“1. The Beginnings of Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
CHAPTER 1 The Beginnings of Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination
Dombey and Son’s “Right-Hand Man”
In a novel what is said two or more times may not be true, but the reader is fairly safe in assuming that it is significant.
—J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (1982)
Rarity, Idiomatic Provenance, and the “Planning” of Dombey
We have seen in the introduction how Dickens not only uses far more body idioms in his novels than his peers but also how he playfully experiments with embodied idiomatic language throughout his early fiction. But his experimental use of body idioms does not start to intersect with his compositional methods nor his fiction’s deepest thematic concerns until about midway through his career. Because of this, Dombey and Son (1846–48) constitutes a decisive moment in Dickens’s career for a particular set of reasons. We know from the overall numerical comparisons and from the brief analyses of his early fiction that Dickens does not suddenly start using bodily derived idiomatic expressions only with this novel. Quite the contrary: he uses hundreds of them in each of his previous novels. The point of this chapter is to demonstrate how he starts pressing certain idioms into a more unified thematic service with Dombey and Son. In other words, although the sheer number of idiomatic expressions Dickens uses in each of his novels is sui generis among major Victorian novelists—and therefore noteworthy itself in terms of authorial “style”—this is not nearly as interesting as the way he begins emphasizing certain expressions for isolated repetition midway through his career. What I mean by isolated repetition is this: the vast majority of the hundreds of body idioms Dickens uses in any given novel are ones that he typically recycles throughout all or many of his other works. For instance, the expression “hold your tongue” appears over and over again in fourteen novels, “at arm’s length” in fifteen novels, “from head to foot” in all seventeen novels, and so on.1 Only in Dombey and Son, though, the seemingly obscure idiomatic expression “right-hand man” occurs four times.2
Despite what Hillis Miller (1982, 2) says about the significance of that which is said two or more times in a novel, the “right-hand man” idiom’s unique usage has probably escaped critical attention for good reason. Most of us now probably use it unwittingly in our contemporary speech and because, after all, it appears only four times in Dombey and Son—Dickens’s longest novel at 356,610 words. But unlike virtually every other bodily derived idiom that repeatedly turns up in Dickens’s work throughout his career (“at arm’s length,” “hold your tongue,” “head to foot,” etc.), this figurative sense of “right-hand man” appears only these four times in Dombey; never before or again in his entire fictional oeuvre. I concede that viewed solely in this numerical context, such rarity of phrasing four times in such a lengthy novel still does not amount to much. Over the course of this chapter and throughout this book, however, we will see how its rarity inaugurates a process of idiom generativity that offers us a new way to frame and interpret Dickens’s mature imaginative development.
Assessing how and why Dickens’s unique usage of the “right-hand man” idiom in Dombey matters for the imaginative process which unfolds throughout the novel first requires some additional and more general contextualization. Twenty-first-century readers have most likely assimilated a pervasive and always-already figurative sense of what a “right-hand man” signifies in our contemporary lexicon. Indeed, its figurative embeddedness in our everyday vocabulary is one reason why we read right past it even when it does appear in Dombey.
The wider idiomatic usage of a “right-hand man” was still relatively rare from a philological perspective in the 1840s, however. As Frances Ferguson (2013, 328) reminds us, philology attends to the histories of words and phrases so as to establish not just the variety of things one might say with a particular word or phrase but also to mark the changes in what one might say with that word or phrase at various historical moments. It is therefore important to understand how and when the idiosyncratic uniqueness of the “right-hand man” expression achieved its idiomaticity—that is, the historical, cultural, and linguistic processes by which the expression moves from the literal to the figurative within the language’s vernacular.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the first use of the phrase “right-hand man” occurs in a military context in 1626 describing the literal placement of “a soldier holding a position of responsibility or command on the right hand of a troop of [cavalry] horses.”3 It is not until more than one hundred years later, in 1739, that the phrase began to acquire the figurative meaning we are familiar with today: as “a person (esp. a man) who serves as a chief assistant or indispensable helper to another.” We will see how the idiom expands even more later on in its life cycle from “chief assistant or indispensable helper” to broader forms of surrogacy and factotum (as in Dombey sends his “right-hand man,” Carker, to broker his second marriage). Even so, it still remains difficult to gauge how the phrase moves from its first instantiations to its more common usage in the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Hansard Corpus, which is made up of over seven million parliamentary speeches by some forty thousand speakers, turns up only two instances of the idiom from 1800 to 1850. It stands to reason, though, that even if MPs at this time were becoming familiar with the idiom, they would be unlikely to dip into the colloquial register while trying to impress and persuade their mostly aristocratic peers in professional settings for fear of using what was common and, in Addisonian terms, “vulgar” language. Olivia Smith (1986, 30) has pointed out that between 1797 and 1845, Parliament dismissively refused to admit petitions from certain sectors of the public simply because of the colloquial language in which they were written.
