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Metafictional, Prototypical and Archetypal Dickens

Apocalypse Now: Dombey in the Twenty-First Century

Jennifer Gribble

Résumé

The narrative injunction to Mr Dombey, ‘awake, doomed man,’ has a Carlylean, Miltonic and biblical source, but it also strikes a significant key-note for early twenty-first-century readers. Acts of unimaginable terror, catastrophic natural disasters and a global sense of humankind’s time running out might make us particularly receptive to the apocalyptic tone and message of Dombey and Son. And renewed currency is being given to the Victorian debate about God, pursued in this novel’s remorselessly ticking clocks and watches, weighing railway time against the end-time of 1840s millenarianism and the timelessness of eternity. Contemporary readers are, however, disinclined and often unable to consider Dickens’s purposeful biblical intertextuality, despite the widespread reading practices of New Historicism and Discourse Analysis. This paper argues that the Judeo-Christian grand narrative is fundamental to the narrative structure, thematics and ethical arguments of Dombey and Son, and that it actively engages with other influential narratives in the topical public sphere. In a progressive unfolding of the great scroll, from Genesis, the law, the prophets and the Psalms, through the Sermon on the Mount to the Book of Revelation, Dickens reads the signs of his times in the light of the biblical time-line from Creation to Apocalypse. Dombey’s pride has theological as well as economic implications: his sense of lordship over nature is representative of the technological, commercial and scientific advances of an expanding empire. Transcending simplifying providential and romance plots, the novel’s focus on the urgent personal and philosophical question of ‘what nature is’ draws on the insights of Romanticism to probe the relationship between the observable universe of nature’s laws and belief in a divinely-activated universe of meaningful pattern and revelation.

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  • 1 Dombey and Son, ed. Dennis Walder [1847]. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 299. All subsequent references a (...)
  • 2 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. Ed. J.W.T. Ley, London: Cecil Palmer, 1928, 471, notes t (...)

1Prophetic Dickens looms large in Dombey and Son. ‘Awake, doomed man,’ he admonishes Dombey in Chapter 43: ‘the time is flying by; the hour is coming with an angry tread.’1 In Chapter 47, in a sequence of visionary paragraphs, the warning is extended to the conscience of ‘a Christian people.’ What links the clouded vision of Dombey with the heedless progress of Victorian England, so the narrative argument runs, is the targeted deadly sin of pride:2 pride figured as a ‘mote in the eye,’ a speck of pollution that multiplies in a contagious cloud. The biblical rhetoric and allusions reveal the lens through which Dickens sees.

  • 3 ‘Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, e (...)

2The apocalyptic message strikes a keynote for this new millennium of ours, as global signs and portents fuel anxiety that time is running out for humankind. That anxiety is fed by unstoppable technology, whether manifested as a London Particular or an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, whether the journey is to Mars or Leamington Spa. ‘Apocalyptic,’ a widely, if loosely-used adjective, enjoys renewed currency as a forecast of cataclysmic end-time, and/or divine judgement. Perhaps not coincidentally, the New Atheism has put God back on the agenda, as science and religion debate their rival truth claims, narratives of origin and time-lines, with a more-than-Victorian fervour. Yet in the field of literary studies, as Terry Eagleton noted in After Theory, despite the attention we give to ideology and power, and to contexts of production and reception, ‘almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassedly ignore’ religion.3 The biblical references threaded through the novels of Dickens are often lost on today’s reader.

  • 4 Cf. The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford UP. Verse 12 continues: ‘The nigh (...)
  • 5 Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion. London: George Allen and Unwin 1981, 138, suggests that Dicken (...)
  • 6 The Revelation of St John the Divine 10:8–11.

