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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It is now generally agreed that in Dombey and Son, “the first masterpiece of Dickens' maturity,” Dickens solved the structural problems of the serial novel. There was, he discovered, “no insuperable obstacle to writing, barely ahead of its publication in monthly instalments complete in themselves, a novel with a well-defined purpose worked out by such an ‘artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot’ as he had once felt that he must eschew.” Dickens' “artfully interwoven” plot structure, similarly, is now recognized to be founded on a highly ramified system of analogies, contrasts, and variations in action and character of what is essentially a single, simple thematic idea, supported and colored by a complex body of inter-related symbols.
1 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols. (New York, 1952), ii, 643.
2 John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London, 1957), p. 90. For a concurrent view, see also Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford, 1954), p. 42 and pp. 157–201 passim, esp. p. 159.
3 For this and for the following discussion of the theme of Dombey and Son, I am indebted, in addition to those named above, to Monroe Engel, The Maturity of Dickens (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 107–117; and to J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 143–150.
4 George Ford, Dickens and His Readers (Princeton, 1955), p. 141.
5 Speaking of the “larger context of possibility and limitation” in Dickens' novels, Monroe Engel says, “The means employed to render this context are again symbolic, and the symbols are uniformly naturalistic and immediate—the river, the sea, the fog, the plague, the railroad. When the method, then, is at its most successful, the different materials merge: the symbols that are also natural facts, and the facts that have symbolic overtones, are the same fabric” (p. 107).
6 Kathleen Tillotson, in particular, gives a close reading of both the sea and the railroad (pp. 187–190); and Monroe Engel discusses the water imagery at length (pp. 113–117).
7 I have used the National Edition of Dickens' works, B. W. Matz, ed., 40 vols. (London, 1906–08), xviii and xix. Citations in the text refer to the volume number, followed by the page number, in this edition.
8 As far as I know, only Kathleen Tillotson (p. 174) touches on the Whittington allusions, and then merely in passing.
9 The Letters of Charles Dickens, Nonesuch Edition, Walter Dexter, ed., 3 vols. (Bloomsbury, 1938), i, 771.
10 Engel, p. 113.
11 Ibid., p. 116.
12 Tillotson, p. 189. In the same place, she also sees the ocean as a type of “separation and reunion, death and eternal life,” without, however, developing these dualities.
13 Kathleen Tillotson (p. 190) dismisses the Wooden Midshipman as “picturesque embroidery.”
14 Miller, pp. 148–149.
15 Another echo of “what the waves were saying” of the “invisible country far away” was cut out of the closing number of the novel in proof: see Butt and Tillotson, p. 112.
16 Johnson interprets the railroad as an emblem only of a “world of change, speed, and desolation” (ii, 628), while Kathleen Tillotson finds it a type of a ruthless new order lacking in any “suggestion of hope, of social progress” (p. 200), a symbol simply of “death” (p. 188).
