Good Mrs.

Brown's Connections: Sexuality and Story-Telling in Dealings with the Firm of

Dombey and Son
Author(s): Joss Lutz Marsh
Source: ELH, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 405-426
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873374 .
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GOOD MRS. BROWN'S CONNECTIONS: SEXUALITY
AND STORY-TELLING IN DEALINGS WITH THE FIRM
OF DOMBEY AND SON

BY JOSS LUTZ MARSH

Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale,Retail

and for Exportation,Dickens's novel of 1846-48,was writtento-
wardsthe heydayofVictorianreticence,hypocrisy, and activityin
matterssexual-before a decent woman was admittedto have a
sexuallife,beforetheage ofconsentcreptabove twelve,beforeany
legislationagainstobscenity.It has longbeen considereda pivotal
novel in Dickens's career.At stake in the reconsideration
of this
novel offeredhere is nothingless than his "reputation,"in the
Victoriansense of thatword. For what I shall demonstrateis the
essentialjustnessofWilkieCollins's solitarycryagainstDickens's
supposed purity:
If it is true,whichit is not,it would implythe condemnationof
Dickens' books as works of art.... If this wretched English clap-
trapmeans anythingit means thatthe novelistis forbiddento
touchon the sexual relationswhichliterallyswarmabouthim.'

In Dombey and Son Dickens does morethan"touch on" human

sexuality:he gives place to sexualityat its most unmentionably
problematic-woman's sexuality. Equivocally, he both gives
womana voice and silences her; forin Dombeythe woman'sstory
is identifiedwith thatsexuality.Reading more deeply into this
novel, consideringits problematicidentification and ineffectual
suppressionin the lightof such insightsas Foucault's in The His-
toryof Sexuality,(re)capturing all the nuances of whatin S/ZRo-
land Barthestermsa text's"culturalcode," and mapping,as Peter
Brookswould have us do, thetransgressive trajectoryofitsplotting,
will allow us moresensitivelytocomprehendthetwincriticalprob-
lems of Dickens's treatmentof sexuality and his handling of
women,as theyinteractin a pivotaltext.2
Strideshave indeed recentlybeen made in this direction,and
away fromthe pure disgustfeltby criticsas diverse as Sylvere
Monod,A. E. Dyson,and JulianMoynahanwithsuch sweet,sen-

ELH 58 (1991) 405-426 ? 1991 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversity

Press 405
timental (and therefore sickly) heroines as Dombey's neglected
daughter Florence.3 Though he does not grapple with the issue of
sexuality, in his Dickens and Women Michael Slater has enriched
our understanding of Dickens's central female charactersby juxta-
posing his readings against a re-examination of the important
women in Dickens's life.4On the subject ofDombey and Son itself,
Nina Auerbach has persuasively presented the novel as a deliberate
exploration of the tragic consequences of splittingthe world into
two mutually isolated "spheres" founded on opposing female and
male principles, home and world.5 Robert Clark, too, has con-
fronteda central problem of the novel: the excessive hostilityof
Dombey to his daughter. He is surely correctto highlightthe text's
"libidinous desire" for"radical" possibilities, such as the liberation
of female sexuality,and its no less urgent "need to repress them."6
As we shall see below, no less apposite is his view, followingLevi-
Strauss, of "the exchange of women [as] the primary social
exchange" in the novel and in the world fromwhich it springs.7
Dombey's hostilityto Florence, Clark finallyproposes, is a reaction
to his own (repressed) desire forincest. Lynda Zwinger's examina-
tion of the problem reaches a somewhat differentconclusion, but
one which nevertheless foregroundsissues of sexuality: Dombey
sees in Florence, the daughter, the embodiment of the threat of
impotence, which he indeed must eventually sufferas a necessary
prelude to reunion with his daughterat the novel's close. "Florence
Dombey and figures like her," she rightlyremarks,"stand at the
intersectionof the pious and the perverse."8 As such incisive work
has made absolutely clear, Dombey and Son simply does not aim to
tell of the "Son" of the grandly mercantilist-capitalisttitle; little
Paul Dombey, afterall, is eliminated only one quarter of the way
into the text. And it may not even desire to speak primarily of
Dombey. In short,the famous "curtain" to the novel's fifthnumber
(already fixed in Dickens's mind as he startedwriting)is a kind of
intra-textualjoke at the title's expense: "Dombey and Son [is] a
Daughter afterall."9
The critical suspicion that the core of Dombey and Son may in
factbe a woman's storyis deepened even by a briefsummaryof its
events. Like Oliver Twist, which in its second half is more deeply
involved with the storyof Nancy the golden-hearted prostitute,the
narrative seems gradually to veer from concern with the epony-
mous male hero to fascination with less reputable female charac-
ters. Ostensibly, Dombey is structuredaround the theme of Pride.

406 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

Mr. Dombey is proud of his business and proud of his second child
and only son, Paul, whose motherdies at his birth.This misfortune
puts proud Dombey in need of a wetnurse,a humble woman whom
he must preventfromsharingin his son's affections.He fails,just as
he fails to exclude fromPaul's heart his neglected daughter, Flo-
rence; it is these two whom are called to the deathbed of poor sickly
Paul. But Pride has apparently succeeded in eliminating Walter
Gay, a low-born lad in Dombey's employ, who afterrescuing Flor-
ence from the clutches of a grotesque old woman has wrapped
himselfin romanticdreams of her. And Pride has created an image
in its own likeness in the person of the dangerously ambitious
Carker, Dombey's manager. It certainlydictates Dombey's choice
of second wife: the accomplished, well-born, penniless and
haughty Edith Granger, whose covetous mother plots the match
with Dombey's friend Major Bagstock. The married life of this
proud pair rapidly turns into a struggle forpower, with Florence,
whom Edith loves in her husband's despite, caught between the
two combatants, and Carker called in by Dombey to act as
"mediator" (743) and thereby humble haughtyEdith all the more.
From this point on, and forsome considerable time before,much
of our interestand nearly all power of action resides with the nov-
el's female characters. Edith and Carker elope; Dombey accuses
Florence of complicity, and brutally strikes her down. She flees.
But Carker's plot to usurp Dombey's place is entirelyundercut by
Edith's plot to humble Dombey. Afterthey have fled to Dijon she
spurns and escapes the lustfulmanager; just the public circulation
of the story that she has fulfilled his adulterous expectations is
sufficientforher crushingrevenge on her husband. Meanwhile, the
apparentlyfallen Edith's low-lifecounterpart,the prostitutedAlice
(the grotesque old woman's daughter), gains her revenge on her
seducer, Carker, by passing to Dombey the "secret intelligence"
(title of chapter 52) she and her mother have gathered of Carker's
plans. Again, a man's scheme is subsumed by, absorbed within, a
woman's grander design; the women of the novel emerge as its
most effectiveplotters.The novel closes with the broken Dombey's
redemption by his daughter, now married to Walter, and final rev-
elations fromEdith and Alice.
All of the plot-lines and the major "hermeneutic enigmas" that
keep our interest,or keep us in suspense, until the very end of the
novel, in fact,privilege women ratherthan men.10The trajectoryof
the novel, the twistsand turnsof its plottingare, to borrow Brooks's

JossLutz Marsh 407

most appropriate description of nineteenth-century narrative,
"deviant" above all in theirforegrounding of woman,her power
and her sexuality:the impetusof the plot is transgression."Still
moresurprisingly, whenwe have unraveledDombey'sweb ofenig-
mas, we findthatthe finalgoal of the narrative(as narrative)has
been the attemptbothto tell and not to tell the whole "woman's
story,"includinghersexualconfession.In justthisrespectDombey
and Son maywell have a hithertounacknowledgedand unacknowl-
edgeable literaryancestorin the genreof confession,a repressed
intertextforits femalenarrative.Furthermore, at the time of the
novel's composition,as we shall see, Dickens had developed a
peculiar and intenseinterestin the storiescertainwomen might
tell.

