In 1846, in Switzerland, Dickens conceived and began writing a new great novel, who graduated in 1848 in England. Latest chapters it was created after the February Revolution of 1848 in France. It was Dombey and Son - one of Dickens's most significant works in the first half of his creative career. The realistic skill of the writer, developed in previous years, appeared here in full force.
“Have you read Dombey and Son,” wrote V.G. Belinsky. Annenkov P.V. shortly before his death, getting acquainted with last work Dickens. – If not, hurry up and read it. It's a miracle. Everything that Dickens wrote before this novel now seems pale and weak, as if by a completely different writer. This is something so excellent that I’m afraid to say: my head is out of place from this novel.”
“Dombey and Son” was created at the same time as “Vanity Fair” by Thackeray and “Jane Eyre” by S. Bronte. But it is quite obvious that Dickens's novel differs from the works of his contemporaries and compatriots.
The novel was created at the time of the highest flowering of Chartism in England, at the height of revolutionary events in other European countries. In the second half of the 1840s, the groundlessness of many of the writer’s illusions, and above all his belief in the possibility of class peace, became increasingly obvious. His confidence in the effectiveness of the appeal to the bourgeoisie could not help but be shaken. "Dombey and Son" reveals with great conviction the inhumane essence of bourgeois relations. Dickens strives to show the relationship and interdependence between various aspects of life, the social conditioning of human behavior not only in society, but also in personal life. Dickens's novel reflected; program, his aesthetic credo, a moral ideal associated with a protest against the selfishness and alienation of man in society. The beautiful and the good in Dickens are the highest moral categories, evil is interpreted as a forced ugliness, a deviation from the norm, and therefore it is immoral and inhuman.
Dombey and Son is different from all previous Dickens novels and in many of its features marks the transition to a new stage.
In Dombey and Son, the connection with literary tradition, that dependence on models, is almost imperceptible. realistic novel XVIII century, which is noticeable in the plot structure of such novels as “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”, even “Martin Chuzzlewit”. The novel is different from everyone else previous works Dickens both in its composition and emotional intonation.
The novel “Dombey and Son” is a work with many characters, at the same time, when creating it, the author used a new principle of organization for him art material. If Dickens constructed previous novels as a series of sequentially alternating episodes or included several parallel developing and at certain moments intersecting plot lines, then in Dombey and Son everything, down to the smallest detail, is subordinated to the unity of plan. Dickens departs from his favorite manner of organizing the plot as a linear movement, develops several storylines, arising from their own contradictions, but intertwined in one center. It becomes the Dombey and Son company, its fate and the fate of its owner: the life of the owner of the ship's tools shop, Solomon Giles, and his nephew Walter Gay, the aristocrat Edith Granger, the family of the fireman Toodle, and others are connected with them.
Dombey and Son is a novel about the “greatness and fall” of Dombey, a major London merchant. The character on whom the author's main attention is focused is Mr. Dombey. No matter how great was Dickens's skill in portraying such characters as the manager of the Dombey and Son form Carker, Dombey's daughter Florence and the early deceased little son his Paul, Dombey's wife Edith or her mother Mrs. Skewton - all these images ultimately develop the main theme - Dombey's theme.
Dombey and Son is, first and foremost, an anti-bourgeois novel. The entire content of the work, its figurative structure is determined by the pathos of criticism of private property morality. Unlike novels named after the main character, this work has the name of a trading company in the title. This emphasizes the importance of this company for Dombey’s fate and indicates the values that a successful London businessman worships. It is no coincidence that the author begins the work by defining the meaning of the company for the main character of the novel: “These three words contained the meaning of Mr. Dombey’s whole life. The earth was created for Dombey and the Son, so that they could carry out trade on it, and the sun and moon were created to illuminate them with their light... Rivers and seas were created for the navigation of their ships; the rainbow promised them good weather, the wind favored or opposed their enterprises; the stars and planets moved in their orbits in order to preserve the indestructible system in which they were at the center.” Thus, the Dombey and Son firm becomes an image - a symbol of bourgeois prosperity, which is accompanied by the loss of natural human feelings, a kind of semantic center of the novel.
Dickens's novel was originally intended to be a "tragedy of pride." Pride is important, although not the only quality of the bourgeois businessman Dombey. But it is precisely this trait of the protagonist that determines his social status owner of the Dombey and Son trading company. In his pride, Dombey loses normal human feelings. The cult of business in which he is engaged and the consciousness of his own greatness turn the London businessman into a soulless automaton. Everything in the Dombey house is subordinated to the harsh necessity of fulfilling one's official duties - serving the company. The words “must” and “make an effort” are the main ones in the vocabulary of the Dombey surname. Those who cannot be guided by these formulas are doomed to death, like Dombey’s first wife Fanny, who failed to “make an effort.”
Dickens's ideological plan is revealed in Dombey and Son as the characters' characters develop and the action unfolds. In his portrayal of Dombey - a new version of the Chuzzlewit and Scrooge - the writer achieves a realistic generalization of the enormous artistic power. Resorting to favorites artistic medium building a complex image, Dickens paints a portrait detail by detail, creating the typical character of a bourgeois entrepreneur.
The writer carefully writes out appearance Dombey shows him in inextricable connection with his surroundings. The character traits of Dombey, a businessman and exploiter, a callous and selfish egoist, formed in a certain social practice, are transferred to the house in which he lives, the street on which this house stands, and the things that surround Dombey. The house is as prim, cold and majestic inside and out as its owner; most often it is characterized by the epithets “dull” and “deserted”. The household objects that the writer depicts serve to continue the characterization of their owner: “Of all... things, the unbending cold fireplace tongs and the poker seemed to lay claim to the closest relationship with Mr. Dombey in his buttoned tailcoat, white tie, with a heavy gold watch chain and squeaky shoes."
Mr Dombey's coldness is emphasized metaphorically. The words “cold” and “ice” are often used to describe a businessman. They are played out especially expressively in the chapter “The Christening of the Field”: it’s cold in the church where the ceremony takes place, the water in the font is icy, it’s cold in the state rooms of the Dombey mansion, guests are offered cold snacks and ice-cold champagne. The only person who does not experience discomfort in such conditions is the “icy” Mr. Dombey himself.
The house also reflects the fate of its owner in the future: it is “decorated with everything that money can buy” on the days of Dombey’s second wedding and becomes a ruin on the days of his bankruptcy.
Dombey and Son is a social novel; main conflict, revealed through Mr. Dombey’s relationship with the outside world, has a social character: the author emphasizes that the main driving force The thing that determines the fate of people in bourgeois society is money. At the same time, it is possible to define the novel as a family novel - it is a dramatic story about the fate of one family.
Emphasizing that Dombey’s personal qualities are related to his social status, the author notes that even in assessing people, a businessman is guided by ideas about their importance for his business. Trade “wholesale and retail” turned people into a kind of commodity: “Dombey and Son often dealt with the skin, but never with the heart. They provided this fashionable product to boys and girls, boarding houses and books.” Mr. Dombey's financial affairs and the activities of his company, to one degree or another, influence the fate of the other characters in the novel. “Dombey and Son” is the name of the company and at the same time the history of a family, in the members of which its head saw not people, but only obedient executors of his will. Marriage for him is a simple business transaction. He sees his wife’s task as giving the company an heir and cannot forgive Fani for her “negligence”, which manifested itself in the birth of her daughter, who for the father is nothing more than “a counterfeit coin that cannot be invested in the business.” Dombey rather indifferently greets the news of the death of his first wife from childbirth: Fanny “fulfilled her duty” in relation to her husband, finally giving birth to the long-awaited son, giving her husband, or rather, his company, an heir.
However, Dombey is a complex character, much more complex than all of Dickens's previous hero-villains. His soul is constantly weighed down by a burden that sometimes he feels more, sometimes less. It is no coincidence that Mr. Dombey appears to Paul’s nurse as a prisoner “imprisoned in solitary confinement, or a strange ghost who can neither be called nor understood.” At the beginning of the novel, the author does not explain the essence and nature of Dombey's condition. It gradually becomes apparent that much is explained by the fact that the forty-eight-year-old gentleman is also a “son” in the firm of Dombey and Son, and many of his actions are explained by the fact that he constantly feels his duty to the firm.
Pride does not allow Mr. Dombey to indulge in human weaknesses, for example, self-pity on the occasion of the death of his wife. Most of all, he is worried about the fate of little Paul, on whom he places great hopes and whom he begins to educate, perhaps even with excessive zeal, trying to interfere with the natural development of the child, overloading him with activities and depriving him of leisure and fun games.
