My Afro-Caribbean wife Merle, who died only two years ago, was a Charles Dickens fan. A more accomplished reader than me, before the end of the 1970s, when she was still young, she’d read every novel Dickens wrote. Meanwhile, over 40 yrs later, I’m still working on the same project.
When Merle finished Dombey and Son, she walked around for a couple of days like she was in another world. When she came out of it, she told me this was a book I had to read.
Well, I finished it this week.
The back cover of my shabby Signet pocket-book edition (the same one Merle read) says:
Dombey and Son marks the great turning point of Dicken’s artistic career. In it he departs forever from the picaresque world of his earlier novels……For the first time he envisions evil as inherent in the very structure of his society.
This the book does, and more. But I have to warn you, it has many flaws.
The main one is that the central characters – Paul Dombey Sr, rich owner of trading company, Dombey & Son, his little son Paul who he longs to see as the head of the company one day, but dies ¼ way into the book, offending many readers, his daughter Florence who he resents for existing, and Edith, a beautiful but phenomenally aloof young woman who Dombey marries still in hope of a boy child – are all so extreme that they’re hard to take as real people.
Dombey senior could be an exception, if you think of his taciturn solitary nature as deriving from autism. In that case, he’s evidence that a lot of money can destroy people on the spectrum as well as anyone else.
The villain of the book, devious and manipulative eventual betrayer of his employer, is James Carker, manager of the Dombey firm and chief reason for its success. He’s a realistic character, and a key to the strength of the plot, but Dickens mocks him too often about the way he smiles, showing all his teeth. Once would have been enough, but Dickens repeats it over and over, weakening Carker’s sinister presence and power.
These problems are probably due to Dickens still being relatively young – he was 34 when he wrote Dombey. Later novels don’t have such defects.
But in Dombey and Son secondary characters come to the rescue – Susan Nipper, Florence’s smart and outspoken governess, fired for speaking up on Florence’s behalf, is worth a novel of her own. Mr Toots, one time older friend in a dismal school with Paul Jr, who has had a crush on Florence ever since, is charming. Sol Gills, the operator of a shop selling sailing ship instruments, and his nephew Walter, who Florence falls in love with, are keys to the plot, even though they disappear before the story’s half over.
Last of all, the friend of Gills, retired ship-captain Ned Cuttle, is one of Dickens’ greatest inventions. Every time a chapter started with him, all my reservations about the book were forgotten. His unique humor, combined with his seaman terminology/seaman perspective on life, are worth the rest of the book put together.
Many people are put off by the length of a Dickens novel (my copy of Dombey and Son is 904 pages). But I learned a long time ago that one can skip whole chapters in his books. For example, he inserts comic sub-stories that are whole chapters – here these are those involving Mrs Chick and Miss Tox, – that feel like TV commercials breaking into a movie – you can skip them altogether.
Also, in loosely written novels like Dombey & Son, there are many long paragraphs where, if you’re an experienced Dickens reader, you can cut them off early.
Those long paragraphs feel like weaknesses in the book to us, but in the nineteenth century readers didn’t want a book to end. They had an unlimited appetite for reading. That century was the greatest age of reading in history.
This is why most nineteenth century novels have slow weak endings, as the author fills you in on the future life of each character. Readers then insisted that every character get their due, Dombey and Son is no exception. There is a chapter involving a marriage between two of the secondary characters that probably delighted Dickens’ readers.
There comes to a point where everything has been resolved. Paul Dombey is now bankrupt and seriously ill, Florence has been rescued and about to be married too. The story could have been ended quickly there.
Instead, Dickens launches into a lengthy description of the details of how the Dombey company and the palatial Dombey house are dismembered, the house described as if it is a character itself. Dickens had a gift for that.
Then, suddenly, you’re watching this demise from the perspective of the house staff , who try to keep an air of solemn respect for the house and their employer, until a “young kitchen-maid of inferior rank” suddenly says, “Suppose the wages shouldn’t be paid!”
What follows then is a delightful side trip into the world of the working class, an exploration of their conflicting interests, their mutual vulnerability juxtaposed with the power of the rich and the vulnerability that haunts them too – in other words, a vision of society as a gigantic house of cards always in danger of collapsing. Few authors have tried to address this aspect of life on the scale that Dickens did in this book and others.
That’s a side-trip you could skip without the slightest harm to your understanding of the story – but you would miss one of the many sparkling gems to be found in Dickens novels.
As for the story itself, to sum it up, I’d say this is a King Lear story, but with a different ending.
The final chapter begins with three of the above characters together, sharing a special bottle of wine that has been talked about now and then all through the book. Their little meeting/celebration is as improbable to the imagination as can be. In this last little scene, Dickens pulls a fictional rabbit out of a hat, proving himself the literary magician that made so many readers love him
Alan Conrad 