Charles Dickens's 'Dombey and Son' Part II

Dicken's church is filled with "empty pews" with "empty benches" mounting to the roof and lost in the shadow of the great grim organ"; there were "dusty and cold stone slabs". Dickens clearly associated the church primarily with funerals rather than weddings and christenings; however, all are individual stations in life which most of us pass through some of which are interwoven with others. Perhaps Thomas Carlyle may shed some light on Dickens's disused church: ‘But it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him on the rim of the sky; minatory of confirmatory! God's absolute Laws...have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of virtue and the Moral Sublime.’ Carlyle continues with the idea that Mid-Victorian modernity does not allow for eternal "substances" but rather concerns itself primarily with the "show and shams" of things; Mr Dombey's appearance at the church for the christening of the other half of his firm establishes mammonism within the novel: 'It might have been well for Mr. Dombey, if he had thought of his own dignity a little less; and had thought of the ceremony in which he took so formal and stiff a part...His arrogance contrasted strangely with its history" (Chapt. 5).

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