Dombey and Son
In his sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” (Morning Chronicle, 11 October 1836), Charles Dickens turns his attention to the connection between manliness and domestic assault. Gazing at an array of secondhand men’s clothing in a shop—a boy’s suit, some corduroys and a round jacket stained with ink, a threadbare suit, a vulgar suit, a green coat with metal buttons, and a coarse common frock—he imagines the clothes as the possessions of one individual, the detritus of a life: “There was the man’s whole life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us” (SB, 78). From the schoolboy in the inky suit to the ruffian in the coarse frock, he reads the man’s moral deterioration in the clothing. Crucially, the man’s imagined moral descent is signaled by acts of domestic assault: Dickens pictures him hitting his mother with a “drunken blow” and striking his wife as she holds a “sickly infant, clamouring for bread” (SB, 79, 80). Finally, Dickens imagines the mother dying in poverty and the family destitute, while the man (now a criminal) is transported and dies a lingering death. “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” then, depicts manly virtue eroding into laziness, drunkenness, domestic violence, and crime. The sketch thus deploys family violence as a key sign of lost manliness. As a Times editorial stated on 12 March 1853, “a man [shows] that he has no claim to consideration as a man by acts of brutal violence against a woman or a child” (6d).
While the sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” focuses on violence against women as a sign of lost manliness, Dickens’s other early writings reveal a nascent interest in the conscience of the male abuser. In Jack’s sobbing in “The Hospital Patient,” and Sikes’s haunting by Nancy in Oliver Twist, Dickens probes the possibility of the abuser’s redemption even as he celebrates female passivity. In Dickens’s early work these are still gestures; the central point of narrative interest remains the abused woman. In 1846–48, however, Dickens published Dombey and Son, his full anatomy of failed manliness. Here, as in the Monmouth Street sketch, domestic assault marks the nadir of masculine failure, in this case in Mr. Dombey’s descent from Victorian businessman and paterfamilias to lonely bankrupt. When Dombey’s wife leaves him (as he thinks) for his business manager, Mr. Carker, he fantasizes about “beating all trace of beauty out of [his wife’s] triumphant face with his bare hand” (DS, 636). Instead, in his impotent rage, he strikes his daughter Florence in the central hall of their home, conflating the women in a symbolic assault on both of them. When he commits this assault on wife and child, his business, his home, and his very identity collapse. Through his inability to understand his obligations within the domestic sphere—in particular his duty to protect wife and child—the successful middle-class businessman falls into the role of the abuser, widely perceived by Victorians as that of the unmanly and unclassed. Paradoxically, then, even as Dombey and Son draws public attention to middle-class family violence, the text’s symbolic language—of slums, tenements, and class descent—still points to the identification of such violence with the working class.
“Much More a Man’s Question”
That Dickens should turn his attention in Dombey and Son to the connections between manliness and family violence points to a growing trend in the 1840s and 1850s for Victorians to see domestic assault as a man’s issue. Lewis Dillwyn, MP for Swansea, exemplified this trend when in 1856 he introduced to the House of Commons a bill proposing flogging as punishment for wife abusers. He described wife assault as “not altogether a woman’s question, but … much more a man’s question.” As he urged the all-male House of Commons, “It concerned the character of our own sex that we should repress these unmanly assaults” (142 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 169; my emphasis). In Dickens’s interest in masculinity and domestic assault—evident in his early sketches and fiction and central to Dombey and Son—he joined in a growing tendency to scrutinize men’s marital behavior and to connect manhood with the cherished Victorian ideal of domesticity.
The Victorians’ regulation of domestic violence partook of their “progressive construction of men’s conjugal behaviour … as a problem to be regulated” (Hammerton, Cruelty, 6–7) and in turn signals the period’s shifting definitions of masculinity. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall document in Family Fortunes, the early nineteenth century witnessed the construction of a new subject position—that of the bourgeois man for whom manliness was inextricably linked to domesticity: “[M]iddle-class men who sought to be ‘someone,’ to count as individuals because of their wealth, their power to command or their capacity to influence people, were, in fact, embedded in networks of familial and female support which underpinned their rise to public prominence” (Davidoff and Hall, 13). For the Victorian middle-class male, Davidoff and Hall argue, domestic harmony thus represented the “crown of the enterprise as well as the basis of public virtue” (Davidoff and Hall, 18). This bourgeois script equated British manliness with self-control over both sexual and violent urges.1 Violence in the home thus destroyed the two central facets of Victorian manliness: it shattered the connection between manliness and domesticity and it showed a man unable to exercise self-control. Hence Dillwyn could characterize wife assault as “much more a man’s question” than a woman’s (142 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 169).
As I will show, Dombey and Son forms part of this discourse that constructed family violence as a threat to masculinity. It represents Dombey’s injury to his daughter as a symbolic assault—a blow, a murder—on his own manliness. And, paradoxically, the text closes with Dombey’s manhood restored by means of, rather then despite, his daughter’s injury. As I will argue, this renders the novel closed to the implications of its own central narrative event. As Anna Clark observes, marital violence threatened Victorian patriarchy because it disrupted the idea that men protected women in the home (A. Clark, “Humanity,” 187). Domestic violence was thus a kind of oxymoron, explosive in its implications for Victorian middle-class values. This threat to the patriarchal home underlies the central section of Dombey and Son, when Edith and Florence, Dombey’s wife and child, leave the Dombey home, and the house itself becomes a symbolic ruin, permeable to the gaze of all onlookers. Yet finally the text allays rather than confronts this threat. By restoring Mr. Dombey to domestic harmony at its conclusion, the text focuses on recreating protective manliness rather than critiquing the unequal gender relations underlying spousal assault. This closure, however, is unstable: in order to reconstitute the home, the text excludes and vilifies Edith, its most powerful female figure, just as The Old Curiosity Shop dismisses the combative Mrs. Jiniwin. Hence both Dombey and Son and The Old Curiosity Shop reveal an uneasiness about female independence and protest, specters fast becoming reality when Dombey and Son was serialized between 1846 and 1848.
Constructing Manliness: The “Good Wives’ Rod” and the Cochrane Decision
Before analyzing Dombey and Son, I want to look at the parliamentary debates on the 1853 Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Aggravated Assaults upon Women and Children to illustrate that members of Parliament described family violence as an assault on manliness. On 10 March 1853, Mr. Fitzroy, Undersecretary of the Home Department, rose in the House of Commons to propose a bill to “enlarge magistrates’ powers to inflict summary penalties for brutal assaults on women and children” (Doggett, 106). This bill, dubbed the “Good Wives’ Rod,” became the first piece of legislation to perceive assaults on women and children as a distinct category (May 1978, 144, 136); it thus formally inaugurated the very category of “family violence” as opposed to assault in general. It increased the maximum penalties under the 1828 Offenses Against the Person Act to £20 or six months in prison (with or without hard labor) and made it possible for a third party witnessing an assault to bring a complaint to a magistrate (Doggett, 106–7). As he introduced his bill, Fitzroy argued that assaults on women and children constituted “a blot” on the “national character” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). Addressing the all-male House of Commons, Fitzroy constructed a manly middle-class Englishman revolted by press accounts of wife assault: “No one could read the public journals without being constantly struck with horror and amazement at the numerous reports of cases of cruel and brutal