portrayal of Sikes and Nancy’s violent relationship and his portrayal of violence in the Dombey home. As Tromp notes, Oliver Twist insulates the middle class from violence (Tromp, 24). Dombey and Son refuses the reader any such distance. Dickens’s portrayal of violence in the Dombey home is highly significant. While lacking the gruesome physicality of Nancy’s murder, Dombey’s assault on his daughter and wife constitutes an assault on contemporary ideals of middle-class manliness, an assault that hit very close to home for many readers of the novel. Far from buttressing middle-class status by portraying the lower classes or the gentry as violent, Dombey and Son worked to expose domestic violence in the middle-class home. Dickens’s text, however, simultaneously reveals a deep ambivalence concerning state intervention there. Even as it portrays the Dombey home as subject to the same male violence found in the police courts and the newspapers, and even as it invites the reader to participate in the public scrutiny of the middle-class home, the text recoils from prying eyes and attempts to reconstitute the middle-class home as a private space. Endorsing the Cochrane decision’s construction of the middle-class home as a space in which interference should be minimized, the novel thus attempts to resolve the issue of domestic assault within the home itself.
In Dombey and Son, the narrator pleads for “a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon [Asmodeus] in the tale” (DS, 620).5 To a large extent, the novel realizes this Asmodean ambition. Serialized between 1846 and 1848, roughly six years after the Cochrane decision and five years before the 1853 act, the novel showed middle-class readers a home of their own social stratum torn by family violence. And such violence is not merely incidental to the text. The novel’s structural fulcrum is chapter 47 (“The Thunderbolt”), in which Dombey strikes his daughter, Florence. More complex still, the narrative establishes through setting, symbol, and parallelism that Dombey’s assault on Florence substitutes for his desire to beat his wife Edith, whom he suspects of adultery. Thematically and structurally, this assault lies at the center of the text.
The anatomy of Mr. Dombey’s failed manliness begins in the novel’s first chapters. These depict the relationships between men, women, and two houses—the commercial House of Dombey and Son and the domestic house of the Dombey family. These early chapters invoke the key Victorian assumption (elucidated by Davidoff and Hall in Family Fortunes) that the House of Dombey and the house of the Dombeys are inseparable enterprises, and will succeed or fail together. As Gail Turley Houston argues, Dombey and Son thus “foregrounds the way the Victorian economic system was founded on family relations, more particularly, those between men and their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.”6 The text strongly suggests that feminine nature—which the narrator describes as “a nature that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, than the nature of men” (DS, 29)—has the potential to redeem “the rapacious nature of capitalist England” (Houston, 91). Mary Poovey notes that in the nineteenth century, femininity was thus seen as capable of “mitigat[ing] the effects of the alienation of market relations”; by representing female work as selfless—and thereby distinguishing it from paid labor—Victorians were able to construct the home as a space of “(apparent) non-alienation.”7 Dombey, however, fails to mitigate his capitalist alienation through associating himself with redemptive femininity in the domestic sphere. He neglects his first wife as well as his daughter in favor of his capitalist enterprise (ironically named the “House of Dombey”). In his second marriage, Dombey misconstrues the relations between the private and public spheres when he chooses his bride, Edith Granger—“very handsome, very haughty, very wilful”(DS, 280)—based on her ability to represent his commercial persona in public. Finally, Dombey confuses the private and the public when he delegates his business manager, Carker, to exercise his authority over his wife. These errors, according to the text’s logic, constitute a failure of manhood, a failure that is conveyed symbolically through a number of discreet allusions to impotence.8 The House of Dombey will fail because Dombey, the “Head of the Home Department,” is neither the father nor the man that contemporary bourgeois expectations demand.
While the novel’s opening thus foretells Dombey’s failure to understand women’s ability, under the Victorian gender system of separate spheres, to redeem the competitive and aggressive lives of men, the text represents this failure in a key central trope—that of domestic assault. The specter of marital violence appears early in the text, immediately after Mrs. Dombey’s funeral. In an act whose symbolism eludes him, Mr. Dombey orders the furniture swathed in newspapers and holland:
When the funeral was over, Mr. Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up.… Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre, muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling’s eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys. The dead and buried lady was awful in a picture frame of ghastly bandages. (DS, 24)
The muffling and bandaging are highly symbolic: the Dombey home, always neglected, now becomes a house of death. Muffled in holland, Mrs. Dombey’s portrait seems swathed in “ghastly bandages” (DS, 24). As the metaphor of bandaging powerfully suggests, there lurks in this house the threat of violence, injury, and wounding—specifically, injury to women. What form that injury might take is ominously suggested by the pages of “journals, daily and weekly” that wrap the furniture, bellpulls, and looking glasses. From these newsprint sheets, the narrator tells us, “obtrud[e] fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders.” The real fear that haunts the House of Dombey is that the dreadful crimes of the daily and weekly newspapers will, through Dombey’s failure to understand the value of women’s ideological work in the Victorian gender system, come to rest in the middle-class home.
Part 1 of the serial version of Dombey and Son (which contains the description of “accounts of death and dreadful murders” obtruding from the newspapers muffling the furniture and portrait) was published in October 1846. A perusal of the Times for September and October 1846 reveals the crimes that haunted the Victorian cultural imagination at this time: marital assault and wife murder. As a Times editorial noted, “instances of brutality on the part of a husband towards a wife” had “of late been very numerous” (Times, 24 August 1846, 4d). The police reports of the Times from the autumn of 1846 contain a litany of violent crimes against women:
WORSHIP-STREET.—An elderly man, named Richard Tweedy, described as a foreman in the London Docks … was placed at the bar, yesterday, before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with cutting and wounding his wife, Catherine Tweedy, with intent to murder her. (Times, 1 September 1846, 6d)
WORSHIP-STREET.—A few days ago a young married woman named Anne Guest, whose face was shockingly cut and contused, and one of her eyes closed up, applied to Mr. BROUGHTON for an assault warrant against James Guest, her husband, a journeyman dyer, living in White-cross place, Finsbury. (Times, 17 September 1846, 7d)
WORSHIP-STREET.—Yesterday Edward Spiller, a middle-aged man of respectable appearance, described as lately a publican, was brought up on a warrant before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with violently assaulting his wife, Caroline Spiller, and also conspiring with another man, now in custody, named Thomas Byrne, to effect a capital offence upon her person. (Times, 24 September 1846, 7b)
MANSLAUGHTER IN LIVERPOOL.—An inquest was held before Mr. P.F. Curry, borough coroner, on Wednesday, upon view of the body of Catherine Tully, of Thomas-street, in this town, who met her death by kicks in the abdomen, received from her husband. (Times, 25 September 1846, 5e)
MARLBOROUGH-STREET.—Robert Long Andrews, a young man, was summoned by Fanny Andrews his wife, for ill-treatment. (Times,