Accordingto Alice,hermotherGood Mrs.Brown"was covetous

and poor,and thoughttomakea sortofproperty ofme" (847). Edith
turnson the motherwho has twice hawked her in the marriage
marketwith the words: "What childhooddid you ever leave to
me?" (472). To Dombey,Florence is "merelya piece ofbase coin
thatcouldn't be invested" (51). But to those used to dealing in
differentmarkets,like thesebawd-mothers, she is a valuable com-
modity.This we learnas earlyas chapter6 ofthe novel. It is here,
in the strangetale of Florence's abductionby Good Mrs. Brown,
thatwe discover a startlingemergenceof the "woman's story."
Chapter6 is a keyto the novel.
Even at firstglance,its eventsstrikeone as murky:the cultural
label theywear,we mightsay,is quite separatefromthe meaning
theyexplicitlyoffer.In thisearlychapter,the "sweet youngpretty
innocent"(108) Florencefindsherselfby accidentforthefirsttime
"quite alone" (128) in London's "labyrinth"(131) of an under-
world,havingwandered"intohauntsand intosociety,"as Dombey
laterputs it, "which are not to be thoughtof withouta shudder"
(142). She is pounced upon by a hideous old woman,a creatureof
the nightand ofnightmare, who "seemed to have followed[her]"
(128). The old womanlures Florence to herhouse, a place offilth
and secrecythatwas,we are told,"as closelyshutup as a house that
was fullofcracksand crevicescould be" (129, myemphasis);she
revealsto Florencehername,"Mrs. Brown... Good Mrs.Brown"
(128); and now promisesherhelp. Yet herveryfirstline had been
an accusation: "Why did you run away from'em?" Alreadythe
natureofchapter6's culturallabel is becomingapparent:thismod-

408 Sexualityand Storyin Dombey and Son

ern "labyrinth" bodes as much danger to maidens as its ancient
prototype. For Florence did not "run away." The old woman's
words encode an assumption that will prove in keeping with her
role and history:bad girls run away to their ruin in the big city,in
Victorian times as now. Reinforcingthis subliminal message, once
(falsely) reassured, Florence follows Good Mrs. Brown "willingly"
(129). Girls who go to the bad, the Victorian cultural code tells us,
choose to do so-whether wittinglyor not is irrelevant: innocence
in this era had nothingto do with volition and everythingto do with
not shop-soiling the goods.'2 Last but not least, one should note the
sexual innuendo of the language; at this time, as for centuries,
"crack" was slang for"vagina."
Florence is now pushed into a desolate room "whose walls and
ceiling were quite black" (129). Here, like any tender female faced
with her trial,she looks "as though about to swoon." "Reviving her
with a shake," Mrs. Brown tells her thatif she is not obstinate, she
will not be hurt-the rapist's request, employed in every tale of
degradation and sado-masochistic "seduction" in the Victorian
era's most notorious, though not most distasteful, underground
magazine, The Pearl.'3 The crone's next concern is to extortFlor-
ence's "little history"fromher (130). This necessary preliminaryto
establishing her power over the child is an important symbolic
element in the scene. Similarly,afterchapter 6, other charactersin
turnwill be empowered by their knowledge of its events; Carker,
Walter, and Edith will make very differentuse of their knowledge
of "the adventure of the lost child" (287). That adventure becomes
Florence's most prominentidentifyingfeature.Afterchapter 6, she
is a girl with a (hi)story.
The room's only furnitureis a heap of rags, bones, dust, and
cinders. Good Mrs. Brown, it seems, trades in human residue: the
bones associate her with death, with the human body as commodity
broken down into its units of currency (an idea Dickens was to
reworkto considerable effectin Our Mutual Friend). We will later
learn how this quasi-masculine, pipe-smoking creature would still
pimp forher own daughter: to Mrs. Brown, all female flesh is com-
modity. So, too, are clothes. Florence is now peremptorilytold to
strip,and her "slight figure" examined; she is ordered to don some
"wretched substitutes" forher own neat garments(130), and given
a rabbit skin to carry-a pointed, bestial detail. Dressed in filth,as
is fallen Alice Marwood upon her firstintroduction to us (563),
Florence will soon be treated as filth:the change symbolizes what

JossLutz Marsh 409

 is termed the "altered state" in which, suggestively, she dreads
"the prospect of encountering her angry father" (132).14 For what
Victorian fatherever valued a fallen child? In this garb she is pre-
sumed to have lost her innocence: "If you please, is this the City?"
she asks a man on a wharfwhen she is finallyset free; "You know
that well enough, I daresay," he replies (133).
But at one point her final liberation is in doubt. As she attempts
to put on a filthybonnet, Florence's hair comes loose and tumbles
over her shoulders. Good Mrs. Brown's excitement at this juncture
speaks to us in terms still more explicitly, dangerously sexual:
"'Why couldn't you let me be?' said Mrs. Brown, 'when I was
contented? You little fool!'" (130). Unwittingly(to use the vulgar
phrase), Florence has "led her on." "Couldn't help it!" Mrs. Brown
cries, "whipp[ing]" out a large pair of scissors, "How do you expect
I can help it?" And she rufflesFlorence's curls with a "furious
pleasure" (130) farbeyond what we mightexpect of a crone with a
line in cuttingand selling human hair. But to Mrs. Brown Florence
is not only a commodityin an asexual sense, her hair raw material
fora wig-maker. Underneath this primary(economic) level of de-
notation in chapter 6 is a sexual substratum,as there is in this era
beneath the very verbs "spend" and "possess," synonyms for
"ejaculate" and "penetrate": the language of this period itself
forges a correspondence between the worlds of economics and of
sexuality,a correspondence essential to the "victim masterplot" of
Dombey and Son.'5 The quasi-sexual language of chapter 6 forces
us to see Florence's body also as a sexual commodity: in order to
achieve a "victory over herself' Mrs. Brown must bid Florence
hide her curls and "let no trace of them escape to tempt her" (131,
my emphasis). Even this aside, the very act of Florence's letting
down her hair is culturallyand sexually encoded. Later in Dombey
and Son, loosened, "wild" hair comes to signifywhat it does in a
host of Pre-Raphaelite paintings: sexual abandonment.16 It will
identifyboth of the novel's bartered daughters, Alice, the fallen
woman, and Edith, the "fallen spirit" (751). In similar fashion,once
Florence has escaped Mrs. Brown and encountered Walter,she will
declare: "I am lost, ifyou please!" (134, my emphasis). Thereafter,
the word "lost," implying "fallen," will echo through the novel,
forgingcloser and closer links between Florence, Alice, and Edith.
Florence's ordeal ends when she meets Walter, her savior.
"Come along, Miss Dombey. Let me see the villain who will dare
molest you now" he declares (135): his language presents her story