3However incredulous we might be these days about meta-narratives, the Judeo-Christian grand narrative of salvation surely provides for Dombey and Son not only its ethical framework, but also a rich source of imagery. The admonition to Dombey draws on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 13:11 in which the meta-narrative’s end-time is associated with the more benign images of apocalypse: with the unveiling or revelation enabled by seeing clearly in the light of dawn, by being awake and ready for the coming of the Kingdom: ‘now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than we believed.’4 In this Pauline allusion, Dickens places himself in a long line of prophets. The call to awake, to see clearly, to expect the Kingdom, echoes from the Old Testament, in Isaiah (52:1), Ezekiel (3:17) and Daniel (12:2) for example, through the parables of Jesus, to St John in the New Testament (Revelation, 16:15). It is taken up by Milton and by Carlyle.5 It makes part of the novel’s network of allusions, from Genesis and the prophetic books and Psalms, to the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of Revelation. Little Paul Dombey’s death is seen in the context of this biblical teleology, anticipating the moment prophesied in Isaiah and Revelation when ‘our race has run its course and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll’ (241), the scroll of the Divine Logos that has been unrolled in Mr Dombey’s invocation of the creation story at the moment of Paul’s birth. Ezekiel and St John are required to eat the scroll, ‘sweet as honey in the mouth’ and ‘bitter to the stomach’,6 a visceral act that confirms them in their role of proclaiming it to an unheeding people. Prophetic Dickens, in his time, ingests or appropriates the scroll, and his voice, too, is divided between apocalyptic threat and promise. This inter-textual relationship with the Bible bears on some perennial questions for Dombey criticism: the question of Dickens’s attitude to the Victorian narrative of progress, with its underlying anxieties about time and technology; the question of narrative omniscience; the question of providential plotting; and the question of what the waves were always saying.

  • 7 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford UP, 1968, 1 (...)
  • 8 Andrew Sanders, ‘Dickens and the Millennium’, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins. Rethinking Victori (...)

4The 1840s saw a rash of millenarian books, periodicals, societies and sects. The Reverend E. B. Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae of 1844, republished in 1846, 47, 50 and 62, dates the coming millennium, or thousand year reign of Christ on earth, to the year 1865 or perhaps 1867. Frank Kermode identifies a tradition of naive apocalyptic, in which a predicted end-time is disconfirmed without being discredited.7 Dickens enjoys this dilemma in what seems perhaps a piece of incidental stock-in-trade anti-evangelical satire.8 The Reverend Melchisedech Howler’s dating, like Elliott’s, is more or less precise: like Elliott he revises an earlier prediction, consenting, ‘on very urgent solicitation, to give the world another two years of existence, but [informing] his followers that then, it must positively go’ (903). Early in the novel we learn that:

having one day discharged himself from the West India Docks on a false suspicion (got up expressly against him by the General Enemy) of screwing gimlets into puncheons, and applying his lips to the orifice, [he] had announced the destruction of the world for that day two years, at ten in the morning, and opened the front parlour for the reception of ladies and gentlemen of the ranting persuasion, upon whom, on the first occasion of their assemblage, the admonitions of the Reverend Melchisedech had produced so powerful an effect, that, in their rapturous performance of a sacred jig, which closed the service, the whole flock broke through into a kitchen below, and disabled a mangle belonging to one of the fold. (221)

  • 9 As Janet Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985, s (...)

5If the apocalyptic Dickens of Chapter 47 displays something of the ‘eschatological urgency’9 of the ranting pastor, an ironic view of such doomsaying is well in evidence here, albeit a comedic one. The carnivalesque fall of Howler and his flock back into the world of mangles is enjoyed in the measured pace and formal register of this elongated sentence. The primal needs that give rise to religion and its rituals are indulged, and indeed, in the passing reference to the application of lips to orifice, linked to oral gratifications the novel takes seriously in the matter of little Paul’s nurture. The imminence of the end lends point to enjoyment in the here and now, in Primitive Methodism’s rapturous jigs, fallings-down in the Spirit, and contending practices of temperance and agape. Also included in this satiric representation of contemporary apocalyptic enthusiasts are perhaps the Plymouth Brethren, who looked forward to the ‘Rapture,’ or end-time prophesied by founder John Nelson Darby, and the Mormons, whose mission to the English nation began in 1837. Melchisedech, King of Salem, features as one of The Book of Mormon’s significant prophets. He appears first in Genesis 14, offering bread and wine to Abraham. In Hebrews 7.3 his role as a forerunner of Christ is further developed as ‘without father, without mother, without descent . . . but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.’ The latter-day Melchisedech, helping himself to a drink, self-appointed and self-anointed, is one of the Sermon on the Mount’s ‘false prophets.’

  • 10 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, 1905, edited, tr (...)
  • 11 Jurgan Moltman, The Theology of Hope. London: SCM Press, 1967, 23.