The children in Dickens's house are generally unhappy, they are deprived of childhood, deprived of human warmth and affection. Simple and warm-hearted people, for example, nurse Toodle, cannot understand how a father can not love little Florence, why he makes her suffer from neglect. However, it is much worse that Dombey, such as he is portrayed at the beginning of the story, is generally incapable of true love. Outwardly it may seem that Paul does not suffer from the lack of fatherly love, but even this feeling is dictated by Dombey primarily for business reasons. In the long-awaited son, he sees, first of all, a future companion, an heir to the business, and it is this circumstance that determines his attitude towards the boy, which his father accepts as genuine feelings. Imaginary love takes on a destructive character, like everything that comes from Mr. Dombey. Paul is not an abandoned child, but a child deprived of a normal childhood. He does not know his mother, but remembers the face of Mrs. Toodle bending over his crib, whom he loses due to the whims of his father (Paul “lost weight and frailty after the removal of the nurse and for a long time as if he was just waiting for the opportunity... to find his lost mother"). Despite the boy’s fragile health, Dombey strives to “make a man out of him” as quickly as possible, ahead of the laws of development. Little sickly Paul cannot endure the system of education into whose power his father gave him. Mrs. Pipchin's boarding school and the clutches of education at Dr. Blimber's school finally undermine the strength of the already weak child. Tragic death little Paul is inevitable, for he was born with a living heart and could not become a true Dombey.
Dombey worries with bewilderment rather than pain premature death son, because the boy cannot be saved by money, which in Mr. Dombey's mind is everything. In essence, he endures the death of his beloved son as calmly as he once did with his words about the purpose of money: “Dad, what does money mean?” - “Money can do anything.” - “Why didn’t they save mom?” This naive and ingenuous dialogue baffles Dombey, but not for long. He is still firmly convinced of the power of money. The loss of his son for Dombey is a great business failure, because little Paul for his father is, first of all, a companion and heir, a symbol of the prosperity of the Dombey and Son company. But as long as the company itself exists, Mr. Dombey’s own life does not seem meaningless. He continues to follow the same path that is already familiar to him.
The money buys a second wife, aristocrat Edith Granger. The beautiful Edith should become an adornment to the company; her feelings are absolutely indifferent to her husband. For Dombey, Edith's attitude towards him is incomprehensible. Dombey is sure that you can buy humility, obedience, and devotion. Having acquired a wonderful “product” in the person of Edith and provided for her, Dombey believes that he has done everything necessary to create a normal family atmosphere. The thought of the need to establish normal human relationships does not even occur to him. Internal conflict Edith is incomprehensible to him, because all relationships, thoughts and feelings of people are accessible to his perception only to the extent that they can be measured with money. The power of money turns out to be far from omnipotent when Dombey collides with the proud and strong Edith. Her departure was able to shake Dombey’s confidence in the indestructibility of his power. The woman herself, whose inner world remained something unknown to her husband, is not of particular value to Dombey. Therefore, he experiences the escape of his wife quite calmly, although his pride is dealt a sensitive blow. It is after this that Dombey becomes almost hated by Florence, his selflessly loving daughter; her father is annoyed by her presence in the house, even by her very existence.
Almost from the very beginning of the novel, clouds hang over Dombey, which gradually thicken more and more, and the dramatic denouement is accelerated by Dombey himself, his “arrogance” in the author’s interpretation. The death of Paul, the flight of Florence, the departure of his second wife - all these blows that Dombey suffers end in bankruptcy, which is being prepared by Carker Jr. - his manager and confidant. Upon learning of the ruin that he owes to his attorney, Dombey experiences a real blow. It was the collapse of the company that was the last straw that destroyed the stony heart of its owner.
The novel “Dombey and Son” was conceived as a parable about a repentant sinner, but the work is not reduced to a story about how fate punishes Dombey and how he, having gone through the purgatory of remorse and torture of loneliness, finds happiness in the love of his daughter and grandchildren. Merchant Dombey is a typical figure for Victorian England, where the power of gold is growing stronger and people who have achieved relative success in society consider themselves masters of life.
Dickens reveals and precisely establishes the nature of evil: money and private lust. Money gives rise to Mr. Dombey's class self-confidence, it gives him power over people and at the same time dooms him to loneliness, making him arrogant and withdrawn.
One of the greatest merits of Dickens as a realist is that he shows the essence of his contemporary society, which follows the path of technical progress, but to which such concepts as spirituality and compassion for the misfortunes of loved ones are alien. The psychological characteristics of the characters - primarily Dombey himself - in this novel by Dickens, compared to his previous works, become significantly more complex. After the collapse of his company, Dombey shows his best side. He pays off almost all of the company's debts, proving his nobility and decency. This is probably the result of the internal struggle that he constantly wages with himself and which helps him to be reborn, or rather, to be reborn for a new life, not; lonely, not homeless, but full of human participation.
Florence was destined to play a significant role in Dombey's moral degeneration. Her perseverance and loyalty, love and mercy, compassion for the grief of others contributed to the return of her father’s affection and love to her. More precisely, thanks to her, Dombey discovered unspent feelings in himself. vitality, the ability to “make an effort,” but now - in the name of goodness and humanity.
At the end of the work, the author shows Dombey’s final rebirth into a caring father and grandfather, nursing Florence’s children and giving his daughter all the love that she was deprived of in childhood and adolescence. The author describes the changes taking place in Dombey's inner world in such a way that they are not at all perceived as the fabulous transformation of the miser Scrooge. Everything that happens to Dombey is prepared by the course of events of the work. Dickens the artist harmoniously merges with Dickens the philosopher and humanist. He emphasizes that social position determines Dombey's moral character, just as circumstances influence the change in his character.
“There is no sharp change in Mr. Dombey,” writes Dickens, “either in this book or in life. The feeling of his own injustice lives in him all the time. The more he suppresses it, the more injustice it becomes. Buried shame and external circumstances can cause the struggle to come to light within a week or a day; but this struggle lasted for years, and victory was not won easily.”
Obviously, one of the most important tasks that Dickens set himself when creating his novel was to show the possibility of moral regeneration of a person. Dombey's tragedy is a social tragedy, and it is performed in the Balzac manner: the novel shows the relationship not only between man and society, but also between man and the material world. Telling about the collapse of the family and the ambitious hopes of Mr. Dombey, Dickens emphasizes that money carries evil, poisons the minds of people, enslaves them and turns them into heartless proud and selfish people. At the same time, the less society influences a person, the more humane and purer he becomes.
According to Dickens, this Negative influence has a particularly painful effect on children. Depicting the process of formation of the Field, Dickens touches on the problem of upbringing and education, repeatedly raised in his works (“The Adventures of Oliver Twist”, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”). Upbringing had a direct bearing on the fate of little Paul. It was intended to mold him into a new Dombey, to make the boy as tough and stern as his father. Staying at the boarding house of Mrs. Pipchin, whom the author calls “an excellent ogress,” and the school of Dr. Blimberg could not break the pure-hearted child. At the same time, overloading Paul with excessive activities, unnecessary knowledge, forcing him to do things that are completely alien to his consciousness and completely not listening to internal state child, “false educators” essentially destroy him physically. Excessive stress completely undermines the boy's fragile health, leading to his death. The process of upbringing has an equally unfavorable effect on representatives of a child of a completely different social status - the son of a fireman Toodle. The son of kind and spiritually noble parents, sent by Mr. Dombey to study in the society of the Merciful Grinders, is completely corrupted, losing all the best traits instilled in him in the family.
As in Dickens's previous novels, numerous characters belonging to different social camps can be divided into "good" and "bad". At the same time, in the novel Dombey and Son there is no positive hero and a “villain” opposed to him. The polarization of good and evil in this work was carried out subtly and thoughtfully. Under Dickens's pen, the diversity of life no longer fit into the old scheme of the struggle between good and evil. Therefore, in this work the writer refuses excessive one-linearity and schematism in the depiction of the characters. Dickens strives to reveal not only the character of Mr. Dombey himself, but also the inner world of other characters in the novel (Edith, Miss Tox, Carker Sr., etc.) in their inherent psychological complexity.