Newspapers, given the explosive expansion of their distribution and readership in the first half of the nineteenth century, provide a far more accurate picture of how the idiom increased in popular usage. Manfred Görlach’s influential study, English in Nineteenth-Century England (1999) has convincingly established that journalism, combined with the exponential rise of literacy after 1840, had significant and more or less immediate effects on the spread of the vernacular in standard English (13). Searches through the British Library Newspapers Digital Archive and the British Periodicals database corroborate Görlach’s claim. The Newspapers archive contains over two million pages from forty-eight daily and weekly papers in Britain, while the British Periodicals database contains over six million pages from 460 magazines and journals. The sheer breadth of these resources therefore provides a more comprehensive sense of how and when the phrase “right-hand man” gained traction in contemporary popular usage.4 The following graphs provide visualizations of the phrase’s traction and rising popularity in the newspaper and periodical presses, respectively, in the time before and during when Dickens was composing Dombey and Son.
These visualizations reveal that the idiom first appears in 1740—consistent with the year the OED dates its first figurative appearance—and its use in newspapers and periodicals rises very slowly until about 1835, when its usage then begins to spike. Although the graphs demonstrate actual occurrences in 1845 (about twenty-five occurrences in figure 1, forty occurrences in figure 2) and show that usage is still relatively rare, they nonetheless demonstrate that the phrase was becoming much more widely used in newspapers and periodicals around the time that Dickens began to compose Dombey in 1845. Moreover, a closer look at each of these occurrences shows an increasing elasticity of the phrase in its figurative usages as it spreads from strictly military contexts to religious, political, juridical, and eventually, to commercial ones as it becomes more popular.5 It is also very likely that Dickens was aware of these developments considering that he maintained a keen interest in journalism (editing the Daily News—if only for a matter of months—in 1846) and in the periodical press (editing Bentley’s Miscellany for three years).6 Dickens’s identification of the expanding applicability of the idiom—however he comes by it—reflects what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 259) would later discuss in terms of “the fundamentally social modes in which discourse lives” in the novel more generally. For Bakhtin, every word, phrase, and idiom of a novel “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (293). We shall see how the socially charged life of the “right-hand man” idiom does just this in Dombey; it moves from what Bakhtin describes as “familiar zones of contact with still-evolving contemporaneity … from professional jargon into more general use” (395, 418).
On a more personal level, one of the very few fictional authors who did employ the “right-hand man” idiom before Dombey and Son, Frederick Marryat, lived in close proximity to Dickens in Lausanne, Switzerland during the mid-1840s. The two were close friends who socialized and discussed their fictional crafts regularly while Dickens was in the process of developing his ideas for Dombey and Son. In a germane and idiomatically framed observation, Angus Wilson (1961, 379) long ago claimed that Dickens’s “greatest natural gift was his ear,” and so it is entirely possible that Dickens picked up the “right-hand man” expression from Marryat, a former Royal Navy officer who was conversant in both military jargon and nautical injuries. It is worth noting, too, that Dickens’s library at Gad’s Hill contained a full set of Marryat’s thirteen novels (see Stonehouse 1935). Although there is no way nor any essential necessity to confirm whether Dickens read the several Marryat novels that featured the (still relatively) rare idiom, the friendship with the popular and successful nautical novelist clearly informed Dombey’s maritime themes more generally as well as the novel’s representations of ocean commerce and seafaring characters such as Jack Bunsby, Solomon Gills, Walter Gay, and especially, the hook-handed Captain Edward Cuttle.7 Not only did Marryat use the “right-hand man” idiom in his own novels, but he also employed several hook-handed characters within them.8
Frederick Marryat, of course, was no Charles Dickens. Where Marryat just happens to feature the “right-hand man” expression in his nautical novels, I think Dickens, perhaps unconsciously at first, saw thematic potential for the new novel he was writing—one that was to explore the possibilities and limitations of a distinctly “right-hand” sense of surrogacy (filial, commercial, gendered, and otherwise).9 Moreover, it fits Dickens’s brilliantly grotesque sensibilities to build into his finest fictional exploration of substitution and proxy a character—Captain Cuttle—who comically but compellingly embodies all the characteristics of a “right-hand man” without actually possessing a right hand.10
I grant that despite the historical data and personal anecdotes, the fact that Dickens uses the phrase “right-hand man” only in Dombey when he recycles many of the hundreds of other body idioms throughout his oeuvre may still seem rather unremarkable. It becomes more interesting and provocative, however, when we consider this anomaly in conjunction with the long-established consensus that Dombey stands out among Dickens’s fiction as the earliest example of deliberate and successful planning. This consensus stretches at least as far back as John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson’s (1957) pioneering book, Dickens at Work, where their chapter on Dombey is appositely titled “Design and Execution” (90).11 Hillary Schor (1999, 49) has described this now twenty-first-century critical consensus perhaps most succinctly: “Dombey and Son marked a new beginning for Dickens in many ways: it was the first of his novels for which he wrote number plans in advance; the first to use complicated and involved metaphors for itself; the first he spoke of ‘branching’ off in ways we [now] think of his novels developing … with newly plotted tightness.”