410 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

as a melodrama of threatened despoliation. We need not pile on
more details. These are enough to establish the astonishing level of
sexual resonance in chapter 6. They are stronglysupported by later
hints of the threats to Florence posed by Edith's mother, Mrs.
Skewton, and, in particular,by Carker, the "scaly monster of the
deep, [who] swam down below, and kept his shining eye upon her"
(477). (The firsthalf of the novel is litteredwith narrativeclues that
lead us to believe thatFlorence, not Edith, will be the victim of its
animalistic all-purpose seducer.) Furthermore,what Clark might
termcruel Dombey's repressed incestuous longings forhis daugh-
ter escape into traditional sexual imagery,familiarfromthe Bible
and Shakespeare: "Unnatural the hand thathad directed the sharp
plough, which furrowedup her gentle nature forthe sowing of its
seeds" (585).17 Yet even if supported by such suggestions of lan-
guage the events of chapter 6 might still suggest no more than the
kind of grotesque threatto sexually victimize the innocent that we
findin The Old CuriosityShop,NicholasNickleby,and David Cop-
perfield, as if the textlonged to transgressits own code of censor-
ship in matters sexual. It is my claim, however, that they do not
stand in isolation.

The events of chapter 6 initiate the parabola of the Florence-

Good Mrs. Brown-Walterplot. This is perhaps Dombey's most es-
sential narrativestructure,and as such it offersus a key, in Brooks's
terms,to the design and "intention" of the narrative.It is therefore
still more strikingthatthese events and thatplot duplicate the key
initiatory events and narrative shape of another novel, widely
though not openly available in nineteenth-centuryEngland. The
novel I referto is John Cleland's erotic masterpiece Memoirs of a
Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill. No less than twenty
editions of this model forEnglish pornographyare recorded forthe
years between its firstpublication in 1749 and 1845. This frankest
of epistolary "autobiographies" was, afterall, required reading for
any man interested in "the sex": among them, forinstance, Dick-
ens's acquaintance, the critic George Augustus Sala, apparent au-
thorof the firstand most sadistic portion of the pornographic Mys-
teries of Verbena House, and Dickens's close friend Monckton
Milnes, "generous" owner of a fast-growinglibrary of erotic and
sadistic literature.'8Dombey's resemblances to this archetypal un-
derground "woman's story"are striking.
In the Memoirs a young orphaned girl, Fanny, also finds herself

foss Lutz Marsh 411

by accident alone forthe firsttime in the big city,vulnerable in her
"native innocence" and profoundignorance.'9 She is spotted by a
procuress, who greedily sizes up the "fresh goods" (45) and "per-
ishable commodity" (51) virginFanny represents: "She looked as if
she would devour me with her eyes" (44). She decoys the inno-
cently willing girl back to her bawdy house, where, like Florence,
Fanny is virtuallyimprisoned. The procuress's name, which, sig-
nificantly,seems to be original to Cleland, is Mrs. Brown, "the good
Mrs. Brown" (51), Fanny tells us, "the sweet good Mrs. Brown"
(52). She herself, of course, shares her name with the firstMrs.
Dombey, the hapless, speechless doormat,Fanny.
Next, as in chapter 6 of Dombey, an importantsymbolic transfor-
mation takes place. Fanny's simple countryclothes are changed-
"a change in real truthfor much the worse"-for "tawdry" (52)
"second-hand finery" (51). In this garb, and escaped fromsuch a
house, her claims to virgininnocence will be treated as a joke even
by the youth who steps in to save her. This savior and firstlove,
Charles, is later forced into a long sea voyage. The plot of the
Memoirs here almost exactly prefiguresthe Florence-Walter plot in
Dombey and Son: Charles, the son and heir, is dispatched on the
pretextof business by his cruel and jealous father;Walter is dis-
patched on business in the ship Son and Heir by Florence's cruel
and jealous parent. Both youths are considered lost (indeed de-
spaired of),but returntriumphantly,ifpoor, towards the conclusion
of both novels to marrytheir beloveds, although neither girl now
has the value she once had: Fanny has lost her virtue,Florence her
money and social position.20 And to both girls such a marriage
seems eminently right,forCharles and Walter knew themfirst.
Yet, given that Fanny is fifteenand Florence only six and a half
when she encounters Good Mrs. Brown, does it strainour credulity
too farto imagine at the core of Dombey and Son this primal por-
nographic plot? The answer, perhaps surprisingly,certainlydiscon-
certingly,is: no. Mayhew's co-writer Bracebridge Hemyng esti-
mated that at least 10,000 of mid-centuryLondon's 80,000 prosti-
tutes were under the age of consent (raised to thirteen only in
1875).21 The lower-class "labyrinth" in which Florence is "lost"
was their breeding ground: "In one streetin Dalston," a Mile-end
Road brothel-keeperlater told the Pall Mall Gazette's W. T. Stead,
"you mightbuy a dozen."22 The years 1834 to 1853 (when the first
legislation against obscenity was passed) saw a peak in the sexual
degradation of pre-adolescent girls; the Victorians established

412 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

homes forfallen children as well as forfallen women.23The society
Dombey and Son depicts did not care to tackle the "Great Social
Evil"; unlike other European countries, Britain believed in what
Hemyng termed "blind and wilful toleration."24 The Gazette's
ground-breakingexpose of the London trade in virgins revealed
how as late as 1885 one man (one of the few ever brought to trial)
could receive only two years in prison fortwice raping and severely
injuring a girl of five, or how another could buy a seven-year-old
fromher mother,yet be acquitted of corruptionbecause he was "no
worse than others," merely a customer. Even in that year, a pow-
erful lobby still existed to bring the age of consent down to ten or
even lower.25 The last word on the subject must be that Stead's
article, "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon," was itself ille-
gally reprintedand even translatedto supply the pornographymar-
ket. Clearly, so faras Victorianfactis concerned, the sexual/cultural
encoding of chapter 6 and the plausibility of Dombey's reminis-
cences of Cleland's Memoirs may be admitted.
However, there is a grand ironyin Dickens's reaching out in his
treatmentof Florence to an underground literaryancestor. For in
Dombey and Son there is also a powerful drive to push under-
ground the woman's storyand her sexuality: the text firstevokes
and then rebukes the pornographic model, its openness of dis-
course and its foregroundingof female sexuality. But throughout
Dombey what is suppressed in one place finds a vent in another.
The urge to discuss sexuality dictates even names, like "Bagstock,"
a Victorian sexual pun, and suggests descriptions of the blue-faced
bearer of thatname, whose angrypassion "swell[ed] every already
swollen vein in his head" (187). And on the broader scale, displace-
ment,indirection,and "mediation" (to use the termso drilyapplied
to Carker) are keynotes of the novel as a whole, perhaps its most
characteristic and curious narrative strategies. Both Edith and
Carker strike at Dombey through Florence; Carker gains a hold
over Edith by threatening Florence. Dombey punishes Edith
throughCarker, and again most cruelly by hurtingFlorence, whom
he brutally strikesdown in lieu of "beating all trace of beauty out
of [Edith's] triumphantface with his bare hand" (756), a climax of
displaced rage we might expect of the man who went to Leaming-
ton seeking something to "interpose between" himself and his
daughter,and found Edith (356). The passive but central figureof
the daughter mightperhaps best be described, in termsof plot and
structure,as a form of commodity-or a means of exchange and

