Dombey and Son
Paul, and shaken hands with Florence, and beheld Master Bitherstone in
his collar of state, and made Miss Pankey cry by patting her on the
head (in which region she was uncommonly tender, on account of a habit
Mrs Pipchin had of sounding it with her knuckles, like a cask), he
withdrew to his hotel and dinner: resolved that Paul, now that he was
getting so old and well, should begin a vigorous course of education
forthwith, to qualify him for the position in which he was to shine;
and that Doctor Blimber should take him in hand immediately.
Whenever a young gentleman was taken in hand by Doctor Blimber, he
might consider himself sure of a pretty tight squeeze. The Doctor only
undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had, always ready,
a supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; and it was
at once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten
with it.
In fact, Doctor Blimber’s establishment was a great hot-house, in which
there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew
before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas, and
intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries
(very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere
sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber’s cultivation. Every
description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs
of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no
consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to
bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other.
This was all very pleasant and ingenious, but the system of forcing was
attended with its usual disadvantages. There was not the right taste
about the premature productions, and they didn’t keep well. Moreover,
one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head
(the oldest of the ten who had “gone through” everything), suddenly
left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere
stalk. And people did say that the Doctor had rather overdone it with
young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off having
brains.
There young Toots was, at any rate; possessed of the gruffest of voices
and the shrillest of minds; sticking ornamental pins into his shirt,
and keeping a ring in his waistcoat pocket to put on his little finger
by stealth, when the pupils went out walking; constantly falling in
love by sight with nurserymaids, who had no idea of his existence; and
looking at the gas-lighted world over the little iron bars in the
left-hand corner window of the front three pairs of stairs, after
bed-time, like a greatly overgrown cherub who had sat up aloft much too
long.
The Doctor was a portly gentleman in a suit of black, with strings at
his knees, and stockings below them. He had a bald head, highly
polished; a deep voice; and a chin so very double, that it was a wonder
how he ever managed to shave into the creases. He had likewise a pair
of little eyes that were always half shut up, and a mouth that was
always half expanded into a grin, as if he had, that moment, posed a
boy, and were waiting to convict him from his own lips. Insomuch, that
when the Doctor put his right hand into the breast of his coat, and
with his other hand behind him, and a scarcely perceptible wag of his
head, made the commonest observation to a nervous stranger, it was like
a sentiment from the sphynx, and settled his business.
The Doctor’s was a mighty fine house, fronting the sea. Not a joyful
style of house within, but quite the contrary. Sad-coloured curtains,
whose proportions were spare and lean, hid themselves despondently
behind the windows. The tables and chairs were put away in rows, like
figures in a sum; fires were so rarely lighted in the rooms of
ceremony, that they felt like wells, and a visitor represented the
bucket; the dining-room seemed the last place in the world where any
eating or drinking was likely to occur; there was no sound through all
the house but the ticking of a great clock in the hall, which made
itself audible in the very garrets; and sometimes a dull cooing of
young gentlemen at their lessons, like the murmurings of an assemblage
of melancholy pigeons.
Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft
violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense about
Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles.
She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages.
None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead—stone
dead—and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.
Mrs Blimber, her Mama, was not learned herself, but she pretended to
be, and that did quite as well. She said at evening parties, that if
she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented.
It was the steady joy of her life to see the Doctor’s young gentlemen
go out walking, unlike all other young gentlemen, in the largest
possible shirt-collars, and the stiffest possible cravats. It was so
classical, she said.
As to Mr Feeder, B.A., Doctor Blimber’s assistant, he was a kind of
human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
continually working, over and over again, without any variation. He
might have been fitted up with a change of barrels, perhaps, in early
life, if his destiny had been favourable; but it had not been; and he
had only one, with which, in a monotonous round, it was his occupation
to bewilder the young ideas of Doctor Blimber’s young gentlemen. The
young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew
no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage
noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of
exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing
system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three
weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months.
He conceived bitter sentiments against his parents or guardians in
four; he was an old misanthrope, in five; envied Curtius that blessed
refuge in the earth, in six; and at the end of the first twelvemonth
had arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards departed,
that all the fancies of the poets, and lessons of the sages, were a
mere collection of words and grammar, and had no other meaning in the
world.
But he went on blow, blow, blowing, in the Doctor’s hothouse, all the
time; and the Doctor’s glory and reputation were great, when he took
his wintry growth home to his relations and friends.
Upon the Doctor’s door-steps one day, Paul stood with a fluttering
heart, and with his small right hand in his father’s. His other hand
was locked in that of Florence. How tight the tiny pressure of that
one; and how loose and cold the other!