6More important still is the connection between the evangelical preacher and that representation of homo economicus,10 Mr Dombey. Jurgan Moltman, in The Theology of Hope,11 relates the sin of pride to the presumptuous, self-willed anticipation of heavenly reward. This I take to be the point of the two satirized appropriations of the biblical grand narrative against which the novel’s intertextuality is positioned. For Dombey’s version of the biblical narrative is as blasphemous, and as self-serving, as the Reverend Melchisedech’s. Buoyant with pride, Dombey sees the birth of his long-awaited son as the latest sign of divine favour, a procreative act confirming his dominion over the natural world:

And again he said ‘Dom-bey and Son’ in exactly the same tone as before.
Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr Dombey’s life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for and against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them: AD had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei—and Son. (3)

7Dombey has spoken a world into existence and sees that it is good. Here, too, the satire has a number of targets, is flamboyant, yet works to persuade the reader to entertain its grandiose, limited viewpoint. If ‘the earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in,’ that formulation suggests Dombey’s sense of unique role, ongoing entitlement, divine favour. Patriarchal succession and imperialist enterprise are confirmed by his reading of the Bible and his dutiful church-going. His exultant psalm: ‘the earth is Dombey’s and all that therein is’ parodies the Hebraic tradition of worshipping God in nature. And that tradition is recalled here in the biblical stories of renewing covenant between God and his creation: from the Genesis story of the creation of matter, space, time and energy, to the provision of livelihood and progeny, and the deliverance from flood symbolized in the rainbow, to the coming of the messiah signified in the calendric convention ‘anno domini.’

  • 12 Paul Schacht, ‘Dickens and the Uses of Nature’, Victorian Studies 34 (1990): 77–102 suggests that D (...)

8Chapter 47 makes explicit the novel’s reading of the grand narrative. The sea that floats Dombey’s ships has dissolved into ‘the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world’ (10). Clinging to the slight spar of her little daughter, Mrs Dombey, like her new-born son, has been carried by an implacable process into an end-time beyond the reach of ticking watches, apprehended only through metaphor and symbol. In the context of this powerful realization of the created world, contemporary discourses about ‘what nature is’ are successively measured against biblical understandings. The argument considers the claims of romantic models of germination and fruition, of Paley’s natural theology, in which the orderly laws of nature prove the universe the work of a designer God,12 and the felicific calculus of Bentham, with its appeal to a self-interested human nature motivated by pleasure or pain. In mediating between the fictional world and the marketplace of ideas, the narrator is engaged in tenacious thinking about questions of moral authority, point of view and belief systems. This involves an understanding of the way in which discourse shapes attitudes, focussing in particular on how normative ideas of nature shape Victorian culture.

  • 13 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004, cites Jurgen Habermas’ (...)

9Underlying the increasing confidence with which Dickens enters his fictional worlds to admonish character and reader is his experience in debating, as journalist, public speaker and reformer, topical issues emerging in Chapter 47. It is as a recognizable voice within a discursive common space,13 that he now reflects on the ways in which Dombey’s mote of pride makes part of the cloud of physical and moral pollution that gathers over expansionist industrializing England. If ‘prophetic Dickens’ is visibly impatient with his narrative mask, the values for which he stands have been unfolding in the created world of the novel, and are now more fully disclosed.

  • 14 Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God. Philadelphia: The (...)

10What emerges is an understanding of the biblical narrative as a record of covenantal relationship: a paternal-filial bond of mutual love and mutual obligation between free agents, in which both are expected to keep promises responsibly,14 and which officially Christian England, like fallen humanity from its first disobedience, continues to break. The narrative overview of that broken covenant culminates in a well-known passage:

Oh for a good spirit who would take the roof-tops off, with a more benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their houses, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too long neglect; and, from the thick and solemn air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owning one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to one common end, to make the world a better place! (685)

11Liberally strewn with exclamation marks, the peroration makes visible apocalyptic threats and promises caught in that pun on ‘common end.’ If ‘the end’ encompasses ‘last things’ (death and judgement, heaven or hell), industrial England has its apocalypse now, in the ‘tremendous social retributions’ Dickens sees in its stunted children, floating gaols, and fat churchyards. And yet this revelation is an awakening to hope: to the ‘common end, to make the world a better place.’ ‘The light of day’ heralds a restored covenantal relationship within the Victorian family, and links utopian aspiration with a normative nature in which day follows night.

  • 15 In 1842, Edwin Chadwick asked his collaborator Henry Austin, Dickens’s brother-in-law, to present a (...)