JossLutz Marsh 413

communication-symbolically passed, like money, between the
other characters.
Given the mechanism of displacement thatthe novel establishes
with regards to power relations, it is no surprise to discover that
displacement of characteristics (predominantly female sexuality)
also occurs amongst its characters, and that a story which might
develop or be uncovered about one characterdetaches itself,wan-
ders, and becomes attached to another. Thus, at the very outset of
Dombey and Son some of the deviant female sexuality that later in
the novel materializes in the figuresof Alice and Edith is initially
displaced onto Florence's "slight figure." And the reverse move-
ment also occurs: the threatto Florence's innocence we scent when
"hot tongue[d]" (442) Carker turnshis "wolflish]" eyes upon her is
diverted to Edith; the sexual story is displaced. Then we seem
poised to learn more about the shadowy Alice, Carker's firstvictim,
but instead returnto the storyof her high-lifealter-ego,Edith. The
storyof the latter,one might say, was all the more "suppressed"
since, at Francis Jeffrey'sinsistence, Dickens decided late in the
day that Edith should draw back fromthe brink of adultery with
Carker, and declare as she grandly spurned him that she "never
meant that."26
There is a sense in which the stories of Florence, Edith, and
Alice are the same story:all are grounded in a victim masterplot,
itself closely related to a central if not the central Dickens myth,
thatof the lost, violated childhood. All three women are dirtied by
their bad parents, the jealous Dombey and the bawd figuresGood
Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Skewton; all three are threatened by Carker.
Throughout,Alice and Edith are symbolically identified with each
other, and finally revealed to be firstcousins. Anticipating this,
Florence dreams of herself and Edith "alone upon the brink of a
dark grave." Edith "point[s] down"; Florence looks and sees
"what!-another Edith lying at the bottom" (592). Dombey views
Florence as virtually"another Edith" when he strikesher down as
"in league" with her fallen stepmother(757), a blow she later re-
calls with aching "shame" (772): the excessive burden of guilt
Florence is made to bear (not to mention the vindictiveness with
which the text pursues her throughout)is an indication that at a
level of narrationat which the textresists operating,she has indeed
sinned, at least by proxy.
The three related stories, then, all struggle to be fully told and
developed; none of them is. For the mechanism of displacement

414 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

and suppression is prone to short-circuiting;it is apparent that to
have a storyto tell at all is to be impure, fallen,and thereforenot fit
to be heard (the ideal Victorian wife was a clean slate on which her
husband wrote): Florence (the "lost child" of the "adventure"),
Edith, Alice, and even, we will discover, Good Mrs. Brown herself,
are on this score equally Fanny Hill's descendants. So too is the
firstMrs. Dombey; and not one of the novel's female characters is
quite so effectivelysilenced as she. Dickens chose not to develop
the hints of something murky in poor speechless Fanny's pre-
marital historythat he had dropped before she died in chapter 1.
Worse, her manuscript remains suffera double suppression. In
chapter 5 her husband, Dombey, secretly reads and carefullytears
up the "one letter that remained entire" in her desk (to which he
alone has the key), putting the "fragments" in his pocket "as if
unwilling to trustthem even to the chances of being re-united and
deciphered" (104). Her creator,Dickens, cut this verypassage from
the overlong second number of the serial parts. In short,the female
voice and the "woman's story"-like her sexuality,with which it is
equated-should be suppressed, not least because both are danger-
ous to the woman herself.

This certainlywas Dickens's real-lifeview. His intense involve-

ment with what, in a lead article in Household Words in 1853, he
euphemistically called a "Home forHomeless Women," makes this
abundantly clear. His role in the planning and day-to-dayrunning
of "Urania Cottage" commenced in May 1846, fourmonths before
Dombey started serial publication; his lettersto the philanthropist
heiress Miss Coutts about what was to become a very humane ref-
uge for fallen women alternate with his most importantletters to
John Forster outlining his projected novel.27 That role was a very
large one, as Philip Collins establishes in his admirable Dickens
and Crime. Dickens's activities included findingsuitable girls, of-
ten "in the course," as he put it, "of my nightlywanderings into
strangeplaces," and even such clerical duties as keeping in his own
hand a casebook with full particularsof every girl admitted, a self-
imposed duty he fulfilledfortwelve years. Interviews of potential
inmates were usually conducted by Dickens alone, and he gave
considerable thoughtto his technique of "imperturbable" neutral-
ityin takingthe "histories," repressing "stock religious professions
and religious phrases." The "extraordinaryand mysteriousstudy"
of these girls led him to conclude that "all people who have led

JossLutz Marsh 415

hazardousand forbiddenlives are,in a certainsense,imaginative,"
a commentthatbegs to be reformulated as "people who have led
hazardouslives fascinatemyimagination."28
Dickens broughtto his taskat UraniaCottagethe same passion-
ate interestand the same skills as he had broughtto a curiously
similartaskin Genoa in thefallof 1844. The novelistbecame con-
vinced thatthroughmesmerismhe could cure a friend'swife,Ma-
dame de la Rue, ofwhatwas termedherterrible"tic" on thebrain.
For several monthshe played "anxious Physician,"inducingat
each visittothepatienta "magneticsleep" duringwhich,underhis
carefullyneutralquestioning,Madame de la Rue would describe
herdreamsand demons,and so exorcisethem.29This earlyexperi-
mentin the "TalkingCure" clearlyprefigures Dickens's activities
at UraniaCottage.For here,too,was the urgeto hear the unhear-
able, to let the womanspeak her storyand so exorciseits demons,
an act which his own wife construedas sexual infidelity(in the
spiritofthesensationalliterature ofthelaterVictorianperiod).But
here also was a hintofthe urgeutterlyto dominate,and to appro-
priatethatstory:as he reportedtheirsessions and revealed the
wife'sstory,Dickens felthimselfto be in some sense the voice by
whichshe explainedherselfto her own husband.30
A similarappropriationoccurredat Urania Cottage; indeed, in
Dombey and Son itself,by suppressingthe tellingby women of
theirown storiesin thecourseofthenarrativeDickens can be seen
to be appropriating them,througha processwhichhingesalso on
the viewing of those storiesas commodities(a problemwe shall
returnto veryshortly).In his role as interviewerand historianat
UraniaCottageDickens was intenton uncoveringeach "imagina-
tive" femalestory.But no soonerhad he done thisthanhe buried
it. The Urania Cottageinmateeffectively lost the use of her own
voice: monthly interviews withor letters to relativesand friends
were rigorously"overlooked.""31More importantly still,fellowin-
mates,the Home's neighbors,and even the superintendants were
kept in ignoranceof each woman'shistory.The intentionwas to
facilitatea returnto normallife by firstclearingthe air and then
buryingreproachesalong with the past, both the storyand the
sexualityat its core. The effectwas to leave Dickens alone in fas-
cinatedpossession of the "imaginative"materialshe recordedin
his case-books,eminentlynarrateable"histories"whichyetshould
notbe told,foodforthe imaginationofa novelist.

