THE MIDDLE-CLASS DICKENS

Utilitarianism, or Benthamism, believed that the government should govern based on the good and well-being of the greatest number. The movers and shakers, whom Dickens was fast becoming, "came down into the world where medical prejudice, Tudor law, Stuart economics and Hanoverian patronage still luxuriated in wild confusion, or by the straight and narrow paths they cut were walking".(7) Dickens became, and remains today a Victorian light, alongside, says Young "Tennyson and Macauley, Carlyle and Newman, Gladstone, Disraeli and Arnold. They all appeared above the horizon together" (8) There was of course misery for the lower classes during the 1830's and 40's when employment was precarious or non existent. Both cholera and the Labourers' Rising of 1830 and the Industrial Revolution  " reduced the value of labour that at any moment finds himself starving amid plenty which his own hands helped create." (9) Government had been and was, perhaps, wilfully negligent of this misery of 1840. Dickens, alongside Carlyle, were the mouthpieces of the delays and irrelevancies of Parliament" (10). Dickens' novels, with their comic satire, however, made an impact.  The Corn Laws, which in 1846 were repealed, and together with the Factory Act, a year later were, according to Young, 'the turning point of the age' (11). Be that as it may, the focus and disquiet arising from the New Poor Law and its subsequent consequences on all generations, young and old, disabled and non disabled people, the sick and the infirm, the vagrant and the destitute created an institutional apartheid, regardless of the bricks and mortar. Dickens railed against the Workhouses and the plight of the poor, but that was conditional.

   Substance and Shadow - Drawn by John Leech. Punch; or The London Charivari                                (15.07.1843) 23. Scanned by Philip V Allingham. The Victorian Web

Dickens's ideal England was not far removed from that of social visionary Robert Owen's experiments in developing a holistic approach to the environment, education and co-operation as a way of challenging the notion of progress. Dickens was no Chartist, nor some would argue even a social reformer. His literary and personal impact, in highlighting the conditions of the poor and destitute, as well as the lower middle classes, was, nevertheless, immense. I am reminded, however, of Young's assertion that his early and middle novels evidenced "a confusion of mind which reflected the perplexity of his time; equally ready to denounce on the grounds of humanity all things who left things alone, and the grounds of liberty all who tried to make things better and by 1845 it was becoming evident that the line between what the State may do and what it must leave alone had been drawn in the wrong place, and that there was a whole world of things that the individual simply could not do to help himself at all." (12). Dickens was no Tory, but he was certainly conservative.

The upper and middle classes, however, had their voices heard; Dickens did, in fact, use his middle-class position to at least attempt to give a voice on behalf of the poor, the neglected, and the oppressed. In Dombey,  he addressed the upper middle class privilege by exposing its corrosive interfamily relationships, child abuse, pride, jealousy, and selfishness,  all wrapped up in a parcel of modernity and technology, education and societal expectations. 

Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustration of the signing of the register to foreshadow the struggle for control between Mr and Mrs Dombey (1877). The Victorian Web

The problem is perhaps layered in Dickens' personality, upbringing, and middle-class cultural mindset, in that he 'did not live by his identity' (13)

Without getting too semantic about how far Dickens identified with the radical middle classes, understanding Dombey and Son becomes essential. The Radical middle class, which some may or may not locate Dickens in, was influenced by his friend and collaborator Charles Mackay, who it is believed shaped his literary 'subplots and financial fictions'. (14) He modelled the Company of Dombey and Son on "the Independent and West Middlesex's dramatic descent into the bankruptcy of the eponymous West Indian trading firm itself self-consciously written in the aftermath of the Railway mania." (15) Dombey was a victim of his 'one idea of life'  in that the 'earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in.' (16) Accumulating wealth turned him into an abusive and negligent parent of his daughter Florence and, in Child Protection terms his son and  Little Paul's failure to thrive leading to his premature death. In true Dickens' manner, Dombey would 'find salvation through bankruptcy and be diverted from thoughts of death by suicide by Florence's dramatic reappearance and be moved by her entirely unwarranted pleas for forgiveness'. (17) Dickens somewhat perversely believed that the affection Dombey felt for Florence was a happy ending. Older adults who have lived a life of selfishness and pride, destroying every familial relationship and abusing their children when they reach rock bottom, will be redeemed. However, we then enter the realm of Victorian fiction. Dickens was not just a middle-class novelist, but also a middle-class husband, father, businessman, and philanthropist, thriving in the power, control, and status both in his home, his community, and amongst his middle-class peers; he was, in many ways, a Dombey.

Even as a young adult with middle age on the horizon, Dickens was the stereotypical Victorian gentleman. A man of substance. In the words of Albert Pionke, he 'sustained an idea of hierarchy in appearance, even paying particular detailed attention to dress and appearance' (18)

'A SOCIAL CRITICISM OF CHARLES DICKENS' DOMBEY    AND SON' (19)

There are several observations that Christine McCarthy makes in her Thesis that are pertinent before we finally get to how and why Dickens portrayed older people the way he did. I am indebted to her study.

