The Sun.
London, England, 1848-04-13 00:00:00

MAGAZINES, ..,c.—(CONTINUED.

DOMBEY AND SON. By Charles Dickens.
Sorrowfully do we close the double number (XIX.
and XX.) of "Pombey and Son" just published. Our
regret is not an affectation. We are neither writing
the balderdash of compliment nor the hyper-
boles of panegyric. An old friend has left
us—the voice of a dear favourite is silent—
" Dombey and Son" is completed. Heartily do we
regret this, for this true English story-book, which
has appeared from month to month, with its chequered
incidents, its exquisite and touching pathos, its fre-
quent, spontaneous, and fantastic merriment,
its occasional grotesqueness, its pervading loyalty
to the natural, the true, and the beautiful, its
home-touches, its gleams of satire, its erotic
benevolence, its unforced philosophy, and, above all
its many, strange, original, life-like, and admirable
characters—the true English story, we say, in which
all this has been lavished with the abundance of a
fruitful but untutored genius, has imparted so much
zest to every successive interval in the course of
its publication, has scattered, as it were, such

sweet flowers upon the dusty path of life, while Time
has been rolling us all onward to Eternity, that we
should be ungrateful were we not to lament its ter-
mination. We do regret it—thoroughly. That Mr.
Dickens can sympathise in this feeling we know from
his books. Their closing sentences are generally
dictated in a mood of sadness and lamentation.
As he himself has happily expressed it in
I one of his brief but suggestive introductions, the
author, like a dejected host, is fain to loiter upon the
threshold even when he has dismissed his guests, and
shade, the last of them farewell. In "Dombey and
a :gnu' i for
ane :ea nlw
pi t he 't whee
dairffeerloeantth troeaitmioangsinien tthhaet our
acquaintan6 with the different creations in the vo-
lume has terminated. Captain Cuttle, either
as "Ed'ard Cuttle, Mariner,s
"the
lives at
at
home at ease," or simplya
with the instrument," in allusion to 7iisgee
resigned
is
n
not exactly the man whose friendship can b
roo hck
without a sigh. Major Bagstock again,‘g,
sto,
and tough, old J. 8., Sir, Josh, Joseph, j.i
Joe 8.," or whatever abbreviation he might please
to call himself by in his delightful spirit of egotism,
is one of those abominable beings one regards with a I
sort of contemptuous affection such we ourselves
well remember to have experienced towards Daniel
Quilp. Mr. Toodle, the stoker, " all cindery and
swarth ;" Polly Toodle, otherwise Mrs. Richards, his
better-half, in her way a hind of middle-aged
Mrs. Nubbles ; and even that precocious imp the
Biler, or the Grinder, the first-born of their large
family of Toodles—are all such truthful specimens
of our labouring classes as not to be abandoned wil-
lingly or forgotten very speedily. Then, more-
over, there is Towlinson, whose ambition is
to set up in the green-grocery line, and whose parti-
cular antipathy are foreigners. There is the Major's
Oriental helot " the Native," described in the last
number (page 51.9), as " living in a rainy season of
boot-jacks and brushes." There is Mr. Morfin, whose
performances on the violincello gave his deaf land-
lady only a " sensation of something rumbling in her
bones." There is that grim and awful harridan, Mrs.
Pipchin, with her partiality for sweetbreads and re-
lays of buttered toast, hot and hot. There is Dr.
Blimber with his learned legs, like a clerical piano-
forte ; and Mrs. Blimber with her blue-stocking love
for Cicero and Tusculum; and Cornelia Blimber, a
very ghoul among dead languages ; and Mr. Feeder,
8.A., with his lierodotus and other stops—quite a
barrel organ of erudition ! Then again, there is Carker,
the manager—" deceased person with white teeth :" and
Perch, the messenger, an oracle not on a tripod, but
on a bracket; and Cousin Feenix, with his friend
Shakspere—" man who was'nt for an age, but for all
time." There is Mrs. Macstinger, of Brig-place, the
lady who cooled her temper by inverting her young-
est born, Alexander Macstinger, so as to bring him
within the range of a sharp battery of slaps. There
is the oracular Bunsby, and Mrs. Mitt; with her
mortified bonnet; and Susan Nipper, and good Mrs.
Brown, and Lucretia Tox, and Mr. Chick, and Mrs.
Chick, and Mrs. Skewton, and Cleopatra's page,
commonly called Withers the Wan ; and Walter
Gay, and Sol Gills, the instrument maker ; and
there is Sir Barnet Skettles, and the weak-eyed
young man at Dr. Blimber's, and Master
Bitherstone, and poor Berry, and Diogenes,