416 Sexualityand Storyin Dombey and Son

 On one level, the histories in Dickens's case-books, his treatment
of Madame de la Rue, and his Dombey, offersuggestive parallels
with Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria;feminist
criticism has identified at the heart of Freud's classic case-study
similar problematics. For not only does Freud insistentlyprivilege
his version of Dora's storyover her own, thus suppressing her story,
as the text does the "woman's story" of Dombey, but he also arro-
gates to himself the rightto publish, and thereby commodify,the
narrative.On another level, within the very text of Dombey itself,
the process of uncovering, defusing and burying is mirrored in
Dickens's treatment of Alice Marwood and her alter-ego, Edith
Dombey-indeed, in much the same way thatFlorence's own story
seems both a systematic forgettingof (literary)origins and a sus-
tained euphemism. On both levels, power, in Foucault's terms,is
identified with control of the story,which itself intersects with
sexuality, and the storybecomes a commodity.

The stories of Alice and Edith, identified with and focused on

their sexual deviations, are clearly very dangerous to themselves.
Public knowledge of her historyhas cost Alice imprisonmentand
exile. Thus she now tantalizes othersthroughoutthe novel with her
secretiveness, initially denying informationto her would-be suc-
corer, Harriet Carker, and rebuffingDombey (and the reader) with
"I keep my storyto myself' (820). She has learned her lesson well.
Meanwhile, of course, as he buys "secret intelligence" fromAlice
and her mother,Dombey is degraded by her knowledge of the story
of his wife's elopement. For story,and the possession of the story,
proves as valuable a commodity (and weapon) as the female body
itself in the mercantilistworld of Dombey and Son.
This is what we mightexpect. Dombey is a novel wherein power
is frequently attained through words. Miss Tox keeps her place
with Mrs. Chick, and Mrs. Chick signals both her importance and
her subservience to her brother Mr. Dombey, by finishing sen-
tences and profferingwords; Edith's motherdemonstratesher hold
on her daughter by obliging Edith to provide the same service, and
gives token of her demise in the demotic deterioration of her
speech; Major Bagstock worms his way into Dombey's confidence
throughhis abilities as conversationalist and storyteller,function-
ing as Dombey's voice in society while Carker does the same in
business; Good Mrs. Brown is most dangerous in her role as infor-

JossLutz Marsh 417

mant, and most formidable and enigmatic in her guise of fortune-
teller in chapter 27, threateningto "call" Edith's fortune(or future
story)afterCarker as ifit were the worstofcurses (459); even a sprat
like Dombey's messenger, Perch, enjoys an hour of fame by retail-
ing to the world firstthe storyof little Paul's death and then the
melodrama (in his hands) of Dombey's disgrace. Most critically,
letting the storyof her supposed elopement with his manager es-
cape into public circulation proves the most effective means of
punishing her husband that Edith could devise; Dickens's swerv-
ing fromhis original intentionpaid thematicdividends. The second
Mrs. Dombey becomes the avenger of her predecessor, humiliating
with publicity the man who was to have suppressed the storyof
speechless Fanny. Conversely, the shadowy good angel Mr. Morfin
(Dombey's under-manager) confesses to Harriet (Carker's ne-
glected sister) that he used his knowledge of her familyhistoryin
order "merely to make my way into your confidence" (559). Later,
inevitably, he wins her hand. More dangerously, earlier in the
novel knowledge of her storybuys Carker intimacywith Edith. It
seems then a shortstep to possession of the woman herself: at the
very beginning of their relationship, Edith declares that Carker
"already knows [me] thoroughly,"and that she is "so much de-
graded by his knowledgeof me" (474, myemphases).
As the plots of Dombey and Son unfold, storyknowledge is con-
verted into carnal knowledge, one commodity into another com-
modity,narrativedesire into fleshlydesire. This transformation is a
rich vein for criticism to work: in it, of course, the pornographic
model is again evident; or, to juggle Brooks's terms,the Eros of the
readers within the text is identified by the movement of the plot
itself with the Eros of their desire; the text enacts the power-
relations of storyand sexuality. As if to confirmour suspicions, the
full pattern is most overtly repeated in the Florence-Walter plot.
Walter, who throughouttreasures his memories of the storybook
"adventure of the lost child," is seen as Florence's destined hus-
band, just as Charles is seen as Fanny Hill's; afterall, as Captain
Cuttle remarks-as unconscious of the sexual innuendo as some
criticsmightstill suppose Dickens to be (the text,as Roland Barthes
would have said, is another matter)-"He know'd her first" (306,
my emphasis). The pun's operation through the narrative of
Dombey and Son signifies the novel's tacit subscription, in
Foucault's terms,to the ars erotica, wherein "truthis drawn from
pleasure itself. 32