I summarise and paraphrase thus:

• The poverty of childhood, even within upper-middle-class families and settings. Dombey existed in that sector of society.
• There is no place for children
• The egocentrism of Victorian society
• 'The world of pride and wealth can never produce normal, healthy, happy childhoods'
• Educational institutions are critiqued as illustrated in the character of  Mrs Pipchin ( whom Dickens drew on his own childhood experience of what he calls 'a reduced old lady'(20) Dickens also references Dr Blimber, the 'pompous and pedantic headmaster, a proprietor of the school, Little Paul was a pupil' (21)
• The alternative to Blimber's world is that of 'Old Glubb', a symbol McCarthy states 'for understanding the needs of the imagination'
• The evil of Dombey and Son is pride and selfishness. (22)
• 'It is not  a question of how educational institutions or vile surroundings affected the populace as a whole, but how they affect individuals, ' it is, adds McCarthy, 'the identity of the individuals that concerns Dickens'.(23)
• Florence is not a character but merely a personification of goodness.
• The role of James Carker, whilst 'not old, he feigned goodness to hide himself beneath his sleek, hushed, crouched manner...' (24)
• Dickens' assumption that individuals are responsible for their own outcomes naturally undermines the criticism of society at the novel's beginning (25) 
• Dombey was possessed by a 'moody, stubborn, sullen demon' (26)
• Dickens highlights the evils of the society he berates. (27)
• All characters in Dombey and Son are not conscious of their natures -' erroneous identity'

This critique is our backdrop. The 'pride of Dombey directly leads to his fall, but that pride is complex, not pious nor self-righteous or insincere', states a reviewer, with a great deal of foreshadowing, who considered Dombey and Son is 'long-winded, with never ending meaningless repetition.' (28) Be that as it may, the book is a reflection of Dickens' middle-classness, which exposes why he was considered amongst the foremost of Victorian influencers, defining an era and serving as the thought leader of his time.

The assumptions and presumptions he held were those of the middle class to which he belonged, and it is within that context that we explore in Part Two the individual older people Dickens portrayed in Dombey and Son.

                                   Mrs Pipchin with Little Paul by Phiz

SOURCES, NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. SCHLICKE, P. (Ed.)  Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens.  Oxford Union Press: Dombey and Son Section (2000 edition). (p 184)

2. YOUNG. G. M.  Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. Oxford University Press. Oxford. New York. (2nd Edition) (1953). First published (1936) (p 6)

3. LAING. T. Dickens's Working Notes for Dombey and Son. Creative Commons (2017)

4. Different scholars provide various titles of novels that fall within Dickens's Early, Middle, and Later works. I have settled on the following as comprising his Middle novels. The transitional work, Martin Chuzzlewit (1842), sits between his Early and Middle publications:

Dombey and Son (1846)

David Copperfield (1850)

Bleak House (1852-3)

Hard Times [novella] (1854)

Little Dorrit ( 1855-57)

Great Expectations (1860- 61)

5. Ibid. YOUNG. (p6)

6. Ibid. YOUNG. (p12)

7. Ibid. YOUN. (p 19)

8. Ibid. YOUNG. (p 24)

9. Ibid. YOUNG. (p42)

10. Ibid. YOUNG ( p 46)

11. Ibid. YOUNG (p 73)

12. Ibid. YOUNG. (p79)

13. MCCARTHY. V.C. The Social Criticism of  Charles Dickens: A Point of View. A Thesis. Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Master's of Arts. McMaster University. ( September 1971) (p 29)

14. PIONKE. A. D.  Victorian Fictions of Middle Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform. Edinburgh University Press. (2024) (p 69)

15. Ibid. PIONKE. (p 69)

16. Ibid.  PIONKE. (p 70)

17. Ibid. PIONKE. ( p 70)

18. GUN.S. The Public Culture of Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840-1914. ( 2007) (p 68)

19. Heading taken from Ibid MCCARTHY. A Summary 

20.  BENTLEY N., SLATER. M & BURGIS. N. The Dickens Index. Oxford University Press. Oxford. New York. (1988) (p 200)

21. HAWES. D. Who's Who in Dickens. Routledge. London. New York. ( 2002 ed) (p 22)

22. Ibid. MCCARTHY. ( p. 25)

23. Ibid. MCCARTHY. ( p. 26)

24. Ibid. HAWES. (p 34)

25. Ibid. MCCARTHY. (p 28)

26. Ibid. MCCARTHY (p 28)

27. Ibid. MCCARTHY. (p 27)

28. GENEVA.D. After the Darkness, Light. Book Review. (Posted October 2021)