The most complex figure in the novel is Karker Jr., a businessman and predator by nature. Carker seduces Alice Merwood, dreams of taking possession of Edith, and on his recommendation, Walter Gay is sent to the West Indies to certain death. Written in the style of grotesque, satirical exaggeration, the image of Karker cannot be considered socially typical. He appears before the reader as a predator grappling with another in a struggle for prey. But at the same time, his actions are not driven by a thirst for enrichment, as evidenced by the ending of the novel: having ruined Dombey, Carker himself does not appropriate anything from his patron’s fortune. He experiences great satisfaction watching Dombey's humiliation and the collapse of his entire personal and business life.
As E.Yu. Genieva rightly notes, one of the authors of “History world literature"(vol. 6), "Carker's rebellion against Dombey is very inconsistent... The true motives of Carker's behavior are unclear. Apparently, we can assume that psychologically this is one of the first “underground people” in English literature, torn apart by the most complex internal contradictions.”
In his interpretation of Carker's "rebellion" against Dombey, Dickens remained faithful to the concept of social relationships that was already evident in Nicholas Nickleby. Both Dombey and Carker violate the norms of social behavior that Dickens considered correct. Both Dombey and Carker receive their due retribution: while Dombey fails as an entrepreneur and suffers the greatest humiliation, Carker receives his retribution by meeting death by accident, under the wheels of a speeding train.
Image of the railway in this episode not accidental. The express is this “fiery, roaring devil, so smoothly rushing into the distance,” an image of rushing life, rewarding some and punishing others, causing changes in people. It is no coincidence that the author emphasizes that in last minutes life, looking at the sunrise, Carker touched virtue at least for a moment: “When he watched with dim eyes how it rose, clear and serene. Indifferent to those crimes and atrocities that, from the beginning of the world, were committed in the radiance of its rays, who would argue that at least a vague idea of a virtuous life on earth and the reward for it in heaven did not awaken in him.” This is not moralizing, but a philosophy of life that the writer followed throughout his entire work.
It is from the standpoint of that philosophy that he considers not only the behavior of Carker, but also other characters. According to Dickens, evil is concentrated in those who are constantly hypocritical, humiliated, currying favor with their superiors (Miss Tox, Mrs. Skewton, Mrs. Chick, Joshua Bagstock, Mrs. Pipchin, etc.). Close to them stands the inhabitant of the London bottom - the “kind” Mrs. Brown, whose image clearly echoes the images of slum dwellers depicted in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”. All these characters have their own life position, which generally boils down to the unconditional worship of the power of money and those who possess it.
The writer contrasted the inhumanity of Dombey, his manager Carker and their “like-minded people” with the spiritual greatness and true humanity of Florence and her friends - simple workers, the “little people” of London. This is the young man Walter Gay and his uncle, small shopkeeper Solomon Giles, Giles' friend - retired captain Cuttle, this is, finally, the family of the driver Toodle, the driver himself and his wife - Field's nurse, maid Florence Susan Nipper. Each of them individually and all of them together oppose Dombey’s world not only morally, but also socially, they embody best qualities ordinary people. These people live by laws opposite to money-grubbing. If Dombey is confident that everything in the world can be bought with money, these simple, modest workers are incorruptible and selfless. It is no coincidence that, speaking of the fireman Toodle, Dickens emphasizes that this worker is “the complete opposite in every respect to Mr. Dombey.”
The Toodle family is another variation on the Dickensian theme of family, in contrast to the Dombey family and the aristocratic family of the elderly "Cleopatra" - Mrs. Skewton. The healthy moral atmosphere of the Toodle family is emphasized by the appearance of its members (“a blooming young woman with a face like an apple,” “a younger woman, not so plump, but also with a face like an apple, who was leading two plump children with faces like similar to an apple”, etc.). Thus, Dickens emphasizes that what is normal and healthy is located outside the world of bourgeois businessmen, among ordinary people.
In scenes depicting Paul's illness and death, the author exalts the love of a simple woman - his nurse, Mrs. Toodle. Her suffering is the suffering of simple and loving heart: “Yes, none of the strangers would shed tears at the sight of him and call him dear boy, her little boy, her poor, dear, exhausted child. No other woman would kneel down next to his bed, take his emaciated hand and press it to her lips and chest, like a person who has the right to caress her.”
Bright and expressive is the image of the child - Paul Dombey, presented as perfect hero. Developing the traditions of Wordsworth, Dickens shows the peculiarities of the child's world, rebelling against treating children as small adults. The writer poeticized the world of childhood, conveyed the spontaneity and naivety with which a little person evaluates what is happening. Thanks to the image of Paul Dombey, the writer allows readers to look at everything around them through the eyes of a little “sage” who, with his “strange” and precisely targeted questions, puzzles adults. The boy allows himself to doubt even such unshakable values of the adult world as money, irrefutably proving their powerlessness to save a person.
Among the characters depicted in the novel, the most controversial is the image of Dombey’s second wife, Edith. She grew up in a world where everything is bought and sold, and could not escape its corrupting influence. At first, her mother essentially sold her by marrying her to Granger. Later, with the blessing and assistance of Edith's mother, Mrs. Skewton, a deal is struck with Dombey. Edith is proud and arrogant, but at the same time she is “too humiliated and depressed to save herself.” Her nature combines arrogance and self-contempt, depression and rebellion, the desire to defend her own dignity and the desire to completely destroy own life, thereby challenging the society she hated.
Dickens's artistic style in Dombey and Son continued to represent a combination of various artistic techniques and trends. However, humor and the comic element are pushed into the background here, appearing in the depiction of secondary characters. The main place in the novel begins to be occupied by in-depth psychological analysis internal reasons for certain actions and experiences of the heroes.
The writer's narrative style becomes significantly more complicated. She gets rich new symbols, interesting and subtle observations. The psychological characteristics of the characters become more complex, the functionality expands speech characteristics, supplemented by facial expressions and gestures, the role of dialogues and monologues increases. The philosophical sound of the novel intensifies. It is associated with images of the ocean and the river of time flowing into it, running waves. The author conducts an interesting experiment with time - in the story about Paul, it either stretches or contracts, depending on the state of health and emotional mood of this little old man, who is solving far from childish issues.
When creating the novel Dombey and Son, Dickens worked more carefully on the language than before. In an effort to maximize the expressiveness of images and enhance their meaning, he resorted to a variety of techniques and rhythms of speech. In the most significant episodes, the writer’s speech acquires special tension and emotional richness.
The scene of Carker's escape after an explanation with Edith can be considered the highest achievement of Dickens as a psychologist. Carker, who defeated Dombey, unexpectedly finds himself rejected by her. His intrigues and deceit turned against him. His courage and self-confidence are crushed: “The proud woman cast him aside like a worm, lured him into a trap and showered him with ridicule, rebelled against him and cast him into the dust. He slowly poisoned the soul of this woman and hoped that he had turned her into a slave, submissive to all his desires. When, plotting a deception, he himself was deceived, and the fox skin was torn off from him, he slipped away, experiencing confusion, humiliation, and fear.” Carker's escape is reminiscent of Sikes's escape from The Adventures of Oliver Twist, but there was a lot of melodrama in the description of this scene. Here the author presents a huge variety emotional states hero. Carker's thoughts are confused, the real and the imaginary are intertwined, the pace of the story quickens. It is like either a mad race on a horse or a fast ride along railway. Karker moves at a fantastic speed, so that even thoughts, replacing one another in his head, cannot get ahead of this race. The horror of being overtaken does not leave him day or night. Despite the fact that Karker sees everything happening around him, it seems to him that time is catching up with him. In conveying movement and its rhythm, Dickens uses repeated phrases: “Again the monotonous ringing, the ringing of bells and the clatter of hooves and wheels, and there is no rest.”
When outlining positive characters Dickens, as before, widely uses poetic means of humorous characterization: descriptions of appearance endowed with funny details, eccentric behavior, speech indicating their impracticality and simplicity (for example, Captain Cuttle sprinkles his speech with quotes that seem appropriate to the occasion).
At the same time, Dickens's skill as a caricaturist is improving: emphasizing the characteristic features of a particular character, he often uses the technique of the grotesque. Thus, the leitmotif of Karker’s image becomes a satirical detail - his shiny white teeth, which become a symbol of his predation and deceit: “A skull, a hyena, a cat together could not show as many teeth as Karker shows.” The author repeatedly emphasizes that this character, with his soft gait, sharp claws and insinuating gait, resembles a cat. The leitmotif of Dombey's image becomes freezing cold. Mrs. Skewton is likened to Cleopatra, reclining on the sofa and “languishing over a cup of coffee” and the room immersed in thick darkness, which is designed to hide her false hair, false teeth, and artificial blush. In describing her appearance, Dickens uses the keyword “false” as the key word. Major Bagstock's speech is dominated by the same expressions, characterizing him as a snob, a sycophant and a dishonest person.