418 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

 It is throughthe unfoldingof a fallen woman's "imaginative"
historythatwe discover,onlyat the veryend, the solutionto the
novel's longest-running enigma: "Who (or whose) is Good Mrs.
Brown's daughter?"The question was posed back in chapter6,
when memoriesof her daughter'sabundanthair promptedMrs.
Brown's "victoryover herself' and Florence's escape; the secret
has been kept for 890 of Dombey's 927 pages. Naturally,all
"sensation" novels, including Bleak House, have dark and fre-
quentlysexual secretsat the core oftheirplots.Dombeyfascinates
because its ultimatenarrativegoal is not simplythe secret,the
sexual storyitself,but the act of tellingthe story,defusingit,and
buryingit; its objectis the denial of its own desire.
Through Dombey, Alice achieves the destructionof Carker.
ThroughCarker,Edithachieves thedestruction ofDombey.Thus,
the plot or the texttells us, the victimized"fallen"womenin fact
trampleon theirvictimizers(a twistof the victim-masterplot that
itselfreflectsa profoundambiguity bothin thistextand in Victorian
societyas to the natureand poweroffemalesexuality).33 But how
do Alice and Edith pay fortheirvictories?The answer is: with
stories,Dombeyand Son's mostvaluable commodities.Four chap-
tersfromthe close, as the melodramaticfinalebothto the storyof
her lifeand to her lifeitself,Alice offersto HarrietCarkeran oral
tale,thestoryofherbirth,thesolutiontoDombey'smostpersistent
enigma.This storyis anotherwoman'sstory(or another"woman's
story"),the storyof her mother,Good Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown
declares,"I was a freshcountrywenchin mytime"(921), untilher
seductionbyEdith'suncle (anotherreinforcement, ofcourse,ofthe
notionof a woman-victim masterplot).The line could be Fanny
Hill's. Her words would have been rich in sexual resonancefor
many Victorianreaders: virginswere known "in the trade" as
"freshgirls."34Then, in the penultimatechapter,withthe same
flairforthemelodramatic as Alice,Edithwritesdownthereal story
ofherelopementwithCarker,and handsthemanuscript memoirto
Florence:"It is forwhomyouwill [she says].It is givento you,and
is obtainedby you" (967).
A narrativetransaction and shiftof power has been effected.In
Dombey's finalchapterseach fallenwoman passes her storyto a
pure one: the "woman'sstory"thusbuysforgiveness forthe wom-
an's history.Thus do Harrietand Florence displace Good Mrs.
Brownand Carkeras thepossessorsofthatmostvaluable commod-
ity,the "woman's story,"whichwe as readershave ourselvesde-

JossLutz Marsh 419

siredand pursuedup totheveryclosingchapters,seekingnarrative
And thustoo do Harrietand Florence achieve textual
satisfaction.
canonization-able to hear storiesthatmightbringa blush to the
Cheek of a Young Person,and empoweredas confessorsto dis-
pense heavenlyforgivenessaccompaniedby the very"stockreli-
gious professionsand religious phrases" which Dickens sup-
pressedat UraniaCottage.

There is, I think,a failed sublimationhere: the tellingof the

sexualstoryfailsto modulateintotheritualofChristianconfession.
Despite markersof the confessionscenes' differencefromother
exchangesof storiesand wordsin Dombey and Son-traces of an
attempt,perhaps,to dismantlethe symboliceconomythatallows
themto takeplace-the logic ofthe narrativeinduces us ratherto
regardthese confessionsas the completingacts ofa coherentnar-
rativepatternofdiscourse-exchange. Indeed, Dickens's own expe-
riencesas confessor-psychoanalyst withMadame de la Rue and the
inmatesofUraniaCottagemakeit hardto accept the Harriet-Alice
and Edith-Florence transactionsat surface value. Moreover,
Dombey'svariantoftheconfessionis an act subculturally encoded
as well as loaded withChristianconnotation:betweenFannyHill
(whose somewhatperfunctory address to an anonymous"Dear
Madam" locates it withinthe traditionof the eighteenth-century
epistolarynovel) and the late Victorianmagazine The Pearl, the
tellingofthe sexual storyby one womanto anotherwomandevel-
oped intoa favoriteformat forpornography.
But we have reachedsomethingotherthana mereimpasse. For
these contradictory connotationsare perhapsinherentin the very
act of confession.The subjectmatterof confession,Westernsoci-
ety'sprimeprocedureofscientiasexualisand mostpotentformof
pouvoir-savoir("power-knowledge"), Foucaultremindsus, was al-
waysprimarily sexual; "it is in theconfessionthattruthand sex are
joined." Recallingthe"deviance" ofDombey'snarrative trajectory,
and recallingalso its narrativepun on "knowledge,"may we not
ask,withFoucault,whethertheChristianconfessionand thesexual
storyas theyconvergein Dombeyand Son were notdestinedto do
so, the recuperativeconfessionof sexual truthbeing "but an ex-
traordinarily subtle form"of the pleasure-givingars erotica,that
"seeminglylost tradition"whichwe mayassociate withnarrative
itself?35
In the confessionalact concealed constraintand overtopportu-

420 Sexualityand Storyin Dombey and Son

nity to tell one's truth mingle: "The obligation to confess,"
Foucault writes, "is now ... so deeply ingrained in us, that we no
longer perceive it as the effectof a power thatconstrainsus; on the
contrary,it seems to us that truth. . . 'demands' only to surface."36
Similarly, it may seem to us that natural justice allows Alice and
Edith finally to speak their own stories. But narrative logic also
constrains,impels, and punishes theirtellings. The problematics of
the confessional act in Dombey are balanced by the contradictions
of narrativejustice they precede. The text metes out severe tradi-
tional punishments to Alice and Edith forallowing their stories to
the surface. For Alice, the worstoffender,the girl actually seduced
by Carker: death. For Edith, who "never meant that": exile. "When
you leave me in this dark room," she tells Florence, "thinkthatyou
have leftme in the grave" (969).37 Anotherof Foucault's suggestive
puns has become operational: Alice and Edith have become
"subjects" in "both senses of the word"-at the moment of becom-
ing speaking subjects, and speaking of themselves as subjects, they
are subjected.38 Their fatesare only marginallyless bitterthan that
of the firstMrs. Dombey. But their stories are more effectively
buried than they are themselves. Dombey, in fact,practices a form
of fictional leger de main on its readers, for-Good Mrs. Brown's
oral tale aside-we do not hear or read the confessions, we only
know that they have taken place; although the act of their telling
marks our most important narrative destination, the confessions
themselves are elided. Their grave is the privacy and discretion of
the female sphere; to burythem there is to condemn theirspeakers
to a worse form of nonexistence still-silence. At its very close,
underminingits own foundationsas narrative,the novel celebrates
a last reticence, even in the face of its own prolonged desire for
"imaginative" telling: in almost the final lines the vicious circula-
tion of stories within the text is finally stopped, even of stories
purified by happy endings. They are instead relocated within the
family circle, broken in the firstchapter. We picture the aged
Dombey on the beach with his grandson and granddaughter,and
hear that "no-one, except Florence, knows the measure of the
white-haired gentleman's affectionfor the girl. That story never
goes about" (975).

This is indeed an equivocal text. On the one side are its radical
impulses-its daring, for example, to let respectable women
emerge unscathed fromthe fireofreading the fallen woman's story;