But my sense of how a rare idiomatic expression operates in the world of the novel pushes Schor’s idea of “complicated and involved metaphor” further to locate the beginning of an imaginative process in Dombey that has so far gone entirely unnoticed. I contend that Dickens anchors the composition of Dombey around a pervading sense of “right-hand manness” and “right-hand womanness” in such a way that it becomes the founding (though still somewhat fledgling) instance of what will become standard imaginative procedure for much of his later and most sophisticated work. This particular idiomatic expression operates as a varied but surprisingly cohesive unifying force in Dombey—a force that radiates outward to how Dickens imagines characterization, narrative voice, plotting, and most importantly, thematic schema. In terms of the last of these, the multiple meanings bound up in this bodily idiom influence the subtle ways in which Dombey and Son forges the exploration of its deepest and most interrelated themes: surrogacy and succession, commerce and commitment, care and neglect, ability and disability.
This rare but unusually prominent idiom, in other words, offers us not only an as-yet-unacknowledged pathway to meaning in Dombey but also a new and alternative way of thinking about the relationship between bodies, language, and the wider imaginative structures that begin to characterize Dickens’s mature fiction. Indeed, his felicitous ability to integrate and elevate idioms of popular origin—ones that an early theorist of figurative language assert “fly at no high pitch of thought”—into the grandest structural and aesthetic achievements of his most mature fiction should be considered a major component of Dickens’s appeal to readers of all classes (L. Smith 1925, 269). It is also important to recognize that the integration and elevation of this particular body idiom in Dombey need not be entirely conscious to be meaningful.
The Embodied Rhetoric of Dombey’s “Right-Hand Man”
Dickens, no doubt, had been considered a virtuoso wordsmith since he burst onto the scene with Pickwick Papers (1836–37), but what we could call his “idiomatic inventiveness” begins to develop in new ways as he experiments with the boundaries of ordinary vernacular language—bringing dormant connotations to literal, figurative, and thematic life after the successes of Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41).12 By the time Dickens starts composing Dombey and Son in early 1846, he begins using idiomatic expressions in systematic ways that analogically stretch and even violate their accepted meanings. The choice to introduce the character of Captain Cuttle in conjunction with the phrase “right-hand man” in his first “planned” novel is exemplary in this regard. It is part of a multifaceted, embodied playfulness that perhaps only Dickens could pull off—where idiomatic expressions both do and do not have the meanings generically ascribed to them. In his only novel to incorporate the phrase “right-hand man,” for instance, one of the originally planned characters is conspicuously presented in prose and illustration as having no right hand; Cuttle has a hook and various other attachments that he uses as a right hand. Dickens’s single page of notes outlining the major events of the novel include the identification of the following characters, in this order: Mr. Dombey, Paul Dombey (“born to die”), Florence, Captain Cuttle, Mrs. Chick, Polly Toodle, Miss Tox, Solomon Gills, Walter Gay, and Major Bagstock—a list that interestingly does not include the novel’s most ostensibly obvious and explicit “right-hand man,” James Carker (Stone 1987, 56–57). Of course, we may read nothing whatsoever into the fact that Captain Cuttle appears as the first non-Dombeyan character listed in Dickens’s first planned notes. But I hope to demonstrate how Cuttle’s centrality from the very start helps open up generative possibilities for other, extra filial characters to operate within modes of proxy, substitution, and surrogacy that extend and even transcend what it means to be a “right-hand man” in this novel. “Some of the most effective embodiments of an idea in fiction,” writes Raymond Williams (1970, 80), “create so immediate and convincing a reality that it is only by analysis … that the shaping idea can be separated out.” This is what I aim to do; to analyze how, by way of an ironic idiomatic association of the “right-hand man” with Captain Cuttle, Dickens creates one of his first and most effective embodiments of both character and shaping idea.