Mastery of portraiture and psychological characteristics very high in Dombey and Son, and even comic minor characters, having lost the grotesque and comical features characteristic of the heroes of the first period, are portrayed by the writer as people well known to readers who could be distinguished from the crowd.
Contrary to the idea of class peace that Dickens preached in his Christmas stories of the 40s, in the novel written on the eve of the 1848 revolution, he objectively exposed and condemned bourgeois society. The general tone of the narrative in the novel turns out to be completely different than in previously created works. Dombey and Son is Dickens's first novel, devoid of the optimistic intonation that was so characteristic of the writer before. There is no place here for the boundless optimism that defined the character of Dickens's works. In the novel, for the first time, motives of doubt and vague but aching sadness were heard. The author was still convinced that his contemporaries needed to be influenced through persuasion. At the same time, he clearly feels that he is unable to overcome the idea of \u200b\u200bthe inviolability existing system public relations, cannot inspire others with the idea of the need to build their lives based on high moral principles.
Tragic decision main topic novel, reinforced by a number of additional lyrical motifs and intonations, makes the novel Dombey and Son a work of insoluble and unresolved conflicts. The emotional coloring of the whole figurative system speaks of a crisis that had matured in the minds of the great artist by the end of the 40s.
In 1846, in Switzerland, Dickens conceived and began writing a new great novel, which he completed in 1848 in England. Its last chapters were created after February revolution 1848 in France. It was Dombey and Son - one of Dickens's most significant works in the first half of his life. creative activity. The realistic skill of the writer, developed in previous years, appeared here in full force.
“Have you read Dombey and Son,” wrote V.G. Belinsky. Annenkov P.V. shortly before his death, getting acquainted with the last work of Dickens. – If not, hurry up and read it. It's a miracle. Everything that Dickens wrote before this novel now seems pale and weak, as if by a completely different writer. This is something so excellent that I’m afraid to say: my head is out of place from this novel.”
“Dombey and Son” was created at the same time as “Vanity Fair” by Thackeray and “Jane Eyre” by S. Bronte. But it is quite obvious that Dickens's novel differs from the works of his contemporaries and compatriots.
The novel was created at the time of the highest flowering of Chartism in England, at the height revolutionary events in other European countries. In the second half of the 1840s, the groundlessness of many of the writer’s illusions, and above all his belief in the possibility of class peace, became increasingly obvious. His confidence in the effectiveness of the appeal to the bourgeoisie could not help but be shaken. "Dombey and Son" reveals with great conviction the inhumane essence of bourgeois relations. Dickens strives to show the interconnection and interdependence between various aspects of life, the social conditioning of human behavior not only in public but also in personal life. Dickens's novel reflected; program, his aesthetic credo, moral ideal associated with a protest against selfishness and alienation of a person in society. In Dickens, the beautiful and the good are the highest moral categories; evil is interpreted as forced ugliness, a deviation from the norm, and therefore it is immoral and inhuman.
Dombey and Son is different from all previous Dickens novels and in many of its features marks the transition to a new stage.
In "Dombey and Son" the connection with the literary tradition is almost imperceptible, the dependence on examples of realistic novel XVIII century, which is noticeable in the plot structure of such novels as “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”, even “Martin Chuzzlewit”. The novel differs from all previous works of Dickens both in its composition and emotional intonation.
The novel “Dombey and Son” is a work with many characters, and at the same time, when creating it, the author used a new principle for organizing artistic material. If Dickens constructed previous novels as a series of sequentially alternating episodes or included several parallel developing and at certain moments intersecting plot lines, then in Dombey and Son everything, down to the smallest detail, is subordinated to the unity of plan. Dickens departs from his favorite manner of organizing the plot as a linear movement, developing several plot lines that arise from their own contradictions, but are intertwined in one center. It becomes the Dombey and Son company, its fate and the fate of its owner: the life of the owner of the ship's tools shop, Solomon Giles, and his nephew Walter Gay, the aristocrat Edith Granger, the family of the fireman Toodle, and others are connected with them.
Dombey and Son is a novel about the “greatness and fall” of Dombey, a major London merchant. The character on whom the author's main attention is focused is Mr. Dombey. No matter how great Dickens' skill in portraying such characters as the manager of the Dombey and Son form Carker, Dombey's daughter Florence and his early deceased little son Paul, Dombey's wife Edith or her mother Mrs Skewton - all these images ultimately develop the main theme is the Dombey theme.
Dombey and Son is, first and foremost, an anti-bourgeois novel. The entire content of the work, its figurative structure is determined by the pathos of criticism of private property morality. Unlike novels named after the main character, this work has the name of a trading company in the title. This emphasizes the importance of this company for Dombey’s fate and indicates the values that a successful London businessman worships. It is no coincidence that the author begins the work by defining the meaning of the company for the main character of the novel: “These three words contained the meaning of Mr. Dombey’s whole life. The earth was created for Dombey and the Son, so that they could carry out trade on it, and the sun and moon were created to illuminate them with their light... Rivers and seas were created for the navigation of their ships; the rainbow promised them good weather, the wind favored or opposed their enterprises; the stars and planets moved in their orbits in order to preserve the indestructible system in which they were at the center.” Thus, the Dombey and Son firm becomes an image - a symbol of bourgeois prosperity, which is accompanied by the loss of natural human feelings, a kind of semantic center of the novel.
Dickens's novel was originally intended to be a "tragedy of pride." Pride is important, although not the only quality of the bourgeois businessman Dombey. But it is precisely this feature of the protagonist that is determined by his social position as the owner of the Dombey and Son trading company. In his pride, Dombey loses normal human feelings. The cult of business in which he is engaged and the consciousness of his own greatness turn the London businessman into a soulless automaton. Everything in the Dombey house is subordinated to the harsh necessity of fulfilling one's official duties - serving the company. The words “must” and “make an effort” are the main ones in the vocabulary of the Dombey surname. Those who cannot be guided by these formulas are doomed to death, like Dombey’s first wife Fanny, who failed to “make an effort.”
Dickens's ideological plan is revealed in Dombey and Son as the characters' characters develop and the action unfolds. In his portrayal of Dombey - a new version of the Chuzzlewit and Scrooge - the writer achieves a realistic generalization of enormous artistic power. Resorting to his favorite artistic means of constructing a complex image, Dickens paints a portrait detail by detail, creating the typical character of a bourgeois entrepreneur.
The writer carefully describes Dombey's appearance and shows it in inextricable connection with the surrounding environment. Characteristics of Dombey, a businessman and exploiter, a callous and selfish egoist, formed in a certain social practice, are transferred to the house in which he lives, the street on which this house stands, the things that surround Dombey. The house is as prim, cold and majestic inside and out as its owner; most often it is characterized by the epithets “dull” and “deserted”. The household objects that the writer depicts serve to continue the characterization of their owner: “Of all... things, the unbending cold fireplace tongs and the poker seemed to lay claim to the closest relationship with Mr. Dombey in his buttoned tailcoat, white tie, with a heavy gold watch chain and squeaky shoes."
Mr Dombey's coldness is emphasized metaphorically. The words “cold” and “ice” are often used to describe a businessman. They are played out especially expressively in the chapter “The Christening of the Field”: it’s cold in the church where the ceremony takes place, the water in the font is icy, it’s cold in the state rooms of the Dombey mansion, guests are offered cold snacks and ice-cold champagne. The only person, who does not experience discomfort in such conditions, turns out to be the “icy” Mr. Dombey himself.
The house also reflects the fate of its owner in the future: it is “decorated with everything that money can buy” on the days of Dombey’s second wedding and becomes a ruin on the days of his bankruptcy.
Dombey and Son is a social novel; the main conflict revealed through Mr. Dombey's relationship with the outside world is of a social nature: the author emphasizes that the main driving force that determines the fate of people in bourgeois society is money. At the same time, it is possible to define the novel as a family novel - it is a dramatic story about the fate of one family.