12The Victorian household is the contested site of this aspiration. In the three preceding paragraphs, domestic space has been opened up to a series of viewpoints, from the laissez-faire judgementalism of the magistrate and judge, to the ministrations of the good clergyman and doctor in dens that lie beneath middle-class carriage wheels, and the researches and reports of social reformers like Chadwick.15 Dickens’s vantage point remains biblical: the retributive hand of divine judgement hovers over the rooftops in the form of Asmodeus, demonic figure of Talmudic and apocryphal tradition, often associated with Apollyon, the Destroying angel of the Book of Revelation. But the lame demon is required to be benignant, and this is consistent with the Destroying Angel’s role in the Exodus story of the Passover (12:21–36), where he is commanded to stay his hand, passing over the homes of the chosen people and sparing their children.

  • 16 Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: the Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and (...)

13The popularity of articles with titles like ‘Asmodeus in London’16 suggests that the lame demon of Lesage’s fable Le Diable Boiteux (1707) has become a serviceable figure of urban overview and magically shifting vantage point in the 1840s. Dickens has already made use of him, as scene-changing ‘intrepid aeronaut,’ in Chapter 33 of The Old Curiosity Shop. In Dombey and Son, viewpoint is radically transformed by railway travel, and surveillance and revelation carry an undertow of destructive energy. Apocalyptic anxieties have been projected in the train journey to Leamington spa, when Dombey feels through all his destabilized senses and in his surrendered volition, that ‘the time is flying by’ and that death is the journey’s destination. And yet the progress of the triumphant monster that annihilates Staggs’s Gardens is exhilarating. Its demonic capacity to fly through space enables an unprecedented power to penetrate the roof-tops. Unfolding panoramas contract to close-ups through the ‘battered roofs’ of falling houses, nightmare reflections of the falling House of Dombey, into domestic interiors ‘where want and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes . . . deformity of brick and mortar penning up deformity of mind and body.’ The narrator makes explicit his investment in this newly-available perspective, pointing out that the railway has ‘let in the light of day on these things, not made or caused them’ (299).

  • 17 Roger Scruton, Spinoza. London: Orson Publishing House, 1998, 30, suggests that Spinoza’s Ethics (1 (...)

14Dickens is often suspected of emulating or even usurping divine omniscience. Like any prophet, however, he discloses the fallibility of shifting human vantage points. ‘The light of day’ associates prophetic revelation with seeing through the cloud of pollution which is an emblem of, and a retribution for, unchecked commercial and industrial pride. The narrator, and the narrative, exhorts Christian England, in Spinozan phrase, to look out ‘on the world of human life around them’ (695), to a knowledge of their own relation to it.17

  • 18 Brigid Lowe, ‘Dombey and Son’, in David Paroissien (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford: B (...)

15That ethical disposition, then, begins in the domestic space and relationships of the Victorian family, ‘owning’ its ‘one duty to the Father of one family.’ Notions of a ‘duty’ given and a filial relationship ‘owned,’ together with the gendered opposition of Nature as ‘our might mother’ and God as omnipotent Father, suggest the ways in which Christian discourse shaped the ideology of the Victorian family. But the novel’s model of family, in the Dombeys and the Toodles and the company at The Little Wooden Midshipman, is in important respects counter-cultural.18 The model proposed here reaffirms the covenantal relationship expressed in the Lord’s Prayer, recited weekly by a Victorian church-going population, and centrally placed in the Sermon on the Mount between Matthew Chapters 5 and 7: a prayer that acknowledges the sovereignty as well as the Fatherhood of God, and God’s kingdom as humanity’s proper destination. The times and dates of the end-time are not for us to know, Jesus tells listeners to his Sermon, but they must live their lives in the expectation of its coming. The kingdom is realized here on earth, however, in forgiving and being forgiven, and in the Sermon’s Beatitudes: they that mourn are comforted, the pure in heart see God, and the meek come into their inheritance: ‘Dombey and Son’ is ‘a daughter after all!’ (241).

16Like the Bible, Dombey and Son is a series of inter-related stories that explore the grand narrative and its values through the variousness of individual lives. Imagery drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, of falling houses, motes and beams, figs untimely cast from the parent tree, provides several plot lines. In his overhauling of the good book, Captain Cuttle enjoys not only the Sermon on the Mount, but Psalm 107:23 ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’ In this post-exilic psalm, deliverance from storm and shipwreck is an expression of the covenant: ‘Then they cry to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivers them out of their distresses’ (23–28). Walter Gay, clinging to his slight spar amongst the wreckage of ‘The Son and Heir,’ experiences for himself the kind of miraculous rescue delivered by his favourite sea-faring stories. For Dombey, the wreckage of his pride awakens him at last: ‘Oh my God, forgive me, for I need it very much’ (890).