Mrs Pipchin hovered behind the victim, with her sable plumage and her
hooked beak, like a bird of ill-omen. She was out of breath—for Mr
Dombey, full of great thoughts, had walked fast—and she croaked
hoarsely as she waited for the opening of the door.
“Now, Paul,” said Mr Dombey, exultingly. “This is the way indeed to be
Dombey and Son, and have money. You are almost a man already.”
“Almost,” returned the child.
Even his childish agitation could not master the sly and quaint yet
touching look, with which he accompanied the reply.
It brought a vague expression of dissatisfaction into Mr Dombey’s face;
but the door being opened, it was quickly gone.
“Doctor Blimber is at home, I believe?” said Mr Dombey.
The man said yes; and as they passed in, looked at Paul as if he were a
little mouse, and the house were a trap. He was a weak-eyed young man,
with the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his
countenance. It was mere imbecility; but Mrs Pipchin took it into her
head that it was impudence, and made a snap at him directly.
“How dare you laugh behind the gentleman’s back?” said Mrs Pipchin.
“And what do you take me for?”
“I ain’t a laughing at nobody, and I’m sure I don’t take you for
nothing, Ma’am,” returned the young man, in consternation.
“A pack of idle dogs!” said Mrs Pipchin, “only fit to be turnspits. Go
and tell your master that Mr Dombey’s here, or it’ll be worse for you!”
The weak-eyed young man went, very meekly, to discharge himself of this
commission; and soon came back to invite them to the Doctor’s study.
“You’re laughing again, Sir,” said Mrs Pipchin, when it came to her
turn, bringing up the rear, to pass him in the hall.
“I ain’t,” returned the young man, grievously oppressed. “I never see
such a thing as this!”
“What is the matter, Mrs Pipchin?” said Mr Dombey, looking round.
“Softly! Pray!”
Mrs Pipchin, in her deference, merely muttered at the young man as she
passed on, and said, “Oh! he was a precious fellow”—leaving the young
man, who was all meekness and incapacity, affected even to tears by the
incident. But Mrs Pipchin had a way of falling foul of all meek people;
and her friends said who could wonder at it, after the Peruvian mines!
The Doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each
knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the
mantel-shelf. “And how do you do, Sir?” he said to Mr Dombey, “and how
is my little friend?” Grave as an organ was the Doctor’s speech; and
when he ceased, the great clock in the hall seemed (to Paul at least)
to take him up, and to go on saying, “how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?
how, is, my, lit, tle, friend?” over and over and over again.
The little friend being something too small to be seen at all from
where the Doctor sat, over the books on his table, the Doctor made
several futile attempts to get a view of him round the legs; which Mr
Dombey perceiving, relieved the Doctor from his embarrassment by taking
Paul up in his arms, and sitting him on another little table, over
against the Doctor, in the middle of the room.
“Ha!” said the Doctor, leaning back in his chair with his hand in his
breast. “Now I see my little friend. How do you do, my little friend?”
The clock in the hall wouldn’t subscribe to this alteration in the form
of words, but continued to repeat how, is, my, lit, tle, friend? how,
is, my, lit, tle, friend?”
“Very well, I thank you, Sir,” returned Paul, answering the clock quite
as much as the Doctor.
“Ha!” said Doctor Blimber. “Shall we make a man of him?”
“Do you hear, Paul?” added Mr Dombey; Paul being silent.
“Shall we make a man of him?” repeated the Doctor.
“I had rather be a child,” replied Paul.
“Indeed!” said the Doctor. “Why?”
The child sat on the table looking at him, with a curious expression of
suppressed emotion in his face, and beating one hand proudly on his
knee as if he had the rising tears beneath it, and crushed them. But
his other hand strayed a little way the while, a little farther—farther
from him yet—until it lighted on the neck of Florence. “This is why,”
it seemed to say, and then the steady look was broken up and gone; the
working lip was loosened; and the tears came streaming forth.
“Mrs Pipchin,” said his father, in a querulous manner, “I am really
very sorry to see this.”
“Come away from him, do, Miss Dombey,” quoth the matron.
“Never mind,” said the Doctor, blandly nodding his head, to keep Mrs
Pipchin back. “Never mind; we shall substitute new cares and new
impressions, Mr Dombey, very shortly. You would still wish my little
friend to acquire—”
“Everything, if you please, Doctor,” returned Mr Dombey, firmly.
“Yes,” said the Doctor, who, with his half-shut eyes, and his usual
smile, seemed to survey Paul with the sort of interest that might
attach to some choice little animal he was going to stuff. “Yes,
exactly. Ha! We shall impart a great variety of information to our