Emphasizing that Dombey’s personal qualities are related to his social status, the author notes that even in assessing people, a businessman is guided by ideas about their importance for his business. Trade “wholesale and retail” turned people into a kind of commodity: “Dombey and Son often dealt with the skin, but never with the heart. They provided this fashionable product to boys and girls, boarding houses and books.” Mr. Dombey's financial affairs and the activities of his company, to one degree or another, influence the fate of the other characters in the novel. “Dombey and Son” is the name of the company and at the same time the history of a family, in the members of which its head saw not people, but only obedient executors of his will. Marriage for him is a simple business transaction. He sees his wife’s task as giving the company an heir and cannot forgive Fani for her “negligence”, which manifested itself in the birth of her daughter, who for the father is nothing more than “a counterfeit coin that cannot be invested in the business.” Dombey rather indifferently greets the news of the death of his first wife from childbirth: Fanny “fulfilled her duty” in relation to her husband, finally giving birth to the long-awaited son, giving her husband, or rather, his company, an heir.
However, Dombey is a complex character, much more complex than all of Dickens's previous hero-villains. His soul is constantly weighed down by a burden that sometimes he feels more, sometimes less. It is no coincidence that Mr. Dombey appears to Paul’s nurse as a prisoner “imprisoned in solitary confinement, or a strange ghost who can neither be called nor understood.” At the beginning of the novel, the author does not explain the essence and nature of Dombey's condition. It gradually becomes apparent that much is explained by the fact that the forty-eight-year-old gentleman is also a “son” in the firm of Dombey and Son, and many of his actions are explained by the fact that he constantly feels his duty to the firm.
Pride does not allow Mr Dombey to condescend to human weaknesses, for example, self-pity on the occasion of the death of his wife. Most of all, he is worried about the fate of little Paul, on whom he places great hopes and whom he begins to educate, perhaps even with excessive zeal, trying to interfere with the natural development of the child, overloading him with activities and depriving him of leisure and fun games.
The children in Dickens's house are generally unhappy, they are deprived of childhood, deprived of human warmth and affection. Simple and warm-hearted people, for example, nurse Toodle, cannot understand how a father can not love little Florence, why he makes her suffer from neglect. However, it is much worse that Dombey, as he is portrayed at the beginning of the story, is generally incapable of true love. Outwardly it may seem that Paul does not suffer from the lack of fatherly love, but even this feeling is dictated by Dombey primarily for business reasons. In the long-awaited son, he sees, first of all, a future companion, an heir to the business, and it is this circumstance that determines his attitude towards the boy, which his father accepts as genuine feelings. Imaginary love takes on a destructive character, like everything that comes from Mr. Dombey. Paul is not an abandoned child, but a child deprived of a normal childhood. He does not know his mother, but remembers the face of Mrs. Toodle bending over his crib, whom he loses due to the whims of his father (Paul “was losing weight and frail after the removal of his nurse and for a long time seemed to be just waiting for the opportunity ... to find his lost mother”). Despite the boy’s fragile health, Dombey strives to “make a man out of him” as quickly as possible, ahead of the laws of development. Little sickly Paul cannot endure the system of education into whose power his father gave him. Mrs. Pipchin's boarding school and the clutches of education at Dr. Blimber's school finally undermine the strength of the already weak child. The tragic death of little Paul is inevitable, for he was born with a living heart and could not become a true Dombey.
With bewilderment rather than with pain, Dombey experiences the premature death of his son, because the boy cannot be saved by money, which in Mr. Dombey’s mind is everything. In essence, he endures the death of his beloved son as calmly as he once did with his words about the purpose of money: “Dad, what does money mean?” - “Money can do anything.” - “Why didn’t they save mom?” This naive and ingenuous dialogue baffles Dombey, but not for long. He is still firmly convinced of the power of money. The loss of his son for Dombey is a big business failure, because little Paul for his father is, first of all, a companion and heir, a symbol of the prosperity of the Dombey and Son company. But as long as the company itself exists, Mr. Dombey’s own life does not seem meaningless. He continues to follow the same path that is already familiar to him.
The money buys a second wife, aristocrat Edith Granger. The beautiful Edith should become an adornment to the company; her feelings are absolutely indifferent to her husband. For Dombey, Edith's attitude towards him is incomprehensible. Dombey is sure that you can buy humility, obedience, and devotion. Having acquired a wonderful “product” in the person of Edith and provided for her, Dombey believes that he has done everything necessary to create a normal family atmosphere. The thought of the need to establish normal human relationships does not even occur to him. Edith's internal conflict is incomprehensible to him, because all relationships, thoughts and feelings of people are accessible to his perception only to the extent that they can be measured with money. The power of money turns out to be far from omnipotent when Dombey collides with the proud and strong Edith. Her departure was able to shake Dombey’s confidence in the indestructibility of his power. The woman herself, whose inner world remained something unknown to her husband, is not of particular value to Dombey. Therefore, he experiences the escape of his wife quite calmly, although his pride is dealt a sensitive blow. It is after this that Dombey becomes almost hated by Florence, his selflessly loving daughter; her father is annoyed by her presence in the house, even by her very existence.
Almost from the very beginning of the novel, clouds hang over Dombey, which gradually thicken more and more, and the dramatic denouement is accelerated by Dombey himself, his “arrogance” in the author’s interpretation. The death of Paul, the flight of Florence, the departure of his second wife - all these blows that Dombey suffers end in bankruptcy, which is being prepared by Carker Jr. - his manager and confidant. Upon learning of the ruin that he owes to his attorney, Dombey experiences a real blow. It was the collapse of the company that was the last straw that destroyed the stony heart of its owner.
The novel “Dombey and Son” was conceived as a parable about a repentant sinner, but the work is not reduced to a story about how fate punishes Dombey and how he, having gone through the purgatory of remorse and torture of loneliness, finds happiness in the love of his daughter and grandchildren. The merchant Dombey is a typical figure for Victorian England, where the power of gold is growing and people who have achieved relative success in society consider themselves masters of life.
Dickens reveals and precisely establishes the nature of evil: money and private lust. Money gives rise to Mr. Dombey's class self-confidence, it gives him power over people and at the same time dooms him to loneliness, making him arrogant and withdrawn.
One of the greatest merits of Dickens as a realist is that he shows the essence of his contemporary society, which follows the path of technical progress, but to which such concepts as spirituality and compassion for the misfortunes of loved ones are alien. The psychological characteristics of the characters - primarily Dombey himself - in this novel by Dickens, compared to his previous works, become significantly more complex. After the collapse of his company, Dombey shows himself with best side. He pays off almost all of the company's debts, proving his nobility and decency. This is probably the result of that internal struggle, which he constantly conducts with himself and which helps him to be reborn, or rather, to be reborn for a new life, not; lonely, not homeless, but full of human participation.
Florence was destined to play a significant role in Dombey's moral degeneration. Her perseverance and loyalty, love and mercy, compassion for the grief of others contributed to the return of her father’s favor and love to her. More precisely, thanks to her, Dombey discovered unspent vitality in himself, the ability to “make an effort,” but now - in the name of goodness and humanity.
At the end of the work, the author shows Dombey’s final rebirth into a caring father and grandfather, nursing Florence’s children and giving his daughter all the love that she was deprived of in childhood and adolescence. The author describes the changes taking place in Dombey's inner world in such a way that they are not at all perceived as the fabulous transformation of the miser Scrooge. Everything that happens to Dombey is prepared by the course of events of the work. Dickens the artist harmoniously merges with Dickens the philosopher and humanist. He emphasizes that social position determines Dombey's moral character, just as circumstances influence the change in his character.
“There is no sharp change in Mr. Dombey,” writes Dickens, “either in this book or in life. The feeling of his own injustice lives in him all the time. The more he suppresses it, the more injustice it becomes. Buried shame and external circumstances can cause the struggle to come to light within a week or a day; but this struggle lasted for years, and victory was not won easily.”
Obviously, one of the most important tasks that Dickens set himself when creating his novel was to show the possibility of moral regeneration of a person. Dombey's tragedy is a social tragedy, and it is performed in the Balzac manner: the novel shows the relationship not only between man and society, but also between man and the material world. Telling about the collapse of the family and the ambitious hopes of Mr. Dombey, Dickens emphasizes that money carries evil, poisons the minds of people, enslaves them and turns them into heartless proud and selfish people. At the same time, the less society influences a person, the more humane and purer he becomes.
According to Dickens, such negative influences are especially painful for children. Depicting the process of formation of the Field, Dickens touches on the problem of upbringing and education, repeatedly raised in his works (“The Adventures of Oliver Twist”, “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”). Upbringing had a direct bearing on the fate of little Paul. It was intended to mold him into a new Dombey, to make the boy as tough and stern as his father. Staying at the boarding house of Mrs. Pipchin, whom the author calls “an excellent ogress,” and the school of Dr. Blimberg could not break the pure-hearted child. At the same time, by overloading Paul with excessive activities, unnecessary knowledge, forcing him to do things that are completely alien to his consciousness and completely not listening to the child’s inner state, the “false educators” essentially destroy him physically. Excessive stress completely undermines the boy's fragile health, leading to his death. The process of upbringing has an equally unfavorable effect on representatives of a child of a completely different social status - the son of a fireman Toodle. The son of kind and spiritually noble parents, sent by Mr. Dombey to study in the society of the Merciful Grinders, is completely corrupted, losing all the best traits instilled in him in the family.
