Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 2, 2025

Charles Dickens’s seventh novel, first published in 20 serial parts between October 1846 and April 1848 with the complete title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale, and for Exploration, marked what many critics agree to be the author’s mature writing period. Dickens moves from the use of poverty-stricken characters to concentrating instead on members of the monied class. Many contrast Dombey and Son with Dickens’s previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), to make this point.

While Martin Chuzzlewit clearly represents the trend in 1840s novels to highlight a character weakness indicative of problems within English society, its emphasis on selfishness through the figure of Pecksniff is delivered with little narrative planning. That approach marked much of Dickens’s early fiction, in which improvisation played a crucial part in plotting. However, by adding the foil character of Martin to balance Pecksniff’s overwhelming negativity, Dickens divides his stage.

In Dombey and Son, the focus remains firmly on one character and his moral weakness of pride. That focus gives the novel a center, adding strength to the character and allowing Dickens to avoid the caricature that Dombey might have become. Dickens succeeds in attaining the goal for Dombey and Son “to do with Pride what its predecessor [Martin Chuzzlewit] had done with Selfishness.” Dickens outlined the entire novel before writing it, and that intent and planning are obvious in its execution, supporting an elaborate plot with balance and theme.

Mr. Dombey invests overwhelming pride in his business. He represents a product of his era, one who plans his life according to rules of logic. Intent upon producing a male heir, Dombey ignores his loving daughter and first-born child, Florence. Following Mrs. Dombey’s death during the birth of his son, Paul, Dombey focuses all of his ambitions on the boy. A sickly child devoted not to Dombey but to Florence, Paul dies, further alienating father and daughter.

In Dickens’s letter of July 25, 1846, he describes the hoped-for effect of Paul’s death on Dombey:

I purpose changing his feeling of indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred. For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her hand, and never thought of him.

Dombey’s crippling pride will not allow him to admit his approach to life is wrong. Dickens allows Dombey to retain his pride by not directly revealing much of his inner turmoil. He illuminates Dombey’s thoughts and emotions in only one section of the novel, an incident that falls between Paul’s death and Dombey’s second marriage. The title of Chapter 20, “Mr. Dombey Goes upon a Journey,” evokes in readers thoughts of the traditional quest protagonist, who experiences a journey—physical, emotional, and spiritual—that leads to a positive change and a new life, allowing Dickens to emphasize that this journey will have the opposite effect on Mr. Dombey.

During a train ride, Dombey contemplates the general meaning of life, with the background of the landscape rushing by, as seen through the passenger car window. This technique allows imagery to imitate, but not fully reveal, the character’s specific thoughts: Dombey hurries “headlong, not through a rich and varied country, but a wilderness of blighted plans and knowing jealousies.” According to Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens analyzes his character by employing the tool of the dream, allowing readers to apply their own imagination and sense of identification to perceive Dombey’s “lonely thoughts, bred late at night in the sullen despondency and gloom of his retirement.” However, he gains nothing from his journey, other than a deep sense of doom, inspired by “the track of the indomitable monster, Death.”

Dombey marries again, seeking yet another heir. The marriage proves childless and loveless on Dombey’s part. His second wife, Edith Grainger, is a passionate woman with no outlet for that passion within her marriage, although she can express her fondness for Florence. In a long narrative explanation, Dickens compares Edith’s early affection for Dombey to a plant expected to grow in polluted poisoned air. Dombey’s sins breed “infancy that knows no innocence” and “maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt.” The narrator refers not only to Dombey, but also to Edith and her mother, and the interactions of those characters, trapped in an abusive relationship, aids in developing an edginess in Edith that helps temper her position as a predictable melodramatic character.

Edith leaves Dombey for his manipulative business manager, Carker, who represents a pride that differs from that of Dombey. Carker’s pride remains hidden in a false subservience that covers his desire to gain success through Dombey’s efforts. Edith’s motive equates to simple revenge against her husband’s cruelty. When Edith dies in a train accident, Dickens creates a deeply ironic situation. The fortune-teller who had urged Carker to pursue Edith earlier in the novel by remarking, “One child dead, and one child living; one wife dead, and one wife coming. Go and meet her!” had made clear that Dombey would make Edith one more sacrifice to his pride.

Dombey descends further into distress, his pride preventing his asking for help, even when he discovers feelings for Florence. The conflicts he encounters at work parallel his emotional and spiritual suffering, and only through threat to his material possessions can he realize the superior value of human relationships. By the novel’s conclusion, he decides to accept Florence’s attentions.

Dombey’s hypocrisy regarding values challenged Dickens as he worked to develop a dynamic and rounded protagonist, a goal he achieved partly by making clear the presence of a certain dignity within Dombey’s humiliation. Positive minor characters, such as Cook and Perkins, supply moral commentary on Mr. Dombey. They add comedy to the plot but hold the focus on Dombey as the most important character and one deeply flawed. In the 1846 letter, Dickens states, Dombey and Son . . . is a Daughter after all. This vision guided Dickens’s effort, succeeding in his development of characters both appealing and interesting.

Some contemporaries and later critics point to the character of Florence as a weakness, due to her seeming perfection. Like all Victorian writers, Dickens had to deal with creating a heroine that could possess only the limited character facets allowed females in that era’s fiction. In other Victorian fiction, the virtue of such heroines made them boring, one-dimensional, and lacking any individuality. However, by allowing the reader to meet Florence as a young child, Dickens engenders sympathy for her, and her retention of a purity and naiveté becomes more acceptable. She remains crucial in allowing the reader to recognize the depths of Dombey’s parental confusion as the child who had been “unwelcome to him from the first” . . . “her patience, goodness, youth, devotion, love, were as so many atoms in the ashes upon which he set his heel.”

As Tillotson writes, Florence must be approached “differently from Mr. Dombey,” as the reader should see her “as a character drawn wholly within the bounds of her situation; to an extent that she, and the pathos of that situation, are one and the same.”

Like much of Dickens’s work, the novel remained popular into the 21st century, when it, along with multiple sources important to understanding its development, appeared in electronic format, accessible online.

Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Novels

Bibliography
Forster, John, ed. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Cecil Palmer, 1872–74.
The Life of Charles Dickens. Dickens Fellowship, Japan Branch. Available online. URL: http://www.dickens.jp/biography-e.html Downloaded on May 1, 2025.
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: London, 1965.