“You have only to make an effort—this is a world of effort, you know, Richards—to be very happy indeed.”

So much of Dickens’ novel operates through satire and irony, much of it achieved by the caricature of the more self-important and self-aggrandizing characters, like Mrs. Chick, Dombey’s sister and the speaker of this admonition to Polly Toodle, whom they decide to call Richards. Mrs. Chick’s belief that success relies simply on making an effort—a favorite declaration of hers—veils how her own good fortune rests on the social standing she enjoys due to her birth and marriage rather than her own effort.

“If the child himself could have awakened in the night, and seen, gathered about his cradle-curtains, faint reflections of the dreams that other people had of him, they might have scared him, with good reason.”

This passage reflects the scope of the omniscient narrator, who can not only examine the thoughts and feelings of individual characters, but also can, and frequently does, withdraw to a distance and speculate upon events past or to come. The reflection here hints that the burden of expectations on little Paul will be too much for him to live up to, subtly foreshadowing his untimely death.

“That spice of romance and love of the marvellous, of which there was a pretty strong infusion in the nature of young Walter Gay, and which the guardianship of his uncle, old Solomon Gills, had not very much weakened by the waters of stern practical experience, was the occasion of his attaching an uncommon and delightful interest to the adventure of Florence with good Mrs. Brown.”

Dickens very often resorts to whimsical metaphors, as here, when he depicts Walter’s personality as a concoction made up of infusions of romance which reality has not watered down. Dickens also uses irony, calling the woman who robbed young Florence “good” Mrs. Brown. Walter’s interest in the adventures of young Florence foreshadows the attachment that develops between them.

“There is an eminence ready for him to mount upon. There is nothing of chance or doubt in the course before my son. His way in life was clear and prepared, and marked out before he existed.”

Dombey’s fancy that his son will walk a clear path to greatness, as these images suggest, reflects how his ambition controls his vision and clouds his perception of reality. Ironically, it is Dombey’s insistence on a robust education that proves too great for Paul’s constitution, introducing the novel’s thematic exploration of Education Versus Nurturance.

“[Walter] was too young and inexperienced to think, that possibly this very quality in him [his quick and zealous disposition] was not agreeable to Mr. Dombey, and that it was no stepping-stone to his good opinion to be elastic and hopeful of pleasing under the shadow of his powerful displeasure, whether it were right or wrong. But it may have been—it may have been—that the great man thought himself defied in this new exposition of an honest spirit, and purposed to bring it down.”

This passage provides another example of the power of the omniscient narrator, who can report simultaneously on Walter’s and Mr. Dombey’s viewpoints. The reflection here pairs the two men, showing how Walter’s honest, cheerful, and energetic disposition contrasts with Dombey’s dour pride and jealousy about the respect he believes is due him.

“Night and day the conquering engines rumbled at their distant work, or, advancing smoothly to their journey’s end, and, gliding like tame dragons into the allotted corners grooved out to the inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there, making the walls quake, as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers yet unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet achieved.”

Dicken’s reflections on the power of the railroads speaks to the background of industrialization and mechanization taking place across London during the period. The imagery of the trains as powerful, barely harnessed beasts adds a sense of warning about their destructive effects even as their capabilities are celebrated.

“They [her smile and expression] brought back to his thoughts the early death-bed he had seen her tending, and the love the child had borne her; and on the wings of such remembrances she seemed to rise up, far above his idle fancies, into clearer and serener air.”

This imagery captures Walter’s perception of Florence as an angelic being, emphasizing the purity of their connection. His reverence for her in this moment heightens the poignancy of their goodbyes as Walter prepares to leave for Barbados. Dickens positions Florence as an example of archetypal, spiritually pure, and sacrificial woman—often referred to as the angel in the house after the publication of the 1854 Coventry Patmore poem by the same name—a character type that appears often in Dickens’s later works and other Victorian literature, such as Esther in Bleak House or Dinah from George Eliot’s Adam Bede.

“What I want, is frankness, confidence, less conventionality, and freer play of soul. We are so dreadfully artificial.”

Dickens presents Mrs. Skewton, one of the novel’s satirical caricatures, as a woman earnestly clinging to youth and beauty when they have long passed her by. Her declaration that she admires nature and pastoral scenes points to the sentiments of the Romantics, who valued ruggedness, wildness, and authenticity above convention and culture. Part of the satire here, typical of Dickens’s style, is that Mrs. Skewton is a woman who surrounds herself with artifice, especially in her aids to beauty.