As in Dickens's previous novels, numerous characters belonging to different social camps can be divided into "good" and "bad". At the same time, in the novel Dombey and Son there is no positive hero and a “villain” opposed to him. The polarization of good and evil in this work was carried out subtly and thoughtfully. Under Dickens's pen, the diversity of life no longer fit into the old scheme of the struggle between good and evil. Therefore, in this work the writer refuses excessive one-linearity and schematism in the depiction of the characters. Dickens strives to reveal not only the character of Mr. Dombey himself, but also the inner world of other characters in the novel (Edith, Miss Tox, Carker Sr., etc.) in their inherent psychological complexity.
The most complex figure in the novel is Karker Jr., a businessman and predator by nature. Carker seduces Alice Merwood, dreams of taking possession of Edith, and on his recommendation, Walter Gay is sent to the West Indies to certain death. Written in the style of grotesque, satirical exaggeration, the image of Karker cannot be considered socially typical. He appears before the reader as a predator grappling with another in a struggle for prey. But at the same time, his actions are not driven by a thirst for enrichment, as evidenced by the ending of the novel: having ruined Dombey, Carker himself does not appropriate anything from his patron’s fortune. He experiences great satisfaction watching Dombey's humiliation and the collapse of his entire personal and business life.
As Genieva E.Yu., one of the authors of “The History of World Literature” (vol. 6), rightly notes, “Carker’s rebellion against Dombey is very inconsistent... The true motives of Carker’s behavior are unclear. Apparently, we can assume that psychologically this is one of the first “underground people” in English literature, torn apart by the most complex internal contradictions.”
In his interpretation of Carker's "rebellion" against Dombey, Dickens remained faithful to the concept of social relationships that was already evident in Nicholas Nickleby. Both Dombey and Carker violate the norms of social behavior that Dickens considered correct. Both Dombey and Carker receive their due retribution: while Dombey fails as an entrepreneur and suffers the greatest humiliation, Carker receives his retribution by meeting death by accident, under the wheels of a speeding train.
The image of the railroad in this episode is not accidental. The express is this “fiery, roaring devil, so smoothly rushing into the distance,” an image of rushing life, rewarding some and punishing others, causing changes in people. It is no coincidence that the author emphasizes that in the last minutes of his life, looking at the sunrise, Karker touched virtue at least for a moment: “When he watched with dull eyes how it rose, clear and serene. Indifferent to those crimes and atrocities that, from the beginning of the world, were committed in the radiance of its rays, who would argue that at least a vague idea of a virtuous life on earth and the reward for it in heaven did not awaken in him.” This is not moralizing, but a philosophy of life that the writer followed throughout his entire work.
It is from the standpoint of that philosophy that he considers not only the behavior of Carker, but also other characters. According to Dickens, evil is concentrated in those who are constantly hypocritical, humiliated, currying favor with their superiors (Miss Tox, Mrs. Skewton, Mrs. Chick, Joshua Bagstock, Mrs. Pipchin, etc.). Close to them stands the inhabitant of the London bottom - the “kind” Mrs. Brown, whose image clearly echoes the images of slum dwellers depicted in “The Adventures of Oliver Twist”. All these characters have their own position in life, which generally boils down to unconditional worship of the power of money and those who possess it.
The writer contrasted the inhumanity of Dombey, his manager Carker and their “like-minded people” with the spiritual greatness and true humanity of Florence and her friends - simple workers, the “little people” of London. This is the young man Walter Gay and his uncle, small shopkeeper Solomon Giles, Giles' friend - retired captain Cuttle, this is, finally, the family of the driver Toodle, the driver himself and his wife - Field's nurse, maid Florence Susan Nipper. Each of them individually and all of them together oppose Dombey’s world not only morally, but also socially, embodying the best qualities of ordinary people. These people live by laws opposite to money-grubbing. If Dombey is confident that everything in the world can be bought with money, these simple, modest workers are incorruptible and selfless. It is no coincidence that, speaking of the fireman Toodle, Dickens emphasizes that this worker is “the complete opposite in every respect to Mr. Dombey.”
The Toodle family is another variation on the Dickensian theme of family, in contrast to the Dombey family and the aristocratic family of the elderly "Cleopatra" - Mrs. Skewton. The healthy moral atmosphere of the Toodle family is emphasized by the appearance of its members (“a blooming young woman with a face like an apple,” “a younger woman, not so plump, but also with a face like an apple, who was leading two plump children with faces like similar to an apple”, etc.). Thus, Dickens emphasizes that what is normal and healthy is located outside the world of bourgeois businessmen, among ordinary people.
In scenes depicting Paul's illness and death, the author exalts the love of a simple woman - his nurse, Mrs. Toodle. Her suffering is the suffering of a simple and loving heart: “Yes, no one else would shed tears at the sight of him and call him a dear boy, her little boy, her poor, dear, exhausted child. No other woman would kneel down next to his bed, take his emaciated hand and press it to her lips and chest, like a person who has the right to caress her.”
The image of the child, Paul Dombey, presented as an ideal hero, is bright and expressive. Developing the traditions of Wordsworth, Dickens shows the peculiarities of the child's world, rebelling against treating children as small adults. The writer poeticized the world of childhood, conveyed the spontaneity and naivety with which a little person evaluates what is happening. Thanks to the image of Paul Dombey, the writer allows readers to look at everything around them through the eyes of a little “sage” who, with his “strange” and precisely targeted questions, puzzles adults. The boy allows himself to doubt even such unshakable values of the adult world as money, irrefutably proving their powerlessness to save a person.
Among the characters depicted in the novel, the most controversial is the image of Dombey’s second wife, Edith. She grew up in a world where everything is bought and sold, and could not escape its corrupting influence. At first, her mother essentially sold her by marrying her to Granger. Later, with the blessing and assistance of Edith's mother, Mrs. Skewton, a deal is struck with Dombey. Edith is proud and arrogant, but at the same time she is “too humiliated and depressed to save herself.” Her nature combines arrogance and self-contempt, depression and rebellion, the desire to defend her own dignity and the desire to completely destroy her own life, thereby challenging the society she hates.
Artistic style Dickens's work in Dombey and Son continued to represent a combination of various artistic techniques and trends. However, humor and the comic element are pushed into the background here, appearing in the depiction of secondary characters. The main place in the novel begins to be occupied by an in-depth psychological analysis of the internal reasons for certain actions and experiences of the characters.
The writer's narrative style becomes significantly more complicated. It is enriched with new symbolism, interesting and subtle observations. The psychological characteristics of the characters become more complex, the functionality of speech characteristics, supplemented by facial expressions and gestures, expands, and the role of dialogues and monologues increases. The philosophical sound of the novel intensifies. It is associated with images of the ocean and the river of time flowing into it, running waves. The author conducts an interesting experiment with time - in the story about Paul, it either stretches or contracts, depending on the state of health and emotional mood of this little old man, who is solving far from childish issues.
When creating the novel Dombey and Son, Dickens worked more carefully on the language than before. In an effort to maximize the expressiveness of images and enhance their meaning, he resorted to a variety of techniques and rhythms of speech. In the most significant episodes, the writer’s speech acquires special tension and emotional richness.
The scene of Carker's escape after an explanation with Edith can be considered the highest achievement of Dickens as a psychologist. Carker, who defeated Dombey, unexpectedly finds himself rejected by her. His intrigues and deceit turned against him. His courage and self-confidence are crushed: “The proud woman cast him aside like a worm, lured him into a trap and showered him with ridicule, rebelled against him and cast him into the dust. He slowly poisoned the soul of this woman and hoped that he had turned her into a slave, submissive to all his desires. When, plotting a deception, he himself was deceived, and the fox skin was torn off from him, he slipped away, experiencing confusion, humiliation, and fear.” Carker's escape is reminiscent of Sikes's escape from The Adventures of Oliver Twist, but there was a lot of melodrama in the description of this scene. Here the author presents a huge variety of emotional states of the hero. Carker's thoughts are confused, the real and the imaginary are intertwined, the pace of the story quickens. It is like either a mad race on a horse or a fast ride on a railroad. Karker moves at a fantastic speed, so that even thoughts, replacing one another in his head, cannot get ahead of this race. The horror of being overtaken does not leave him day or night. Despite the fact that Karker sees everything happening around him, it seems to him that time is catching up with him. In conveying movement and its rhythm, Dickens uses repeated phrases: “Again the monotonous ringing, the ringing of bells and the clatter of hooves and wheels, and there is no rest.”
