Mr. Dombey is the proud father of a son born to greatness—until little Paul Dombey dies. Then he’s only a proud man who happens to have a daughter. Florence Dombey grows up unloved and unappreciated—but not being there when she needed him will come back to haunt Mr. Dombey when he needs her.
Dombey and Son is a longish book, a little shorter than Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend. Almost twice as long as something like Pride and Prejudice or Little Women.
The book largely revolves around humbling Mr. Dombey—not an easy thing to do. His pride resists every fall, and he really has to come desperately low. Besides that, the explanation and illustration(s) of his pride itself are a little complex and likely to go over a young reader’s head. Usually, that kind of complexity is second layer in a book and a reader can enjoy the plot without it, but in this case it’s pretty central. I would give Dombey and Son a 17 or even 18+ rating; I’m not sure a younger teen would really be able to appreciate it.
As usual, you can jump straight to the bottom for my brief concluding opinion, or read straight through for all the spoiler-laden details.
The Plot [spoiler alert!]
The plot of Dombey and Son revolves around the destruction of Mr. Dombey’s selfish pride. For Paul Dombey, the world exists only to further the interests of his family business, the firm of Dombey and Son. But though the firm has Son in its name, Mr. Dombey only has a daughter—and he might just as well have no child at all, for any difference it would make to him. Fortunately though, his wife gives birth to a son just as the book begins. Though she dies immediately afterwards, Mr. Dombey is, all things considered, happy—but with a nervous happiness, awaiting the growth of little Paul.
Paul is put under the care of a hired nurse—a kind woman who treats Paul’s sister Florence well and tries to help her into her father’s good graces, without success. Unfortunately, she is fired after she takes Paul (without Mr. Dombey’s knowledge) to visit her own family—an escapade which is found out only because Florence gets lost on the way back. Eventually Florence, enquiring for Dombey and Son, is found by a young clerk of the establishment, Walter Gay. Walter builds some air castles on the strength of this adventure, and his Uncle and his Uncle’s good friend Captain Cuttle build even more. But unfortunately Mr. Dombey isn’t much impressed by a service done to his daughter—still less by their continued (though occasional) interaction. Besides, he has always intrinsically disliked Walter for his cheery, buoyant friendliness. When a convenient opportunity to ship Walter off for a far distant position occurs, Mr. Dombey takes it.
Meanwhile, Paul hasn’t grown up as strong as Mr. Dombey would have liked. He goes to a boarding school, accompanied by Florence whom he will not leave, but although he gets temporarily stronger, eventually he weakens and dies after returning home for the holidays. Mr. Dombey is devastated—yes, in part because he lost the boy he loves—but ineradicably intertwined with that love is his pride, his longing for the continuation and aggrandizement of his name and firm.
Florence, though she tries to comfort her father, is repulsed by him. He can’t see her without wishing that she were the dead child. Unwilling to believe this, Florence endures her solitary life, gradually centering her hopes and plans on one day earning her father’s love.
When her father remarries, Florence asks the new Mrs. Dombey to help her in this quest. But Edith Dombey did not marry for love, and is quite alarmed at Florence’s proposition. Edith married more because she was tired of her mother’s efforts to marry her off, and because Mr. Dombey is perfectly willing to marry her without any efforts of her own, than for any other reason. Edith’s idea is that if Mr. Dombey will let her alone, she will let him alone. Unfortunately for her, Mr. Dombey’s idea is that she is immeasurably honored by being his wife, and ought to be thrilled to do whatever he asks. Edith doesn’t see the honor at all, and is plainly scornful.
At first, Florence expects much from the new marriage. She finds a good friend in Edith, who admires and soon loves her. But Edith can do nothing to help her become closer to her father, and in fact unintentionally does a lot to separate the two—Mr. Dombey is not at all pleased to see that Florence can get along very well with his wife, while he can’t get along with her at all. The situation quickly becomes desperately painful for Florence. Edith could hardly care less for herself, but she does try to smooth troubled waters for Florence’s sake. But when Mr. Dombey takes to sending haughty demands to Edith through his business agent and right hand man Mr. Carker, things have gone too far.
Carker has made a career out of flattering Mr. Dombey. But so far from admiring him as much as he professes, Carker hates his boss and is eager to humiliate him in every possible way. Besides, Carker is attracted to Edith, and he has a weapon he’s not hesitant to use—he threatens to slander Florence to Mr. Dombey, using her friendship with Walter and his Uncle as a tool. This buys Edith’s ear—she has no choice but to listen to anything Carker likes to say.
When Mr. Dombey also uses Florence as a weapon against Edith, her last incentive to maintain a decent appearance snaps. Having long since lost all self-respect (mostly due to her mother’s training and behavior), Edith decides to throw her good name to the winds. She elopes with Mr. Carker—who incidentally has put the financial operations of Dombey and Son into a bad way—dealing a stunning blow to Mr. Dombey’s pride and pride of name.
But Edith has no mind to give Carker what he wants either, and escapes from him, taunting him with having been used by her. Carker is finally caught by a revengeful Mr. Dombey and in a last ditch effort to escape, he gets run over by a train.