“Hecatombs of furniture, still piled and covered up, shrunk like imprisoned and forgotten men, and changed insensibly. Mirrors were dim as with the breath of years. Patterns of carpets faded and became perplexed and faint, like the memory of those years’ trifling incidents.”

After Paul’s death, Dickens uses metaphorical language to describe the Dombey mansion in London as a place undergoing an accelerated and faintly magical decay. This description is an example of Dickens’s ability to use setting to reflect the emotional states of his characters, providing a characteristic example of his prose.

“That she was a young widow, Sir. That she was of a fine family, Sir. That Dombey was over head and ears in love with her, Sir and that it would be a good match on both sides; for she had beauty, blood, and talent, and Dombey had fortune; and what more could any couple have?”

The range and variety of the narrator’s voice is in evidence here representing what the Major has to say to Carker on the subject of Edith and Dombey. Ironically, the grounds for their match are not mutual affection, but an individual pride that becomes an antagonistic force for both of them.

“They were making late hay, somewhere out of town; and though the fragrance had a long way to come, and many counter fragrances to contend with among the dwellings of the poor (may God reward the worthy gentlemen who stickle for the Plague as part and parcel of the wisdom of our ancestors, and who do their little best to keep those dwellings miserable!), yet it was wafted faintly into Princess’s Place, whispering of Nature and her wholesome air, as such things will, even unto prisoners and captives, and those who are desolate and oppressed, in very spite of aldermen and knights to boot.”

Dickens’s frequently works his opinions on social reform into reflective moments, and here, when he describes Miss Tox’s home in Princess Place, the narrator pauses to reflect on how the authorities of the city seem to object to improving the dwellings of those of lesser means. His sarcastic praise of those efforts concludes with a suggestion of their ultimate futility, suggesting that the fresh air he’s describing can reach the destitute and imprisoned despite efforts by authorities to deprive them.

“Dawn, with its passionless blank face, steals shivering to the church beneath which lies the dust of little Paul and his mother, and looks in at the windows. It is cold and dark.”

This personification of outside forces, here the dawn of Dombey’s wedding day, is a tactic Dickens frequently uses in his description of settings, which establish the emotional register of the scene. The remembrance of Paul and his mother’s graves, along with the imagery of cold and dark, foreshadows the bleak end of Dombey’s second marriage.

“The cordial face she lifted up to his to kiss him, was his home, his life, his universe, and yet it was a portion of his punishment and grief; for in the cloud he saw upon it—though serene and calm as any radiant cloud at sunset—and in the constancy and devotion of her life, and in the sacrifice she had made of ease, enjoyment, and hope, he saw the bitter fruits of his old crime, for ever ripe and fresh.”

Here, Dickens’s description of Harriet evokes similar angelic terms to his characterization of Florence, and her devotion to her brother, John, is a parallel to Florence’s devotion to Paul. Harriet and Florence together, as this passage suggests, represent an ideal of womanhood that is made more beautiful through self-sacrifice and cheerful repose despite deprivation.

“Florence, who had hoped for so much from this marriage, could not help sometimes comparing the bright house with the faded dreary place out of which it had arisen, and wondering when, in any shape, it would begin to be a home.”

The Dombey house, made grand for the reception of its new lady, does not bear out its promise, providing another bitter irony for Florence, who hoped at last for warmth and affection. This contrast bears out the novel’s continuing juxtaposition of the barren results of unchecked pride and ambition, underscoring The Redemptive Power of Affection.

“It is the curse of such a nature—it is a main part of the heavy retribution on itself it bears within itself—that while deference and concession swell its evil qualities, and are the food it grows upon, resistance and a questioning of its exacting claims, foster it too, no less.”

One of the novel’s chief modes is an allegory on the sin of pride, and the narrator reflects often on this subject, as in this passage that examines the contrary, paradoxical quality of Mr. Dombey’s pride: that it grows with admiration as well as resistance. Dombey’s increasing stubbornness in pride, his ruin, and his eventual remorse, form his character arc across the novel.

“So Edith’s mother lies unmentioned of her dear friends, who are deaf to the waves that are hoarse with repetition of their mystery, and blind to the dust that is piled upon the shore, and to the white arms that are beckoning, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away. But all goes on, as it was wont, upon the margin of the unknown sea; and Edith, standing there alone, and listening to its waves, has dank weed cast up at her feet, to strew her path in life withal.”