JossLutz Marsh 421

its breaking of the Victorian taboo on poor boy marryingrich girl
(Walter, Florence), and corresponding presentation of poor girl
marryingrich boy (Florence's comic suitor Toots gets her maid as
consolation). More, its means ofarrivingat its narrativedestinations
can only be described as transformatory (and it is in such transfor-
mation, such plotting-in all its Brooksian "intentionality"-that
our critical interest ultimatelylies). As the briefestcomparison of
the cover illustrationto the serial parts with the emblematic fron-
tispiece to the 1847 book edition must indicate, Dombey and Son
effectsa transformation, and not merely of its supposedly central
figure,the ultimately"altered man" (809). Proud Dombey pictured
amid his paraphernalia ofbusiness gives way to Florence ringed by
softly penciled cherubs; the dogma in which he drills his son
("Money, Paul, can do anything," [152]) gives way to the ascen-
dancy of Florence and her unspoken code of selfless love; the mer-
chant's House is replaced by a familyhome. The narrativeworld of
Dombey and Son, like that of the simplest folk tale, passes, as
Tzvetan Todorov mightput it,froman opening state ofequilibrium,
through disorder and transformation to another state of
equilibrium.39 In becoming "Dombey and Daughter" the text de-
stroysthe bourgeois-capitalist basis on which depends the meta-
phor Dombey once applied to Florence, "base coin." More radi-
cally still, it is Dombey's contact with the novel's prostitutes or
pseudo-prostitutesthatdetermines his destiny and the trajectoryof
the novel (the paternal "Firm" of Dombey /Dombey, we mightsay,
is rendered "in-firm"by contact with these women): Edith, pur-
chased in the marriagemarketlike a hack in the horse-dealer's ring;
Alice, the fallen and degraded woman; and Florence, the girltarred
in chapter 6, when the novel firstestablished its correspondence of
monetaryand sexual value. As Brooks has commented, in this pow-
erfullytransformingfigure of the prostitutein nineteenth-century
fiction we encounter the meeting point of Eros and Mammon or
Commerce, Dombey's two (intermingled) motive forces.40
But on the other side, there is the novel's conservatism: its ca-
pitulations to literaryconvention and social dictate, most notably
Alice's repentant deathbed scene, and those unjust operations of
narrativejustice; and the inadequacy of its final destination and
(typicallyVictorian) closing vision of happiness-the family,in Or-
well's immortal phrase, "constantly multiplying, like a bed of
oysters."41 From firstto last, Dombey is tornbetween conservatism
and radicalism, reticence and frankness,and discrepancies rush in

422 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

to fill the gap between. Like the nineteenth-centuryclinics of
Foucault's History of Sexuality, the novel seems to be an "appara-
tus for producing [a] truth" which is "to be masked at the last
moment," a characteristicproduction of a society which "speaks
verbosely of its own silence" on the unmentionable subject, and
characteristic also in its "expurgation ... of the authorized
vocabulary" of sex and its substitution of encoding, euphemism,
and displacement (the import of the Florence-Walter plot, the
loaded language, the cultural symbolism of "wild" hair and "lost"
girls, the intersectingof storyand sexuality).42Chapter 6 perhaps
can unlock more than one of Dombey's secrets, forit offersnot only
a powerful trope forfemale sexuality ("cracks and crevices"), but a
metaphor forthe paradoxical constructof the garrulously reticent
text: like Good Mrs. Brown's house, the official paternal plot of
Pride and the business "Dealings" of Dombey's familyfirmseems
"closely shut up," but yet is "full of cracks and crevices," through
which the woman's storyand her sexuality seek to escape.
Those same impulses of reticence and franknessthat lead to dis-
placement and ultimatelyto equivocation in Dombey and Son also
informthe several strands of the novel's sub- and extraliteraryin-
heritance: what a study of narrative structureand of the logic of
narrativetransmissioncan tell us of this text is entirelyreinforced
by what research can uncover or criticism spotlight. Within
Dombey are the traces both of an interest in unleashed sexuality
and the case histories and erotica thatallowed it a voice, as well as
a worthyand humane concern with the horrible consequences of
the perceived misdirection of female sexuality,consequences that
a lack of reticence could only worsen. There is no suggestion that
Dickens took any of the particular pleasure he may have taken in
Fanny Hill in the narrativesof the inmates of Urania Cottage. He
divorced fantasyfromreality. But in novels, pre-eminentlyDick-
ens's novels, perhaps pre-eminentlyDombey and Son, fantasyand
reality have a way of interbreeding.
CaliforniaInstituteof Technology
NOTES
1 Quoted by Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (London: The Bod-
ley Head, 1951), 259.
2
Roland Barthes, S/Z,trans.Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 20;
The criticisms of Dickens's handling of women date back to his own daughter's
famous pronouncement, "My fatherdid not understand women" (Gladys Storey,
Dickens and Daughter [London: Frederick Muller, 1939], 100).

JossLutz Marsh 423

 3 Sylvere Monod, Dickens, the Novelist, introductionby Edward Wagenknecht
(Norman, Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 265; A. E. Dyson, "The Case
for Dombey Senior," Novel 2 (1969): 129; Julian Moynahan, "Dealings with the
FirmofDombeyand Son: FirmnessversusWetness,"in Dickensand theTwentieth
Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (London: Routledge, 1962), 130.
4 See Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (London: Dent, 1983).

5 See Nina Auerbach, "Dickens and Dombey: A Daughter AfterAll," in her Ro-

Womenand OtherGlorifiedOutcasts(New York:Columbia

manticImprisonment:
Univ. Press, 1985).
6 Robert Clark, "Riddling the Family Firm: The Sexual Economy in Dombey and
Son," ELH 51 (1984): 82.
7 Clark (note 6), 71.

8 Lynda Zwinger, "The Fear of the Father: Dombey and Daughter," Nineteenth
Century Fiction 39 (1985): 435.
9 CharlesDickens,DealingswiththeFirmofDombeyand Son,Wholesale,Retail
and for Exportation, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books, 1970), 298. All furtherreferencesto this edition will be made within the text.
The term "hermeneutic enigmas" is Barthes's, S/Z, 19.
1 PeterBrooks,Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intentionin Narrative(New
York: Knopf, 1984), 155.
12 We mighthere consider the legal definitionof rape given by the standard work
of the period, Stephen's Digest of the Criminal Law, quoted by W. T. Stead in his
"The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon": "If permission is given, . . . 'the factthat
it was obtained by fraud,or thatthe woman did not understand the nature of the act,
is immaterial'" (Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885, 6).
13 Consultingsuch magazinesas The Pearl, Glee, The Boudoir,The Annals of
Gallantry,and The Englishwoman'sDomesticMagazine confirms thatthe prime
pornographicfantasies and (in some cases) illicit activities of the period were incest
and child abuse or rape, togetherwith sodomy and flagellation. As Steven Marcus
remarks, this flies in the face of official wisdom, which held that there was no
tendency to consider siblings or children as sexually desirable. See chapter 1 of his
in Mid-Nineteenth
The OtherVictorians:A Studyof Sexualityand Pornography
Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1964).
14 One mightalso compare Florence in her filthy"altered state" to Lady Dedlock
in Bleak House, dressed in (borrowed) rags afterher flightand confession of sexual
guilt.
15 Marcus (note 13), 22.
16 See, forexample, Rossetti's Found (1854) and Holman Hunt's The Awakening

Conscience (1853). In Elizabeth BarrettBrowning's Aurora Leigh (1856), when Mar-

ian Erle relates how "My mother sold me to a man last month," she tells how, to
clinch the deal by settingoffher daughter's charms,the motherfirst"let down the
hair /Upon her like a sudden waterfall" (The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, ed. HarrietWaters Preston,3 vols. [Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin,1900],
3:1193, 1045-46).
17 See, forexample, Judges 14:18: "And [Samson] said unto [the men of Timnath],
If ye had not plowed with myheifer,ye had not foundout myriddle"; Proverbs 21:4:
"An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin," which
seems applicable to Dombey in more ways than one; and Antony and Cleopatra
2.2.229-30: "[Cleopatra] made great Caesar lay his sword to bed; /He plowed her,
and she cropped."
18 On Sala, see Edgar Johnson,CharlesDickens:His Tragedyand Triumph,re-
vised and abridged edition (Harmondsworth,England: Penguin Books, 1979), 364,
379; and Marcus (note 13), 264n. On Milnes, see James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton

