Dombey and Son, published by Charles Dickens in 1848, is far from being the most populated of his novels. Moreover, almost all the characters—with the exception of the heroine Florence—appear as "humour characters," in the sense defined by Samuel Johnson: that is, they are characterized by an exaggeration, or even an eccentricity (whether good or bad), which tends to sum up their entire personality. Even Little Paul, the long-awaited male child meant to carry on the powerful firm of "Dombey and Son," becomes odd, is judged old-fashioned and outdated, yet precociously adult—able, before his premature death, to understand the mystery of the waves and, beyond that, of the entire cosmos.

Dickens focuses above all on the relationships between the characters, particularly the strange relationship between the daughter Florence and her father Mr. Dombey, which only begins to change at the end of the novel—after he, until then absent, useless, and cruelly indifferent, finally finds redemption through a kind of reverse initiatory journey marked by defeat, sorrow, and illness. This relationship has raised numerous questions, for which critics have offered, depending on the generation, moralizing, societal, psychoanalytic, or feminist interpretations.

Clearly, Dickens places less emphasis on individualized character development, mainly using two traditional literary devices from the 17th and 18th centuries: satirical irony aimed at the villains, and sentimentality—often verging on melodrama—toward the good characters, who, in the novel's end, gather around a symbolic bottle of old Madeira wine, whose presence or absence punctuates the progression of the narrative.

Census

Almost all the proper names evoke, through their sound, either directly or by allusion, a personality trait. A brief explanation is given for each.

Mr. Paul Dombey: wealthy owner of a shipping house. The name "Dombey" suggests the adjective dumb, meaning "stupid" in a figurative sense, and also the noun donkey. Edith Granger: proud widow, daughter of Mrs. Skewton, who becomes the second Mrs. Dombey. The misfortunes brought on by this marriage draw her closer to Florence, Dombey's neglected daughter. Mrs. Fanny Dombey: first wife of Mr. Dombey, mother of Florence and Paul, who dies shortly after giving birth. The name Fanny has a distinctly feminine connotation in British English. Master Paul Dombey (Little Paul): Mr. Dombey's son, frail and often ill. Presumptive heir to the "Dombey and Son" firm, he dies at the age of nine after enduring a rigid and imposed education. Miss Florence (Floy) Dombey: Mr. Dombey's elder daughter, whom he coldly neglects. The name Florence, as in French, evokes the word "flower." Mrs. Louisa Chick: Mr. Dombey's sister. Mr. Chick: husband of Mrs. Chick. Miss Lucretia Tox: friend of Mrs. Chick, great admirer of Mr. Dombey, and neighbor to Major Joseph Bagstock. Tox recalls "toxin" or drugs, as though this lady were "intoxicated," so obsessed is she with Mr. Dombey. James Carker (Mr. Carker the Manager): corrupt manager of the firm "Dombey and Son." Carker evokes canker (a kind of ulcer) and the idea of gnawing worry (cark). John Carker (Mr. Carker the Junior): elder brother of James Carker, disgraced and relegated to menial tasks at "Dombey and Son." Miss Harriet Carker: sister of the above. Mr. Morfin: deputy manager at the Dombey firm. Morfin suggests morphia, or morphine. Mr. Perch: office boy at Dombey's. Perch refers both to the fish and to the pole used to reach things. Mr. Perch has a talent for slipping away like one and reaching his goal like the other. Solomon (Uncle Sol) Gills: maker of nautical instruments and owner of the shop The Wooden Midshipman. His first name, whose abbreviation suggests "sun," evokes the legendary wisdom of the biblical figure Solomon. Walter Gay: nephew of Solomon Gills, friend of Florence, employee of Mr. Dombey, exiled by Carker the Manager. The surname GayGay, in the sense of homosexuality, is a term only dating from the 1960s. emphasizes his joyful nature, while the very common first name Walter suggests total normality. Captain Edward (Ned) Cuttle: retired naval officer, friend of Gills. Cuttle is short for cuttlefish (a squid-like sea creature); the name, just one consonant away, also recalls scuttle ("to scuttle," or deliberately sink something). Major Joseph Bagstock (Josh, Joe, J.B., Old Joe): retired army officer, great admirer of Miss Tox and friend of Dombey until the latter's downfall. The name Bagstock evokes a worn-out windbag, full of flashy yet empty speech. Briggs: schoolmate of Paul. Tozer: schoolmate of Paul. Mr. P. Toots: schoolmate of Paul and later a foppish admirer of Florence, he eventually marries Susan Nipper. The Game Chicken: pseudonym of a friend of Mr. Toots, fond of fighting and roughhousing. The name evokes the world of professional boxing. Miss Susan Nipper: Florence's nurse, whom she loves and defends with unwavering loyalty. She eventually marries Mr. Toots. Her surname evokes her sharp tongue—nipper derives from nip. Mrs. Cleopatra Skewton: disabled mother of Edith Granger Dombey and former lover of Bagstock. Her first name hints at her glittering, fading past, while Skewton contains skew. Also, skew is close to skewer, suggesting her withered state. Cousin Feenix (Lord Cousin Feenix): cousin of Edith Granger, who takes her in after she flees the Dombey household. Mr. Toodle: railway technician, whose name calls to mind a poodle. Polly Toodle (Mrs. Richards): Mr. Toodle's wife and Little Paul's wet nurse under the name "Mrs. Richards," imposed by Dombey. Polly, a fairly common name, is also the heroine of the famous nursery rhyme: Polly put the kettle on. Robin Toodle (Rob the Grinder, Biler): son of the Toodles, sent to the Charitable Grinders school, later employed by Captain Cuttle and Mr. Carker the Manager. Robin evokes the robin bird; Grinder recalls the destitute children in workhouses who were so hungry they would grind bones to survive; Biler suggests a bilious, irritable person. Good Mrs. Brown: old ragpicker who briefly kidnaps Florence and proves to be a key figure in the plot. Brown Alice (Alice Marwood): daughter of Good Mrs. Brown and cousin of Edith Granger, former lover of Carker, recently returned from deportation. Jack Bunsby: captain of the ship Cautious Clara, a hero to Captain Cuttle, who consults him regularly without ever really understanding what he says. Bunsby eventually marries Mrs. MacStinger. His name contains bun. Mrs. MacStinger: Captain Cuttle's landlady, a relentless shrew. Her name evokes stinginess and pettiness. Mrs. Pipchin: strict widow and owner of a boarding house in Brighton, where Little Paul is sent for health reasons before being enrolled in Dr. Blimber's academy. Master Bitherstone: resident at Mrs. Pipchin's, later a student at Dr. Blimber's academy. Miss Pankey: resident at Mrs. Pipchin's. Sir Barnet Skettles: father of Master Skettles. Lady Skettles: mother of Master Skettles. Master Skettles: student in Brighton. Doctor Blimber: head of the institution in Brighton where Little Paul is enrolled. The school is a kind of hothouse that forces young plants (students) to grow prematurely. Mrs. Blimber: wife of Doctor Blimber. Miss Cornelia Blimber: daughter of Doctor Blimber and teacher. The name Cornelia may refer to Shakespeare's King Lear. Mr. Feeder: assistant to Doctor Blimber and teacher; his name means "one who feeds"—in this context, one who stuffs students with (pseudo-)intellectual nourishment. Diogenes: dog at Dr. Blimber's institution in Brighton, especially loved by Little Paul and adopted by Florence after Paul's death. Mr. Brogley: secondhand furniture dealer with a shop in Bishopgate Street; he takes over The Wooden Midshipman when Solomon Gills can no longer pay his debts. However, Sol receives money from Paul Dombey to settle the account, and Walter Gay remains with Brogley after the shipwreck. The Native: Indian servant of Major Bagstock. Mrs. Wickham: Little Paul's second nurse after Polly Toodle is dismissed.