  • 19 To Wilkie Collins 6 October 1859, The Letters of Charles Dickens 3, 124, ed. Walter Dexter, Bloomsb (...)
  • 20 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2007, describes the ‘anthro (...)

17‘Wonders in the deep’ is for Captain Cuttle a metaphor of providential deliverance, and of the unfathomable workings of grace. The novel’s happy ending is not the outcome of its romance, fairy-tale and sea adventure conventions, but of restored covenant. If Dickens sees his plots as ‘little imitations of the ways of providence,’19 this reflects a reading of the Bible essentially different from the Providential Deism of Dombey, and the self-serving prophecies of Melchisedech Howler. The God of Deism, and of the Unitarianism Dickens is relinquishing by the end of the 1840s, is, like the watchmaker God of Natural Theology, a God of observable causal laws, but not a God of miracles or supernatural revelation.20

  • 21 The Prelude VI, 572–3. Despite Forster’s view that Dickens had ‘little love for Wordsworth’, op. ci (...)
  • 22 The original ending, cancelled for reasons of space, and echoing the end of Chapter XVI, reads: ‘Th (...)

18The ‘dark and unknown sea’ that encircles the novel is inflected with a Wordsworthian apocalyptic, ‘of something ever more about to be,’ ‘of first and last, and midst, and without end.’21 For Dickens, intimations of immortality make it the more urgent ‘to make the world a better place.’ The ceaseless murmur of the waves speaks to the dying Paul of the unimaginable realm of the end-time, but they also speak to him, and will speak to a changed Dombey, of ‘love, eternal and illimitable’.22 The Dombey family, renewed by the steadfastness and resilience and forgiveness of Florence, represents Dickens’s hope for the restored covenant between God and humankind.

  • 23 Among the anxieties of ‘late capitalism’, Fredric Jameson argues, in Valences of the Dialectic. Lon (...)

19Dickens readers, whether in 1847 or 2010, are not required to assent to the grand narrative of salvation. But it was, for Dickens, not simply a strategic appeal to the shared values of ‘a Christian people,’ but the ethical perspective through which he read the signs of his times, exploring questions no less relevant in our late capitalist moment than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century.23

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Bibliographie

Primary Sources

The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. London: OUP.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1847. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: OUP, 2000.

Dexter, Walter, ed. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1938.

Elliott, E. B. Horae Apocalypticae. London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1844.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Cecil Palmer, 1928.

Secondary Sources

Arac, Jonathan. Commissioned Spirits: the Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1979.

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. London: Penguin, 2009.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. London: Methuen, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009.

Kaufman, Gordon D. The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: OUP, 1966.

Larson, Janet. Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1985.

Lowe, Brigid. ‘Dombey and Son’. A Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009. 358–68.

Moltman, Jurgan. The Theology of Hope. London: SCM Press, 1967.

Sanders, Andrew. ‘Dickens and the Millennium’. Rethinking Victorian Culture. Ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2000. 80–90.

Schacht, Paul. ‘Dickens and the Uses of Nature’. Victorian Studies 34 (1990): 77–102.

Scruton, Roger. Spinoza. London: Orson Publishing House, 1998.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2007.

Walder, Dennis. Dickens and Religion. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings. 1905. Edited, translated and with an introduction and notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin, 2002.

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Notes

1 Dombey and Son, ed. Dennis Walder [1847]. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 299. All subsequent references are to this edition.

2 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. Ed. J.W.T. Ley, London: Cecil Palmer, 1928, 471, notes that Dickens aimed ‘to do with Pride what its predecessor had done with Selfishness.’

3 ‘Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassedly ignore it.’ Terry Eagleton, After Theory. London: Penguin, 2003, 99.

4 Cf. The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford UP. Verse 12 continues: ‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand.’

5 Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion. London: George Allen and Unwin 1981, 138, suggests that Dickens is echoing Carlyle’s cry to the Captains of Industry in Past and Present (1843) and Milton’s appeal to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost.

6 The Revelation of St John the Divine 10:8–11.

7 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford UP, 1968, 124.

