Dombey and Son takes the chaos of history as its structuring theme. However, the very use of ‘theme’, or the combination of realism (fiction presenting what seems like a picture of the familiar world of experience) with the organised, overarching significance and unity of plot, has been interpreted as in some way already a concession to an imperio-historical conception of history as a unified, significant and teleological progress. Lennard Davis, for instance, suggests that ‘plot in narratives, and most particularly novels, helps readers to believe that there is an order in the world’, so that ‘we might say that the idea of plot is part of an idea of history – that history and novels share a certain faith in plot’. Needless to say, for the reasons suggested at the start of the last chapter, this is a very bad thing as far as Davis and like-minded critics are concerned.

I have suggested that there are elements in Dombey that resist being subsumed by the progression of plot and its structured import.