2 - Dombey and Son: the daughter's nothing

Summary

Dombey and Son marked a new beginning for Dickens in many ways: it was the first of his novels for which he wrote number plans in advance; the first to use complicated and involved metaphors for itself; the first he spoke of as ‘branching’ off in the ways we think of his novels developing. For the argument of this book, Dombey and Son marks another beginning, for it was in this novel that Dickens began to isolate those characteristics of the daughter, in particular the writing daughter, which were the hallmark of his later career. But the breakthrough idea of the novel (which Dickens was never to carry out with quite the same level of poignancy) was the bringing together of the good and the dark heroine under one roof; the domestication of the story of the wanderings of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop. In the meeting of Florence Dombey and her stepmother Edith, and in the toll it exacts for the daughter to separate herself from the dark heroine (whom she refers to as “my beautiful mama”), Dickens posed the problem of the daughter within the patriarchal house, both Dombey's house and the novel, which he was to work out in the rest of his career.