Dombey and Son
towards Miss Dombey. They are the same as ever. She is the same bright
vision to me, at present, that she was before I made Walters’s
acquaintance. When Mrs Toots and myself first began to talk of—in
short, of the tender passion, you know, Captain Gills.”
“Ay, ay, my lad,” says the Captain, “as makes us all slue round—for
which you’ll overhaul the book—”
“I shall certainly do so, Captain Gills,” says Mr Toots, with great
earnestness; “when we first began to mention such subjects, I explained
that I was what you may call a Blighted Flower, you know.”
The Captain approves of this figure greatly; and murmurs that no flower
as blows, is like the rose.
“But Lord bless me,” pursues Mr Toots, “she was as entirely conscious
of the state of my feelings as I was myself. There was nothing I could
tell her. She was the only person who could have stood between me and
the silent Tomb, and she did it, in a manner to command my everlasting
admiration. She knows that there’s nobody in the world I look up to, as
I do to Miss Dombey. Knows that there’s nothing on earth I wouldn’t do
for Miss Dombey. She knows that I consider Miss Dombey the most
beautiful, the most amiable, the most angelic of her sex. What is her
observation upon that? The perfection of sense. ‘My dear, you’re right.
I think so too.’”
“And so do I!” says the Captain.
“So do I,” says Sol Gills.
“Then,” resumes Mr Toots, after some contemplative pulling at his pipe,
during which his visage has expressed the most contented reflection,
“what an observant woman my wife is! What sagacity she possesses! What
remarks she makes! It was only last night, when we were sitting in the
enjoyment of connubial bliss—which, upon my word and honour, is a
feeble term to express my feelings in the society of my wife—that she
said how remarkable it was to consider the present position of our
friend Walters. ‘Here,’ observes my wife, ‘he is, released from
sea-going, after that first long voyage with his young bride’—as you
know he was, Mr Sols.”
“Quite true,” says the old Instrument-maker, rubbing his hands.
“‘Here he is,’ says my wife, ‘released from that, immediately;
appointed by the same establishment to a post of great trust and
confidence at home; showing himself again worthy; mounting up the
ladder with the greatest expedition; beloved by everybody; assisted by
his uncle at the very best possible time of his fortunes’—which I think
is the case, Mr Sols? My wife is always correct.”
“Why yes, yes—some of our lost ships, freighted with gold, have come
home, truly,” returns old Sol, laughing. “Small craft, Mr Toots, but
serviceable to my boy!”
“Exactly so,” says Mr Toots. “You’ll never find my wife wrong. ‘Here he
is,’ says that most remarkable woman, ‘so situated,—and what follows?
What follows?’ observed Mrs Toots. Now pray remark, Captain Gills, and
Mr Sols, the depth of my wife’s penetration. ‘Why that, under the very
eye of Mr Dombey, there is a foundation going on, upon which a—an
Edifice;’ that was Mrs Toots’s word,” says Mr Toots exultingly, ‘“is
gradually rising, perhaps to equal, perhaps excel, that of which he was
once the head, and the small beginnings of which (a common fault, but a
bad one, Mrs Toots said) escaped his memory. Thus,’ said my wife, ‘from
his daughter, after all, another Dombey and Son will ascend’—no ‘rise;’
that was Mrs Toots’s word—‘triumphant!’”
Mr Toots, with the assistance of his pipe—which he is extremely glad to
devote to oratorical purposes, as its proper use affects him with a
very uncomfortable sensation—does such grand justice to this prophetic
sentence of his wife’s, that the Captain, throwing away his glazed hat
in a state of the greatest excitement, cries:
“Sol Gills, you man of science and my ould pardner, what did I tell
Wal”r to overhaul on that there night when he first took to business?
Was it this here quotation, ‘Turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of
London, and when you are old you will never depart from it.’ Was it
them words, Sol Gills?”
“It certainly was, Ned,” replied the old Instrument-maker. “I remember
well.”
“Then I tell you what,” says the Captain, leaning back in his chair,
and composing his chest for a prodigious roar. “I’ll give you Lovely
Peg right through; and stand by, both on you, for the chorus!”