Florence, of course, is utterly horrified when all this comes down. But her sympathy for her father is very strong, and she is willing to once again brave his uninviting presence in order to offer it to him. And once again Mr. Dombey repulses her—this time actually striking her in his anger. Florence, completely disillusioned, leaves her father and her father’s house for good.
She goes to Walter’s old house, now inhabited by his Uncle’s friend Captain Cuttle. Walter himself is missing and presumed drowned on the voyage out to his assigned position. Walter’s Uncle has also disappeared, evidently with the intention of searching for Walter. But Captain Cuttle is more than willing to help and protect the friendless Florence. She finds a comfortable home with him—and Walter, having survived the shipwreck of his ship, opportunely returns (and shortly thereafter his Uncle returns as well). He’s gotten a position as a ship’s clerk of some sort in a different firm (the firm of the ship that picked him up). After some beating around the bush he tells Florence (by way of proposing) that he couldn’t possibly take advantage of her present forlorn position and ask her to marry him, which Florence properly brushes away, sensibly recognizing that she’s the one with nothing to give him. If he’d like to marry her, she announces, she’s up for it. Naturally this is couched in more romantic terms; but you get the gist.
So they marry, and Walter takes Florence with him on his next job/voyage, and in “the city” the great firm of Dombey and Son finally comes toppling down. The toppling down process has taken some time—in fact, about a year passes between the time Florence and Walter leave and the time Dombey and Son crashes. Mr. Dombey, as proud in poverty as he ever was in prosperity, will not save himself one penny, but pays everything to fulfill his obligations. Ruined in every sense, he contemplates suicide. But, just in the nick of time, Florence comes rushing into the room, begging him to forgive her for abandoning him, telling him that now that she has a child she realizes what it must have felt like, and so forth. Mr. Dombey, a changed man (more or less… certainly a chastened man), lives with his daughter and son-in-law for the rest of his days.
Only one loose end remains to be tied—Edith. While the reader knows that she’s not as guilty as she at first seemed, Mr. Dombey and more importantly Florence still believe that she committed adultery with Mr. Carker. A relative of Edith’s, however, suspects her innocence (strange as that is to say) and concocts a plan to spring Florence on her, hoping to surprise her into making a clean confession. This succeeds to perfection, and Edith, rather against her will, thus mitigates Mr. Dombey’s punishment and is eventually softened enough by Florence to half-forgive him and half ask to be forgiven.
Such is the plot of Dombey and Son. There are, of course, many secondary characters necessarily left out of this summary. They were, in fact, much easier to leave out than is usually the case in Dickens’ novels.
To evaluate the characters a little—Mr. Dombey is very realistically drawn—and while you can’t really like him, he does command a certain respect and even sympathy. Mr. Carker is an excellent villain, with convincing rationale behind his villainy (which, by the way, goes deep into his past and a bunch of secondary characters, so I mostly glossed over it for the summary). Despite the convincing rationale, he’s still a deep-dyed villain, not a pressured-by-circumstances villain. Edith, on the other hand, is very much pressured by circumstances. Unlike Carker, she’s actually rather likeable, so I was glad to find that she wasn’t as bad as she pretended to be. It’s actually quite hard to evaluate all the “could haves” or “should haves” of Edith’s arc. She was really wedged into incredibly difficult positions and, all things considered, you can’t hold it very much against her that she gave Mr. Dombey what he had coming.
Moving on to the good guys, Paul is pretty adorable, Walter is jolly, and Florence is perfect as (apparently) a heroine should be. I liked Walter better when he was younger; he got a little two-dimensional when he was older. Florence was mostly three-dimensional; her perfections were not too unrealistic. The only thing I seriously question is how it was that she was so blind to her father’s character. Basically Florence at least half blames herself for his utter indifference (and later virtual hatred) towards her. I mean, I get it, it’s her dad, she wants to think well of him. But… he’s so obviously terribly proud and frankly so obviously has let that totally warp the way he thinks about her—almost hating her because she has survived in spite of his early neglect—certainly hating her because she survived and Paul did not—also hating her because Edith admires her and doesn’t admire him—in short, his pride is so jealous and cruel, that to me it feels a little unrealistic that Florence didn’t, or wouldn’t, realize it for so long. When she finally did, her reaction was simply to crush the knowledge and run from it. That was fairly reasonable/realistic; and I grant that it would have been difficult for the plot to run as it did if Florence had mentally come to terms with her father’s pride before… it wouldn’t have called forth such a violent reaction from her when it did finally strike home. However, I can’t help but question the probability of anyone behaving like that under similar circumstances.
