Charles Dickens's 'Dombey and Son' Part IV
Great Exhibition in 1851 he found it curious that it placed 'side by side' two countries, England and China. He thought that the exhibit of the former was a 'moving world' whilst China's exhibition was one of a 'people who came to a dead stop, Heaven knows how many years ago...' and was placed "side by side with the exhibition of the moving world"; to Dickens, China and England were the extremes of 'progress and reaction, movement and stagnancy'.14 The firm of Dombey and Son was stagnant as was the church and educational systems in the novel; all were unproductive and non-progressive. Dickens believed that England prospered because it communicated with the world; its prosperity depending upon 'a flow of goods and information within and beyond its borders; Interchange'.15
Household Words advocated world-wide free trade After the repeal of the Corn Laws, Dickens felt that the Tories were still inherently protectionist and were trying to turn England into another shielded China.16 When Dickens visited the Bank of England, he wondered at the 'mighty heart of active capital, through whose arteries and veins flows the entire circulating medium of this great country'.17 Dombey's office is shown as representing the 'cavern of some ocean monster, looking on with a red eye at the mysteries of the deep' (Chapt. XIII). Caverns have no opportunity for circulation of any kind and therefore becomes an ineffectual base for commercial growth or progress and helps to explain Mr. Dombey's financial demise. 'Knowledge is the life-blood of Genius' declared an article in Household Words 'and must, where it can be spread and circulated'.18 Again the idea of circulation as life giving force may be likened as the inverse of the redeeming water imagery Dickens used throughout Dombey and Son; in order for spiritual growth to occur, the characters were to listen to what the waves were saying; Paul's final voyage to sea completes the image of the 'ocean monster of the deep' and creates a circle: Paul does meet with the firm of Dombey and Son if only within the eternal sea.
The next installment will explore the theme of economics, within 'Dombey', using the theories of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle.
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