The metaphor of the murmuring waves and the ocean that divides the mortal world from the afterlife begins with young Paul and continues here with the death of Edith’s mother. Edith’s loss provides a moment of sympathy and humanization that temper her proud coldness elsewhere and reinforces the image of the waves as forewarnings of death and loss.

“Awake, doomed man, while she is near. The time is flitting by; the hour is coming with an angry tread: its foot is in the house. Awake!”

Dickens employs the device of direct address in which the narrator suddenly intrudes upon a moment to communicate directly with the reader or the character, throughout Dombey and Son. Here, the narrator exhorts Dombey to reconcile with Florence. The phrase “doomed man” imagines his tragic fate as a creature entering Dombey’s house, adding to the sense of menace and warning.

“You did not know how exacting and how proud he is, or how he is, if I may say so, the slave of his own greatness, and goes yoked to his own triumphal car like a beast of burden, with no idea on earth but that it is behind him and is to be drawn on, over everything and through everything.”

Carker, in speaking to Edith of Dombey’s pride, aptly conveys how Dombey’s sense of his own importance fills his vision to the exclusion of all else. His image of Dombey not as the conqueror riding in the triumphal car but the beast pulling it, adds an ironic note to the depiction. This sense of destruction caused by Dombey’s pride is one of many places where the novel warns of the consequences of such ambition.

“Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other, bound together by no tie but the manacle that joined their fettered hands, and straining so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore and chafed to the bone.”

The metaphor of the wedding bond between Dombey and Edith as a manacle conveys how their union will become painful to them both, making them prisoners. The misery that both Dombey and Edith’s pride brings them is central to the novel’s thematic focus on the painful consequences of pride.

“But this is sure; he does not think that he has lost her. He has no suspicion of the truth. He has lived too long shut up in his towering supremacy, seeing her, a patient gentle creature, in the path below it, to have any fear of that. Shaken as he is by his disgrace, he is not yet humbled to the level earth. The root is broad and deep, and in the course of years its fibres have spread out and gathered nourishment from everything around it. The tree is struck, but not down.”

This image of Dombey’s pride as a great tree with a deep root echoes Dickens’s earlier warning of doom when the narrator pauses to reflect on the character trajectory of Dombey’s fall. His arc is not so much foreshadowed as outlined in advance, again and again, creating suspense about how and when the change will come.

“She was covetous and poor, and thought to make a property of me. No great lady ever thought that of a daughter yet, I’m sure, or acted as if she did—it’s never done, we all know—and that shows that the only instances of mothers bringing up their daughters wrong, and evil coming of it, are among such miserable folks as us.”

Alice’s life story, which she reveals to Harriet, adds another layer to the novel’s examination of the relationship between mothers and daughters, and the ways that daughters can be treated like property. Alice’s statement contains a bitter irony when she suggests the upper classes would not behave so, which the narrative emphasizes as false. Through Alice, Dickens comments on the vein of Victorian morality that held that the poor brought their suffering on themselves through bad choices.

“So awful, so transcendent in its beauty, so divinely solemn. As he cast his faded eyes upon it, where it rose, tranquil and serene, unmoved by all the wrong and wickedness on which its beams had sone since the beginning of the world, who shall say that some weak sense of virtue upon Earth, and its reward in Heaven, did not manifest itself, even to him?”

Dickens often uses setting for contrast or emphasis, and here, in the sunrise Carker the manager witnesses just before his death, the narrator hints that he may have repented of his actions. This idea is in keeping with the Christian morality that frames the book, suggesting that even the worst villain is not irredeemable. This pause for a philosophical reflection extends the tension and suspense as the reader suspects something terrible is about to happen.

“Through a whole year, the famous House of Dombey and Son had fought a fight for life, against cross accidents, doubtful rumours, unsuccessful ventures, unpropitious times, and most of all, against the infatuation of its head, who would not contract its enterprises by a hair’s breadth, and would not listen to a word of warning that the ship he strained so hard against the storm, was weak, and could not bear it.”

Shipwreck, a frequent metaphor throughout the story, is used in this passage to signify the wreck of Dombey’s business—another consequence of his pride. The image of Dombey driving his own ship to destruction echoes the shipwreck that was said to have claimed the life of Walter.