As for the plot proper, it’s fairly predictable, possibly with the exception of Edith’s arc—I don’t think it was too easy to tell exactly where that was going. But of course, from the beginning it was clear that Mr. Dombey’s pride was due for a fall, and that eventually Florence’s patient love would be rewarded. And also, even when Walter supposedly died, it was obvious as the nose on your face that he and Florence would end up together. Paul’s death was also easy to see coming. On the other hand, the plot did integrate all its aspects very thoroughly—while some books seem to lose sight of important characters entirely for long periods of time and then jump back to them to explain what they were doing “meanwhile,” Dombey and Son has very little occasion to do this and mostly is able to focus on the main characters, especially Florence, and bring in everything else the reader needs to know around them.
Since a pivotal part of the plot is the downfall of Mr. Dombey’s pride, it’s hard for me to separate the plot from the point. In an attempt to do so, I’ll stop analyzing the plot right here and save the next part for the next heading. So, for plot, I’ll give Dombey and Son a 6/10.
The Point
Dickens’ novels frequently have a strong social critique as a significant moral—the courts of chancery in Bleak House, government bureaucracy in Little Dorrit, for example—but Dombey and Son is something of an exception to this rule. Presumably Mr. Dombey’s pride in his business does reflect a social failing of the day, but it’s far broader and more basic than that.
Mr. Dombey’s type of pride is not a complex one, not at all hypocritical. He is the epitome of pride, pure and simple; obstinate in thinking that everything within his circle is, and must be, for him and about him, and resentful of anything else. Little enough is done by way of explaining the origins of his pride, but it doesn’t need much explanation.
This dominating characteristic of Mr. Dombey’s is not very endearing. And therefore it works its own downfall. It spurs Carker (proud in his own way, and very contemptuous), to do his best to ruin Mr. Dombey—at the same time it gives Carker just the tool he needs, flattery. It completely antagonizes Edith—not being a hypocrite like Carker, she defies and eventually disgraces him openly. Most tragic of all, it completely isolates Mr. Dombey from Florence—in the long run hating her essentially because she is independent of Mr. Dombey and his pride; because she can be healthy and even happy to a degree, without him.
Wherefore the point is; after pride, a fall. To say that this is well integrated into the plot is an understatement; this is the plot. It’s perfectly integrated. And the irony inherent in the fact that raising oneself above the proper height leads to a leveling fall is well reflected in the irony of the book: Dombey and Son is a daughter, after all.
Hardly anyone—if anyone—is completely free from pride; on the flip side, few of us take it to Mr. Dombey’s lengths, or even in Mr. Dombey’s direction. But Dickens’ embodiment of this basic fault in Dombey and Son is well worth reading.
9/10
The Style
This isn’t the first time I mention that Dickens’ style is a little long-winded. But what’s interesting about Dickens’ wordy style is that the wordiness is never meaningless repetition. Dombey and Son has a striking example of this that I’ll quote in full. Do me the favor to skim read it.
[Mr. Carker] was walking to and fro, alone, looking along the lines of iron, across the valley in one direction, and towards a dark bridge near at hand in the other; when, turning in his walk, where it was bounded by one end of the wooden stage on which he paced up and down, he saw the man from whom he had fled, emerging from the door by which he himself had entered. And their eyes met.
In the quick unsteadiness of the surprise, he staggered, and slipped on to the road below him. But recovering his feet immediately, he stepped back a pace or two upon that road, to interpose some wider space between them, and looked at his pursuer, breathing short and quick.
He heard a shout—another—saw the face change from its vindictive passion to a faint sickness and terror—felt the earth tremble—knew in a moment that the rush was come—uttered a shriek—looked round—saw the red eyes, bleared and dim in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill, that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the air.
Skim read that, and now let’s see if you know what happened. All right, limb from limb, mutilated fragments—he’s dead, obviously. But how? You really have to slow down and read the words in order to find out.
In fact, Mr. Carker got run over by a train. If you read it more slowly and maybe even think about it a little, you can tell—which is the point, Dickens isn’t bringing you up-to-date with recaps so you can skip all his words; you generally have to read them or you’ll be missing some pretty important details!
Dombey and Son has a lot of foreshadowing. Sometimes I thought it was a little too much—or too pointed. I mean, poetical justice obviously demanded that Mr. Dombey be humbled, so it’s not like the clear references to that spoiled anything, but for me they were kind of overkill on the working up emotion/drama side of things.
Anyways, that’s nitpicking on Dickens’ masterful style which is a pleasure to see shine in Dombey and Son as in his other works.
7/10
Conclusion
7.3/10
Dombey and Son has a well-organized plot, though it’s slightly on the predictable side. The villains of the piece are particularly well-developed; I found the heroes slightly less realistic at times, but still in general relatable and enjoyable characters. The point of the book—an extended illustration of the devastation unchecked pride leaves behind—is well taken and well established. Dickens’ style doesn’t make for a light read, but it’s rewarding and educational.
I’ve read Dombey and Son twice, and while I’m sure it’s among my favorite of Dickens’ books, I’m not at all sure where exactly it fits in. I guess I’ll just have to read it a third time someday!
You can download Dombey and Son for free as an ebook on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/821
Have any questions about the book or opinions of your own to share? Let me know in the comment section below!
You might also enjoy these other book reviews I’ve written:
Geneva D 
What do you think?