Buried wine grows older, as the old Madeira did, in its time; and dust
and cobwebs thicken on the bottles.
Autumn days are shining, and on the sea-beach there are often a young
lady, and a white-haired gentleman. With them, or near them, are two
children: boy and girl. And an old dog is generally in their company.
The white-haired gentleman walks with the little boy, talks with him,
helps him in his play, attends upon him, watches him as if he were the
object of his life. If he be thoughtful, the white-haired gentleman is
thoughtful too; and sometimes when the child is sitting by his side,
and looks up in his face, asking him questions, he takes the tiny hand
in his, and holding it, forgets to answer. Then the child says:
“What, grandpa! Am I so like my poor little Uncle again?”
“Yes, Paul. But he was weak, and you are very strong.”
“Oh yes, I am very strong.”
“And he lay on a little bed beside the sea, and you can run about.”
And so they range away again, busily, for the white-haired gentleman
likes best to see the child free and stirring; and as they go about
together, the story of the bond between them goes about, and follows
them.
But no one, except Florence, knows the measure of the white-haired
gentleman’s affection for the girl. That story never goes about. The
child herself almost wonders at a certain secrecy he keeps in it. He
hoards her in his heart. He cannot bear to see a cloud upon her face.
He cannot bear to see her sit apart. He fancies that she feels a
slight, when there is none. He steals away to look at her, in her
sleep. It pleases him to have her come, and wake him in the morning. He
is fondest of her and most loving to her, when there is no creature by.
The child says then, sometimes:
“Dear grandpapa, why do you cry when you kiss me?”
He only answers, “Little Florence! little Florence!” and smooths away
the curls that shade her earnest eyes.
The voices in the waves speak low to him of Florence, day and
night—plainest when he, his blooming daughter, and her husband, beside
them in the evening, or sit at an open window, listening to their roar.
They speak to him of Florence and his altered heart; of Florence and
their ceaseless murmuring to her of the love, eternal and illimitable,
extending still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible
country far away.
Never from the mighty sea may voices rise too late, to come between us
and the unseen region on the other shore! Better, far better, that they
whispered of that region in our childish ears, and the swift river
hurried us away!
PREFACE OF 1848
I cannot forego my usual opportunity of saying farewell to my readers
in this greeting-place, though I have only to acknowledge the unbounded
warmth and earnestness of their sympathy in every stage of the journey
we have just concluded.
If any of them have felt a sorrow in one of the principal incidents on
which this fiction turns, I hope it may be a sorrow of that sort which
endears the sharers in it, one to another. This is not unselfish in me.
I may claim to have felt it, at least as much as anybody else; and I
would fain be remembered kindly for my part in the experience.
DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, Twenty-Fourth March, 1848.
PREFACE OF 1867
I make so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of
correctly observing the characters of men, is a rare one. I have not
even found, within my experience, that the faculty (or the habit) of
correctly observing so much as the faces of men, is a general one by
any means. The two commonest mistakes in judgement that I suppose to
arise from the former default, are, the confounding of shyness with
arrogance—a very common mistake indeed—and the not understanding that
an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself.
Mr Dombey undergoes no violent change, either in this book, or in real
life. A sense of his injustice is within him, all along. The more he
represses it, the more unjust he necessarily is. Internal shame and
external circumstances may bring the contest to a close in a week, or a
day; but, it has been a contest for years, and is only fought out after
a long balance of victory.
I began this book by the Lake of Geneva, and went on with it for some
months in France, before pursuing it in England. The association
between the writing and the place of writing is so curiously strong in
my mind, that at this day, although I know, in my fancy, every stair in
the little midshipman’s house, and could swear to every pew in the
church in which Florence was married, or to every young gentleman’s
bedstead in Doctor Blimber’s establishment, I yet confusedly imagine
Captain Cuttle as secluding himself from Mrs MacStinger among the
mountains of Switzerland. Similarly, when I am reminded by any chance
of what it was that the waves were always saying, my remembrance
wanders for a whole winter night about the streets of Paris—as I
restlessly did with a heavy heart, on the night when I had written the
chapter in which my little friend and I parted company.