and Mr. Toots and the Game Chicken, and
Alice, and Edith, and Mr. Dombey, and Flo-
rence, and little Paul Dombey ! Those, and
there are thousands of them, who have, like ourselves,
devoured the work bit by bit—familiarising them-
selves by long association with the every characteris-
tic of the ideal personages depicted in the narrative
—and coming at last to regard with a sort of tender-
ness even the green covers of the monthly instalment,
as being connected in some fashion with the joys and
sorrows of the story, and by consequence with their
own tears and laughter, will comprehend our regret
at the dispersion of this imaginary multitude. It is
not the least important or the least remark-
able among the numerous peculiarities of Mr.
Dickens as a novelist, that he sketches a
locality with as much vividness as a painter,
and that he imparts to a fictitious being an
absolute and visible individuality. The actors in his
tales are no mere pasteboard fantoccini, moved by the
threads of an ingenious plot, and coloured into the
semblance of life by the lustre of his imagination—
they are as actual as flesh and blood, as true as
humanity, as filled with the heat of passion
and as fraught with the vitality of sentiment as the
creature modelled by the hand of Prometheus and
warmed into animation by the fire stolen from the
celestial laboratory. If there were nothing worthy of
admiration in " Dombey and Son" beyond the passage
descriptive of the death of Little Paul, it would
from that solitary passage have been worthy of a dis-
tinguished place among the classic books of our
national literature. In that exquisite chapter —.a
chapter stamped with the golden seal of genius—
Mr. Dickens altogether surpassed himself,
he surpassed his plaintive sketch of Tiny
Tim's death in the " Christmas Carol,"
and even that most beautiful, and, as we had
once imagined, inimitable, incident in the " Old
Curiosity Shop "-.-the death of Little Nell. We
envy not that man who can read for the first time
the account of the death of little Paul Dombey with
a heart unmoved and an eye tearless. We can
have no sympathy with each other—we are separated
in disposition by a wall of brass.. . . Like most of
the preceding fictions of Mr. Dickens, " Dombey
and Son" inculcates a great moral inferentially,
and demonstrates the omnipotence of virtue by
the transformation of a temperament. In this
manner " The Christmas Carol" proclaimed
anew those glorious tidings which were sung by
angels in the sky on the eve of the first Christmas—
Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra par hominibus.
Peace, goodwill, brotherly love, universal charity one
towards another was the moral of that matchless book.
" Martin Chuzzlewit" in a different way asserted the
policy of gentle feelings for our neighbours. "Dombey
and Son," upon a similar principle, shows the hol-
lowness of egotism and the misery resulting from
the isolation caused by self-sufficiency. Ebenezer
Scrooge is changed before the close of the
volume from a miser into a philanthropist.
Young Martin abandons his selfishness for gene-
rosity ; and Dombey, the great merchant,
_oin emergeshe
towards the close of the present history r
armour of his Pride, proving himself to be of a
hearted, generous, gentle, loving
nature.
for
enforcement of this beautiful dogmaofmeekness, are associated
the eloquent revelations of love which
with every fragment in reference to Florence, for
For the
child's death, in the person of
the bewitching delineation of a child's life and the
exquisite picture of a d
son,,
is assuredly the
masterpiece of
little Paul—" DombeyCharles
is hosetreeloisquinenitt andno
l
parallel passage, it
which may
in the tower of Saint Paul's
tot
Cathedral, truane,
Dickens.
h a t n
"be found in one of the random
and insulated chapters of Master Humphreys
Clock." There are no separate paragraphs inspired
with such rhetorical animation as those in " I3arnaby
Rudge," where the murderer is scared by the ringing
of the alarm-bell in the mansion of Mr. Hare-
dale, or where the populace are casting fresh
fuel before the burning doors of Newgate. "Dombey
and Son" has no Dick Swiveller, like the " Old Cu-
riosity Shop ;" no Brothers Cheeryble, like " Nicholas
Nickleby ;" no Sarey Gamp or Seth recksniff, like
" Martin Chuzzlewit." It is inferior to " Pick-
wick" in point of sustained drollery, and to
" Oliver Twist" in dramatic passion, and epic
completeness. In the three particulars already
specified, however, " Dombey and Son" sur-
passes every one of the preceding compositions of
Mt: Dickens; and in several of the minor parts it is