Some Dombey Links

Interesting discussion in the class today about father-son relationships in culture, and the reason why they're so often mediated by death. Please add in the comments below any thoughts you had in seminar but didn't get round to saying, or any thoughts you've had since. (If you're having trouble commenting -- and I think you need a gmail or blogger account to do it -- email me the comments and I shall post them).

Here are a few things of interest re: Dombey and his relationship to his son.

David Lee Miller, 'Charles Dickens: a Dead Hand at a Baby', in Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father's Witness (Cornell University Press, 2003) Google books has most of this chapter, and some of the rest of the book. This whole monograph is interesting, actually: Miller identifies what he calls 'the formal embarrassment of fatherhood's inability to represent itself' through the frequent and core cultural representation of common sacrifice as the bond between father and son: he looks at the Aeneid, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale and Dombey and Son.

Ian Milner, 'The Dickens Drama: Mr. Dombey', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, (Vol. 24, No. 4, The Charles Dickens Centennial Mar., 1970), pp. 477-487. [JSTOR] Interesting if slightly old fashioned article on the extent to which Dickens can successfully characterise Dombey without giving us any sense of his 'inner life'.

Anne Humpherys, 'Dombey and Son: Carker the Manager' Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Mar., 1980), pp. 397-413. [JSTOR] Reads Carker as 'a Gothic hero-villain.'

And here's a recent (well: 2003) overview of the state of Dickens criticism more generally: some stuff on Dombey and Son although the focus is broader.