When depicting positive characters, Dickens, as before, widely uses poetic means humorous characteristics: description of appearance endowed with funny details, eccentric behavior, speech indicating their impracticality and simplicity (for example, Captain Cuttle peppers his speech with quotes that seem appropriate to the occasion).
At the same time, Dickens's skill as a caricaturist is improving: emphasizing the characteristic features of a particular character, he often uses the technique of the grotesque. Thus, the leitmotif of Karker’s image becomes a satirical detail - his shiny white teeth, which become a symbol of his predation and deceit: “A skull, a hyena, a cat together could not show as many teeth as Karker shows.” The author repeatedly emphasizes that this character, with his soft gait, sharp claws and insinuating gait, resembles a cat. The leitmotif of Dombey's image becomes freezing cold. Mrs. Skewton resembles Cleopatra, reclining on the sofa and “languishing over a cup of coffee” and the room immersed in thick darkness, which is designed to hide her false hair, false teeth, and artificial blush. In describing her appearance, Dickens uses the keyword “false” as the key word. Major Bagstock's speech is dominated by the same expressions, characterizing him as a snob, a sycophant and a dishonest person.
The mastery of portrait and psychological characteristics is very high in Dombey and Son, and even the comic minor characters, having lost the grotesque and comic features characteristic of the heroes of the first period, are portrayed by the writer as people well known to readers who could be distinguished in the crowd.
Contrary to the idea of class peace that Dickens preached in his Christmas stories of the 40s, in the novel written on the eve of the 1848 revolution, he objectively exposed and condemned bourgeois society. The general tone of the narrative in the novel turns out to be completely different than in previously created works. Dombey and Son is Dickens's first novel, devoid of the optimistic intonation that was so characteristic of the writer before. There is no place here for the boundless optimism that defined the character of Dickens's works. In the novel, for the first time, motives of doubt and vague but aching sadness were heard. The author was still convinced that his contemporaries needed to be influenced through persuasion. At the same time, he clearly feels that he is unable to overcome the idea of the inviolability of the existing system of social relations, and cannot instill in others the idea of the need to build their lives based on high moral principles.
The tragic solution to the main theme of the novel, reinforced by a number of additional lyrical motifs and intonations, makes the novel Dombey and Son a work of insoluble and unresolved conflicts. The emotional coloring of the entire figurative system speaks of a crisis that has matured in the consciousness great artist by the end of the 40s.
Third period(1848-1859) is characterized by the deepening of the writer’s social pessimism. The writing technique is also changing: “it is distinguished by great restraint and thoughtfulness of techniques,” in the image artistic paintings « special meaning acquires the part." At the same time, the writer’s realistic research into child psychology also deepens. In general, the work of Charles Dickens during this period marked a qualitatively new stage in the history of development English realism- psychological stage. A new ethical category, previously unexplored by him, also appears in the writer’s work - moral emptiness.
During this period of creativity, the following mature realistic novels of the writer were published: “Dombey and Son” (1848), “David Copperfield” (1850), “Bleak House” (1853), “Hard Times” (1854), “Little Dorrit” (1857), “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859).
The fourth period(1861-1870) During this last period, Charles Dickens created two masterpieces: Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865). In these works you will no longer find the gentle humor inherent in Dickens at the beginning creative path. Gentle humor gives way to ruthless irony. Subject " great hopes"of late Dickens turns, in fact, into Balzac's theme of "lost illusions", only there is more bitterness, irony and skepticism in it. Even Dickens's all-saving flame of the hearth cannot save broken hopes. But this result of the collapse of “great hopes” interests Dickens, an artist and moralist, no longer in a social sense, but rather in a moral and ethical one.
The poetics have also changed: novels are less and less like huge, shapeless, although full of charm, buildings. Dickens's late novels are characterized by harmony of design, mutual subordination and proportionality of parts. “Realistic dominant” was defined in to a large extent and the changing public sentiments of the writer associated with the crisis situation in England in the 50s.
"Dombey and Son" reveals with great conviction the inhumane essence of bourgeois relations. Dickens strives to show the interconnection and interdependence between various aspects of life, the social conditioning of human behavior not only in public but also in personal life. Dickens's novel reflected; program, his aesthetic credo, a moral ideal associated with a protest against the selfishness and alienation of man in society. In Dickens, the beautiful and the good are the highest moral categories; evil is interpreted as forced ugliness, a deviation from the norm, and therefore it is immoral and inhuman.
Dombey and Son is different from all previous Dickens novels and in many of its features marks the transition to a new stage.
In Dombey and Son there is almost an imperceptible connection with literary tradition, that dependence on examples of the realistic novel of the 18th century, which is noticeable in the plot structure of such novels as The Adventures of Oliver Twist, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, even Martin Chuzzlewit. . The novel differs from all previous works of Dickens both in its composition and emotional intonation.
The novel “Dombey and Son” is a work with many characters, and at the same time, when creating it, the author used a new principle for organizing artistic material. If Dickens constructed previous novels as a series of sequentially alternating episodes or included several parallel developing and at certain moments intersecting plot lines, then in Dombey and Son everything, down to the smallest detail, is subordinated to the unity of plan. Dickens departs from his favorite manner of organizing the plot as a linear movement, developing several plot lines that arise from their own contradictions, but are intertwined in one center. It becomes the Dombey and Son company, its fate and the fate of its owner: the life of the owner of the ship's tools shop, Solomon Giles, and his nephew Walter Gay, the aristocrat Edith Granger, the family of the fireman Toodle, and others are connected with them.
Dombey and Son is a novel about the “greatness and fall” of Dombey, a major London merchant. The character on whom the author's main attention is focused is Mr. Dombey. No matter how great Dickens' skill in portraying such characters as the manager of the Dombey and Son form Carker, Dombey's daughter Florence and his early deceased little son Paul, Dombey's wife Edith or her mother Mrs Skewton - all these images ultimately develop the main theme is the Dombey theme.
Dombey and Son is, first and foremost, an anti-bourgeois novel. The entire content of the work, its figurative structure is determined by the pathos of criticism of private property morality. Unlike novels named after the main character, this work has the name of a trading company in the title. This emphasizes the importance of this company for Dombey’s fate and indicates the values that a successful London businessman worships. It is no coincidence that the author begins the work by defining the meaning of the company for the main character of the novel: “These three words contained the meaning of Mr. Dombey’s whole life. The earth was created for Dombey and the Son, so that they could carry out trade on it, and the sun and moon were created to illuminate them with their light... Rivers and seas were created for the navigation of their ships; the rainbow promised them good weather, the wind favored or opposed their enterprises; the stars and planets moved in their orbits in order to preserve the indestructible system in which they were at the center.” Thus, the Dombey and Son firm becomes an image - a symbol of bourgeois prosperity, which is accompanied by the loss of natural human feelings, a kind of semantic center of the novel.
Dickens's novel was originally intended to be a "tragedy of pride." Pride is important, although not the only quality of the bourgeois businessman Dombey. But it is precisely this feature of the protagonist that is determined by his social position as the owner of the Dombey and Son trading company. In his pride, Dombey loses normal human feelings. The cult of business in which he is engaged and the consciousness of his own greatness turn the London businessman into a soulless automaton. Everything in the Dombey house is subordinated to the harsh necessity of fulfilling one's official duties - serving the company. The words “must” and “make an effort” are the main ones in the vocabulary of the Dombey surname. Those who cannot be guided by these formulas are doomed to death, like Dombey’s first wife Fanny, who failed to “make an effort.”
Dickens's ideological plan is revealed in Dombey and Son as the characters' characters develop and the action unfolds.
Dickens's artistic style in Dombey and Son continued to represent a combination of various artistic techniques and trends. However, humor and the comic element are pushed into the background here, appearing in the depiction of secondary characters. The main place in the novel begins to be occupied by an in-depth psychological analysis of the internal reasons for certain actions and experiences of the characters.
The writer's narrative style becomes significantly more complicated. It is enriched with new symbolism, interesting and subtle observations. The psychological characteristics of the characters become more complex, the functionality of speech characteristics, supplemented by facial expressions and gestures, expands, and the role of dialogues and monologues increases.