Relationships The title of the novel itself reveals the importance given to the relationships among the various characters and, above all, to family ties. While "Dombey and Son" is the name of the company, the presence of the coordinating conjunction links the two characters on a human level. The first chapters correspond to the nine years of Little Paul's life, but his death marks the beginning of another major turning point, summed up in Miss Tox's ironic remark: "Good gracious, good gracious, [...] who would have thought that Dombey and Son would turn out to be Dombey and Daughter after all!"Curiously, the Wordsworth edition omits this sentence at the end of chapter 16. The way had already been paved by Walter Gay's toast: "To Dombey and Son — and Daughter!" In truth, the novel does not follow a plot that aligns with its title, for the story is above all that of a one-sided conflict between a father and his daughter—and not only theirs: parent-child relationships, and especially parental absence, form the core of the narrative, its main branch and all its offshoots.

Dombey, an enigmatic character

According to Elizabeth Gitter, "[w]ith his comic coldness, Dombey resembles Ebenezer Scrooge, but he is a darker, more enigmatic character, as mysterious and grotesque as the allegorical figures described by Walter Benjamin." She goes on to argue that, unlike Scrooge, however, his emotional frigidity is not rooted in a childhood etiology — his coldness comes to him naturally, in a way. She concludes that his forever gloomy and dry mood stems from a fundamental melancholy that makes him at once cruel, stubborn, solitary, and relentless. Dombey, she continues, "reigns over an England afflicted with the same societal coldness, an almost universal absence of compassion." Thus, "despite his central role in a Victorian novel, he remains essentially a 'pre-bourgeois' emblematic figure, a synecdoche of the desolate world in which he resides." At the end of the novel, she concludes, "in a suicidal vision of his own reflection, he ejects himself from the narrative for the simple reason that Dickens uses him not for a conventional change of heart, but to tear away the mask of the Dombey household — and of the nation as a whole." Françoise Basch adds that "he is not presented as an individual, but as the symbol of his firm and, beyond that, of the entire country."

This is essentially a societal analysis; psychoanalysis offers a more complex interpretation, which many critics have explored. If the relationship between Florence and her father pertains to the Oedipus complex,The Electra complex, sometimes used for father-daughter relationships, is a theoretical concept by Carl Gustav Jung, who, in 1913, named it in reference to the Greek heroine who avenged her father Agamemnon by murdering her own mother, Clytemnestra. He believed he had created an equivalent to Freud's Oedipus complex, but Freud rejected this proposal: "It seems to us on this point that what we say of the Oedipus complex applies strictly only to the male child, and that we are justified in rejecting the term Electra complex, which insists on the analogy in behavior between the two sexes." For Freud, there is no "Law of the Mother," and the issue cannot be resolved by a simple mythological equivalence. nothing is stated openly by Dickens — not only because, given the chronology, such an interpretation can only be made in hindsight, but also because he proceeds by a series of allusions that the reader is left to decipher.

Dombey, the absent father