424 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son

Milnes: The Flight of Youth 1851-1885 (London: Constable, 1951), 38. See also
114-22. Milnes had started collecting de Sade at the very latest by 1845 (Pope-
Hennessy,MoncktonMilnes:The YearsofPromise1808-1851[London:Constable,
1949], 216). His libraryincluded the 1751 French translationof Fanny Hill, La Fille
dejoie (Flight of Youth, 116). Milnes was, however, by no means the monsterhe was
later made out to be (the corrupterof Swinburne, and so forth);he shared his pe-
culiarly English taste forflagellation not only with Swinburne and Burton but also
with Thackeray (134).
9 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter
Wagner (Harmondsworth,England: Penguin Books, 1985), 63. Furtherreferencesto
this edition will be given within the text.The idea of the innocent abroad, a prey to
the city's snares, was not of course original to Cleland, or indeed to any writer;it is
evident, for example, in Pamela, Clarissa, and Joseph Andrews, and in Hogarth's
famous series The Harlot's Progress (1732). Furthermore, the scene of clothes
changing central to both Fanny Hill and chapter 6 of Dombey was a necessary
strategyof the fourhundred people Henry Mayhew's co-writerBracebridge Hem-
yng estimated "procure a livelihood by trepanning females" (London Labour and
the London Poor, enlarged edition, 4 vols. [London: Cass, 1861-2], 4:211): "When
an innocent child appears in the streets without a protector,she is insidiously
watched ... and decoyed under some plausible pretextto an abode of infamyand
degradation.... She is stripped of [her] apparel ... and then,decked with the gaudy
trappingsof her shame, she is compelled to walk the streets." However, the pattern
of correspondences, above all of name ("Good Mrs. Brown") and of shape of plot
(Walter's voyage and return), seem to me to be sufficientlyclose to warrant our
stronglysuspecting a relationship between the two texts.
20 Compare too Moll Flanders, one of Fanny Hill's ancestors, on her seduction:

"Thus I finish'dmy own Destruction at once, forfromthis Day, being forsakenofmy

Vertue, and my Modesty, I had nothing of Value left to recommend me" (Daniel
oftheFamousMoll Flanders,ed. G. A. Starr
Defoe, The Fortunesand Misfortunes
[London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], 29).
21 Mayhew (note 19), 211. Mayhew and Hemyng were collecting data fromthe late

1840s throughthe 1850s. (Interestingly,Mayhew was friendlywith Dickens at the

time of Dombey, having appeared in Dickens's amateur production of Everyman in
His Humor in 1845.) Stead gives a grand total in 1885 of 50,000 prostitutes("Maiden
Tribute," PMG, 6 July,2), but concurs with Hemyng and Mayhew's figureof 10,000.
Stead specifies, however, thatthese children would by and large not be prostitutes
but "little girls living in sin" (8 July,2), many of them victims "of the incest which
... is inseparable fromovercrowding" (8 July,1).
22 Stead (note 12), 6 July,4. The price was twentyto twenty-five pounds. Hemyng
and Mayhew (note 19) estimate thatgentlemen in comfortablecircumstances,learn-
ing perhaps at the clubs that "a new importationfromthe country" (a virgin) had
arrived, would pay a (retail) price of between fiftyand a hundred pounds to come
into possession (250). The procuress who abducts the heroine of James Anthony
Froude's extremely frankstoryof 1847, "The Lieutenant's Daughter," hopes fora
higher price fromher customer: "Lord William offerstwo hundred pounds ... if it's
quite fresh" ("Zeta," "The Lieutenant's Daughter," in Shadows of the Clouds [Lon-
don: John Ollivier, 1847], 229).
23 David Loth,The Eroticin Literature:A HistoricalSurveyof Pornography
As
Delightful As It Is Indiscreet (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), 113; forhomes
forfallen women and children, see Stead (note 12), 8 July,2.
24 Mayhew (note 19), 212.
25 Stead (note 12), 8 July,2; 25 September, 9; 8 July,2.

JossLutz Marsh 425

 26 See The Letters of Charles Dickens 1847-49, ed. Graham Storeyand K. J.Field-

ing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 211.

27 The Lettersof CharlesDickens1844-46,ed. KathleenTillotson(Oxford:Clar-
endon, 1977), 552-93.
28 Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1962),
99, 103, 108, 106.
29
Dickens, Letters 1844-46, (note 27), 249.
30
Fred Kaplan touches on the importance of Dickens's experience with Madame
de la Rue forhis fiction,specifically "The Haunted Man" (1847), a storyin which the
central character,like Madame de la Rue, is haunted by a "Phantom," in this case an
"awfullikenessofhimself'(Dickensand Mesmerism:The Hidden Springsof Fic-
tion [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975], 86). Clearly this has implications for
the "displacement" or, perhaps more properlyspeaking, the "transference"of char-
acteristics between the female characters of Dombey and Son. Dickens was well
aware, Kaplan notes, of "the frequency with which family members, particularly
siblings, appeared as doubles in mesmeric literature" (80).
31 Collins's phrase (note 28), 107. The adoption, at Dickens's suggestion, of an
incentive systemof "Marks" (worth6s 6d per thousand) led still more to trainingthe
inmates in self-suppression.
32 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), 57.
33 This ambiguity is mirroredin Phiz's illustrationsto the novel, in which Alice

and Edith figureas giantesses, rarelydrawn to scale, as Michael Steig has observed
(Dickens and Phiz [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978], 99), and in the comic
subplot of Captain Cuttle's capture by Mrs. MacStinger, predator and wife.
34 Stead (note 12), 6 July,4.
35 Foucault (note 32), 61, 71.
36 Foucault, 60.
37 Dickens does not so capitulate fouryears later, in David Copperfield, wherein

Little Em'ly survives, and her alter-ego, prostitutedMartha Endell, even marries.
But the gradations of narrativejustice are nonetheless very fine. Edith's place of
exile, as JohnButt and Kathleen Tillotson remark(Dickens at Work [London: Meth-
uen, 1957], 112n), is judiciously chosen: the "fallen spirit" is destined forthe south
of Italy, whereas the fallen Em'ly is banished to Australia,like one of the repentant
inmates of Urania Cottage (thus perhaps does life open up new possibilities for
fiction).
38 Foucault (note 32), 60.
39 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1977), 118.
40 Brooks (note 11), 145.
41 George Orwell, "Charles Dickens," An Age Like This: 1920-1940, ed. Sonia
Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 447.
42
Foucault (note 32), 56, 8, 17.

426 Sexuality and Story in Dombey and Son