The mastery of portrait and psychological characteristics is very high in Dombey and Son, and even the comic minor characters, having lost the grotesque and comic features characteristic of the heroes of the first period, are portrayed by the writer as people well known to readers who could be distinguished in the crowd.
The general tone of the narrative in the novel turns out to be completely different than in previously created works. Dombey and Son is Dickens's first novel, devoid of the optimistic intonation that was so characteristic of the writer before. There is no place here for the boundless optimism that defined the character of Dickens's works. In the novel, for the first time, motives of doubt and vague but aching sadness were heard.
Charles Dickens - English writer, one of the greatest English-language prose writers of the 19th century, humanist, classic of world literature.
At the age of 10, little Charles had to earn his own living. Adolescent and early years The writer's lives were full of deprivation and humiliation; the naturally gifted and sensitive boy was too fortunate to know the whole seamy side of life. Dickens is considered one of the pillars of realism - one of the most popular movements in European XIX literature century. From his pen, one after another, the first books appeared: moralizing "Sketches of Bose" and humorous novel "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" . The second work brought him enormous popularity among the reading public, overnight turning him into famous writer. A few years later, the writer appeared in a new role as a serious author, exposing the vices of society. His works "The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby" and in particular "The Adventures of Oliver Twist" vividly and colorfully depicted the unsightly side of English society. This novel received wide public attention and subsequently led to the relaxation and even repeal of many cruel laws against the poor and child workers. All subsequent years, Dickens never tired of delighting his readers with new works. "Dombey and Son" , autobiographical novel "David Copperfield" , which brought him pan-European fame and many other works.
Mr. Dombey, a wealthy London businessman, owner of the Dombey and Son trading house, is an ambitious, vain, stubborn man and almost never shows his emotions. But the birth of a child, to whom Mr. Dombey gives the name Paul, causes him joy, because for many years he has been waiting for the appearance of an heir - now he will have someone to leave after his death the main business of his life - the Dombey and Son firm. Even the fact that Mrs Dombey, his wife, dies immediately after the birth of the boy does not bother him very much. He devotes all his attention to his little offspring and neglects another child - a daughter named Florence, who was six years old at the time of Paul's birth. The girl seems to not exist for her father, because she cannot contribute to the eternal prosperity of his trading house...
The history of the novel
In 1846, in Switzerland, Dickens conceived and began writing a new great novel, which he completed in 1848 in England. Its last chapters were written after the February Revolution of 1848 in France. It was Dombey and Son - one of Dickens's most significant works in the first half of his creative career. The realistic skill of the writer, developed in previous years, appeared here in full force. “Dombey and Son” was created at the same time as “Vanity Fair” by Thackeray and “Jane Eyre” by S. Bronte. But it is quite obvious that Dickens's novel differs from the works of his contemporaries and compatriots. The novel was created at the time of the peak of Chartism in England, at the height of revolutionary events in other European countries. In the second half of the 1840s, the groundlessness of many of the writer’s illusions, and above all his belief in the possibility of class peace, became increasingly obvious. His confidence in the effectiveness of the appeal to the bourgeoisie could not help but be shaken. "Dombey and Son" reveals with great conviction the inhumane essence of bourgeois relations. Dickens strives to show the interconnection and interdependence between various aspects of life, the social conditioning of human behavior not only in public but also in personal life. Dickens's novel reflected; program, his aesthetic credo, a moral ideal associated with a protest against the selfishness and alienation of man in society. In Dickens, the beautiful and the good are the highest moral categories; evil is interpreted as forced ugliness, a deviation from the norm, and therefore it is immoral and inhuman. Dombey and Son is different from all previous Dickens novels and in many of its features marks the transition to a new stage. In Dombey and Son there is almost an imperceptible connection with literary tradition, that dependence on examples of the realistic novel of the 18th century, which is noticeable in the plot structure of such novels as The Adventures of Oliver Twist, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, even Martin Chuzzlewit. . The novel differs from all previous works of Dickens both in its composition and emotional intonation.
Analysis of the work
Dickens would return to the theme of poverty and luxury more than once in his works. The author is not indifferent to the fact that some people live in comfort and prosperity, can afford to teach their children and give them the best. Others are forced to leave their family to work to create someone else's comfort. This unjustified injustice seems disgusting to Dickens. However, you should not envy wealth. The author invites the reader to look into a rich house. The life of a millionaire and his family looks prosperous only at first glance. Both the wife and children of a rich man most often do not have something that cannot be bought for any money. The cold atmosphere of indifference and calculation makes the existence of the inhabitants of the “golden cage” unbearable and meaningless.
Criticism of the work
From all of Dickens's works it is clear that he knows his fatherland well and has studied it in detail and thoroughly. To be national writer, love for the homeland alone is not enough - love will only give energy, feeling, but not content; A father needs to know his people well, to get closer to them, to become closer to them. The best school for artistic talent is the study of one’s nationality, and its reproduction in artistic forms- the best field for creative activity. Study of elegant ancient monuments, study the latest theories let art be a preparation for the artist for the sacred task of studying his homeland, let him enter into folk life, in her interests and expectations. On his journey to America (the United States), English exceptionalism becomes even more apparent; this entire work is imbued with the spirit of personal, national enmity towards fellow tribesmen overseas. However, it must be said, to Dickens’s credit, that his reviews of foreigners, while exceptional, have neither the harshness nor the tone of contempt for which his compatriots became famous in Europe, but are always softened with more or less humor. For artistic analysis“Home and son” will serve as confirmation of what was said before. Dickens, striking him from [...] his views, got to his trading...] in theory. Trade pride. For known ref. - the honor of the company is above all, let everything be sacrificed to it, the honor of the company is the beginning from which all activities flow. Dickens, in order to show all the untruth of this principle, puts it in contact with another principle - with love in its various manifestations. This is where the novel should have ended, but that’s not how Dickens does it; he forces Walter to come from overseas, Florence to hide with Captain Kutle and marry Walter, forces Dombey to repent and settle in Florence’s family. This struggle forms the basis of the novel. - Look. heat into types in which both beginnings are manifested. The representative of trade pride is Dombey. Then Karker. In Dombey, all natural relationships with people are distorted. He looks at people in the service as a wife, a son, a daughter... He wants to be not a person, but a representative of the company. This novel develops and ends... under the company...
Composition
FLORENCE DOMBEY (eng. Florence) - the heroine of Charles Dickens's novel "Dombey and Son" (1846-1848), she is also Floy, daughter of Paul Dombey, sister of Paul Dombey Jr., fiancee, and then wife of Walter Gay. Despite the title of the novel, it is she, F., and not her father or brother, who is the main, true heroine. It is F. who connects the characters with each other. Their attitude towards it determines their spiritual qualities. Main man in the life of little Paul and a witness to his early decline, it is F. who embodies the author’s favorite thought, perhaps nowhere so clearly expressed by him - the thought of the all-conquering power of mercy. Mercy as a way to live, to breathe. F. enters the novel as a lonely child who has just lost his mother; at the end of the book she is a young woman, a happy mother of a family. But two motives that determine this fate and personality are given at the very beginning - dislike of the father and devotion to him. Faith and love connect F.'s image with her artistic prototypes: the medieval Patient Griselda and Shakespeare's Cordelia. Like Cordelia, she is the reason for the transformation of her abandoned father, a monster of coldness and soullessness, it is she who makes him fall in love, and therefore return to life. In F. one can trace the features of Dickens's eternal image of a persecuted child, fundamentally opposed to the world of adults. The most grotesque embodiment of this world is the creepy Good Mrs. Brown, who robbed a lost girl. But meetings with such people do not violate inner harmony F., instinctively open only to the good. In this sense, she is comparable to Oliver Twist in Fagin's situation. Adult F. could be classified as one of Dickens’s “angelic” heroines, who, unlike typical characters secondary, psychologically unconvincing. Such are Rose Maylie from Oliver Twist, Agnes from Little Dorrit and Hester from Bleak House, whose dovelike meekness is perceived either as a complete lack of personality or as virtuoso hypocrisy. You believe F. right away, because her meekness is convincingly combined with dignity; she is too strong and a definite character, actually creating reality and influencing it. F. fulfills a special mission and is therefore convincing. In the world of Dickens, she is one of the most thoughtful and at the same time touching characters.
Lit.: Marcus S. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. London, 1965. P. 351-355; Slater M. Dickens and Women. London, 1983, pp. 243-276.
