Bleak Houses. Lisa Surridge
the funeral was over, Mr. Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up.… Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs, heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre, muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling’s eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys. The dead and buried lady was awful in a picture frame of ghastly bandages. (DS, 24)
The muffling and bandaging are highly symbolic: the Dombey home, always neglected, now becomes a house of death. Muffled in holland, Mrs. Dombey’s portrait seems swathed in “ghastly bandages” (DS, 24). As the metaphor of bandaging powerfully suggests, there lurks in this house the threat of violence, injury, and wounding—specifically, injury to women. What form that injury might take is ominously suggested by the pages of “journals, daily and weekly” that wrap the furniture, bellpulls, and looking glasses. From these newsprint sheets, the narrator tells us, “obtrud[e] fragmentary accounts of deaths and dreadful murders.” The real fear that haunts the House of Dombey is that the dreadful crimes of the daily and weekly newspapers will, through Dombey’s failure to understand the value of women’s ideological work in the Victorian gender system, come to rest in the middle-class home.
Part 1 of the serial version of Dombey and Son (which contains the description of “accounts of death and dreadful murders” obtruding from the newspapers muffling the furniture and portrait) was published in October 1846. A perusal of the Times for September and October 1846 reveals the crimes that haunted the Victorian cultural imagination at this time: marital assault and wife murder. As a Times editorial noted, “instances of brutality on the part of a husband towards a wife” had “of late been very numerous” (Times, 24 August 1846, 4d). The police reports of the Times from the autumn of 1846 contain a litany of violent crimes against women:
WORSHIP-STREET.—An elderly man, named Richard Tweedy, described as a foreman in the London Docks … was placed at the bar, yesterday, before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with cutting and wounding his wife, Catherine Tweedy, with intent to murder her. (Times, 1 September 1846, 6d)
WORSHIP-STREET.—A few days ago a young married woman named Anne Guest, whose face was shockingly cut and contused, and one of her eyes closed up, applied to Mr. BROUGHTON for an assault warrant against James Guest, her husband, a journeyman dyer, living in White-cross place, Finsbury. (Times, 17 September 1846, 7d)
WORSHIP-STREET.—Yesterday Edward Spiller, a middle-aged man of respectable appearance, described as lately a publican, was brought up on a warrant before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with violently assaulting his wife, Caroline Spiller, and also conspiring with another man, now in custody, named Thomas Byrne, to effect a capital offence upon her person. (Times, 24 September 1846, 7b)
MANSLAUGHTER IN LIVERPOOL.—An inquest was held before Mr. P.F. Curry, borough coroner, on Wednesday, upon view of the body of Catherine Tully, of Thomas-street, in this town, who met her death by kicks in the abdomen, received from her husband. (Times, 25 September 1846, 5e)
MARLBOROUGH-STREET.—Robert Long Andrews, a young man, was summoned by Fanny Andrews his wife, for ill-treatment. (Times, 2 October 1846, 6e)
WORSHIP-STREET.—Yesterday a young man named Alfred Wilton, described as a boot and shoemaker, was placed at the bar before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with causing the death of his wife, Sarah Wilton, a young woman aged 19, by drowning in the Regent’s Canal. (Times, 20 October 1846, 6f)
WORSHIP-STREET.—Yesterday a middle-aged man, named John Lacy, was placed at the bar before Mr. BROUGHTON, charged with brutally assaulting his wife, Ann Lacy. (Times, 22 October 1846, 8d)
As I argue in chapter 1, newspaper accounts of wife-beating trials in magistrates’ courts had been a new phenomenon in the 1830s after the 1828 act came into effect. By the time Dickens was writing Dombey and Son in 1846–48, these stories were all too common. Yet they still held power to shock. This power is revealed in Fitzroy’s speech when he introduced his “Good Wives’ Rod” to the House of Commons in 1853: his most powerful rhetorical argument in favor of the bill was reading wife-assault cases verbatim from the newspapers. In Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, a full column and a half is filled with these paragraph-long synopses of predominantly lower-class spousal assaults, each of which, Fitzroy argued, should strike the imagination with “horror and amazement” (124 Parl. Deb. 3s., col. 1414). Fitzroy’s speech is fascinating because he foregrounds the shocking moment at which these (apparently alien) lower-class crimes entered the consciousness of the middle-class newspaper reader. (This contrasts with Punch, which in 1849 depicted a lower-class man reading accounts of domestic murder in the newspaper, and with his home papered with illustrations of gibbets and of criminals such as James Greenacre [fig. 2.2].) Like Fitzroy’s speech, the depiction of the Dombey house points to the moment when middle-class domesticity is shattered by the kind of violence associated with the magistrates’ courts and the newspaper. The fear of this tainting suggestively links the “ghastly bandages” on the portrait of the first Mrs. Dombey with the “fragmentary accounts” obtruding from daily and weekly papers. The threat that hangs over the house of Dombey is that of wife assault.
Dombey and Son thus suggests that unmitigated male aggression in the marketplace—that is, capitalist aggression that is not balanced by selfless female labor in the home—will lead to uncontrolled acts of domestic assault more commonly associated with the Victorian working class.9 Dickens thus represents domestic violence in Dombey and Son as symptomatic not of a problem in the gender system but of Mr. Dombey’s failure to recognize the rightness of the current gender system and to benefit from its self-regulating properties. Like the 1853 act which followed its publication, Dombey and Son thus seeks not to change gender relations but to reassert and reinforce them.
The threat of domestic violence is realized in chapter 47, suggestively entitled “The Thunderbolt.” Domestic assault shatters the house of Dombey when Mr. Dombey discovers that his second wife, Edith, has left him for his business manager, Mr. Carker. The narrator states explicitly that Dombey’s first impulse is to assault his wife: “He read that she was gone. He read that he was dishonoured. He read that she had fled, upon her shameful wedding-day, with the man whom he had chosen for her humiliation; and he tore out of the room, and out of the house, with a frantic idea of finding her yet, at the place to which she had been taken, and beating all trace of beauty out of the triumphant face with his bare hand” (DS, 636). Edith has left, however, so Dombey strikes his daughter instead: “[I]n his frenzy, he lifted up his cruel arm and struck her, crosswise, with that heaviness, that she tottered on the marble floor; and as he dealt the blow, he told her what Edith was, and bade her follow her, since they had always been in league” (DS, 637). The text makes it clear that Dombey conflates his daughter with his supposedly adulterous wife—this is a combined act of wife and child assault. Such an assault signals his failure to control his wife and his failure to protect the weak. In contemporary terms, it means that self-regulating system of the middle-class home—whereby male market aggression was regulated by the female economy of selflessness—has failed, and that his home has been destroyed from within. Interestingly, however, at the level of representation, Dombey’s assault catapults him out of the middle class and into the realm of police reports and newspaper journalism. As Mr. Toots says with unwonted accuracy, Mr. Dombey has become “a Brute” (DS, 672).10
Figure 2.2. “Useful Sunday Literature for the Masses; or, Murder Made Familiar,” Punch 17 (1849): 117.