8 Andrew Sanders, ‘Dickens and the Millennium’, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins. Rethinking Victorian Culture. Houndsmills: Macmillan 2000, 80–90, finds the passage ‘almost a throwaway’ comic device with ‘only a marginal role in the social and fictional fabric of Dombey and Son’ (85).

9 As Janet Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985, suggests, 96. In a detailed discussion of Chapter 47 she finds ‘an ebbing of biblical authority’ here and throughout.

10 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, 1905, edited, translated, and with an introduction and notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, New York: Penguin, 2002, suggests that Calvin, in particular, viewed the expression of the work ethic as a sign of economic man’s ‘election.’

11 Jurgan Moltman, The Theology of Hope. London: SCM Press, 1967, 23.

12 Paul Schacht, ‘Dickens and the Uses of Nature’, Victorian Studies 34 (1990): 77–102 suggests that Dickens never really repudiates his early admiration for Paley’s Natural Theology of 1802. And yet, as he also notes, Paley gives ballast to the views of Adam Smith and Malthus that poverty is ‘natural, divinely willed and ineradicable.’ Dickens crisply exposes such views in the magistrate and judge who in Chapter 47 ‘admonish the unnatural outcasts of society.’

13 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004, cites Jurgen Habermas’s discussion of an emergent public space for discussion in publications and social gatherings towards the end of the eighteenth century.

14 Gordon D. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981, sees the concept of God gradually reconstructed from the mighty warrior of the Exodus period into ‘the creator of heaven and earth.’ The relationship is for the first time grasped as one of covenant ‘a moral relationship between moral wills only possible between free agents’ (108).

15 In 1842, Edwin Chadwick asked his collaborator Henry Austin, Dickens’s brother-in-law, to present a copy of his Report on The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population to Dickens in the hope that he might help win influence for sanitary reform. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 478. The Mems for Chapter 47 read ‘Opening<reflection> matter—sanatory (sic) (941).

16 Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: the Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1979, points out that these popular periodical articles ‘placed the city in overview at the reader’s feet’ (112).

17 Roger Scruton, Spinoza. London: Orson Publishing House, 1998, 30, suggests that Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) sets out to prove that ‘our salvation consists in seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis, as God sees it, and in gaining thereby freedom from the bondage of time’ (30). It would be surprising if Dickens had not read the review article on Spinoza by his new friend George Henry Lewes in The Westminster Review 39 in 1843, introducing to English-speaking readers the work of a writer who was to become so much a submerged philosophical current in Romantic and Victorian writing, including this novel’s enquiry into ‘what Nature is’ (DS 683).

18 Brigid Lowe, ‘Dombey and Son’, in David Paroissien (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008, 358–368, argues this case persuasively.

19 To Wilkie Collins 6 October 1859, The Letters of Charles Dickens 3, 124, ed. Walter Dexter, Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1938.

20 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2007, describes the ‘anthropomorphic shift’ as ‘the eclipse of mystery, and the foreshortening of earlier views of eventual human transformation at the hands of God, evoked by the patristic notion of ‘theosis’ (290). This shift is exemplified by Unitarianism, for example, as ‘an attempt to hold onto the central figure of Jesus, while cutting loose from the main soteriological doctrines of historical Christianity’ (291).

21 The Prelude VI, 572–3. Despite Forster’s view that Dickens had ‘little love for Wordsworth’, op. cit., 421, the letters and novels tell a different story. Pervasive echoes of the Ode: Intimations of Immortality, for example, suggest that he had the poem in mind well before the direct allusion at the start of David Copperfield.

22 The original ending, cancelled for reasons of space, and echoing the end of Chapter XVI, reads: ‘They speak to him of Florence and his altered heart, of Florence and their ceaseless murmuring to her of love, eternal and illimitable’ (967).

23 Among the anxieties of ‘late capitalism’, Fredric Jameson argues, in Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009, is the disjunction between biological or existential time and the differently experienced time of our living within what he calls, in The Political Unconscious. London: Methuen, 1981, ‘the vast unfinished plot of history.’

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Jennifer Gribble, « Apocalypse Now: Dombey in the Twenty-First Century »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], Hors-série | 2012, mis en ligne le 22 novembre 2022, consulté le 16 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12432 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.12432

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Auteur

Jennifer Gribble

Jennifer Gribble is Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on Victorian and Australian literature. Her most recent book is the Penguin edition of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Her current research project is a study of Dickens and the Bible.

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