As one of the originally planned characters, Major Bagstock also plays a central role in establishing the multiple ways that the idiom works its way into the novel. Since, as Miss Tox says, there is “ ‘something so truly military’ ” in the man, it is fitting that Bagstock is the one who eventually uses the “right-hand man” idiom first and most explicitly later on in reference to Carker (Dickens [1848] 2002, 102). This confirms an important part of Bakhtin’s (1981, 302) theory of how heteroglossic discourse enters fiction—notably, where “common language” aligns with “the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society.” Bagstock’s sphere of society is military oriented, and thus it is fitting that it is he who first introduces the idiom into the text. But Bagstock comes to embody nearly all of the phrase’s literal and figurative connotations beforehand. He proposes “to be [Dombey’s] guest and guide at Leamington,” encouraging Dombey to “command him in any way [he] please[s]” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 306). Their relationship gets to this point because, as the narrator tells us early on, “Dombey observed of the Major … that besides being quite a military man he was really something more, as he had a very admirable idea of the importance of things unconnected with his own profession” (148). One of these “things unconnected with his own profession” at which Bagstock excels (and which Dombey most certainly does not) is romantic sociability. When all is said and done, it is Bagstock who suggests the trip to Leamington and who sets up the particulars of where they will stay, what they will eat, where they will visit, and whom they will see there. Thus compacted within Bagstock is the military-historical provenance of the idiom but also some of its expansive future potential beyond.
The assistance that the major offers is hardly handled by Bagstock alone, however. Even as he becomes the “right-hand man” for Dombey’s social excursion, he himself employs his own “right-hand man”: “the dark servant” known only as “the Native” (102, 303). Because it is the Native who assembles the luggage, arranges the transportation, does the cooking, and even carries messages around to Mrs. Skewton and Edith Granger at Leamington, there is undoubtedly a troubling social and racial power dynamic underwriting Bagstock’s ability to be a “right-hand man” for Dombey. Perhaps nowhere is this cascading dynamic of hierarchical “right-hand” power more apparent than in the illustration depicting the scene where Bagstock formally introduces Dombey to his future (second) wife and mother-in-law (figure 3). Here, the subordinate hierarchy repeatedly embedded in the idiom could not be more visually explicit in the positioning of the characters. The “right-hand man,” Bagstock, stands directly to the right of Dombey, while Bagstock’s “right-hand man,” the Native, appears directly to his right.
Even Major Bagstock, though, is not at the top of Dombey’s hierarchy of right-hand men—and his position as such is crucial for when and how the idiom enters the text. Bagstock, along with the Native, orchestrate and set in motion all of the various courting campaigns at Leamington that make Dombey’s romantic affiliation with Edith possible, yet it is “the [business] Manager,” Carker, who swoops in to sanction the relationship (399). The irony of this unmilitary, untrustworthy, and “sly” character supplanting the major’s role as Dombey’s “right-hand man” is not lost on Bagstock (399). He cannot resist a hearty “chuckle” when he sees how Dombey blindly considers his firm’s “second-in-command” as his right-hand man (399).
This ironic perspective is also an important element in the idiom’s first explicit appearances in the novel. Attempting to convince Mrs. Skewton that Dombey “is in earnest” about a prospective match with Edith, Bagstock points to the arrival of Carker in Leamington—who is dispatched there presumably to assess the situation in (right-hand man) proxy for the exceedingly proud “Colossus of commerce” (407, 398). The major again chuckles at his own use of the idiom before becoming serious:
“Dombey’s right-hand man, Ma’am,” said the Major, stopping abruptly in a chuckle, and becoming serious, “has arrived.”
“This morning?” said Cleopatra.…
“Well, Ma’am,” said the Major. “I have thrown out hints already, and the right-hand man understands ’em; and I’ll throw out more, before the day is done.” (407; emphasis mine)
Consultation with Dickens’s handwritten manuscript from the Victoria & Albert Museum reveals something very interesting—perhaps crucial—here in this first usage of the idiom. His handwriting in the manuscript flows cleanly up until “Dombey’s …,” and then several undecipherable cross-outs show Dickens struggling indecisively with how he wants (Bagstock) to describe Carker, until he eventually settles on labeling him “Dombey’s right-hand man.” Could these cross-outs and insertions provide a glimpse into Dickens’s thinking about how to reconcile the ways in which the novel’s most “official” but officially negligent right-hand man is known for his teeth while the most capable but unofficial one (Cuttle) is known for his hooked right hand? Whatever the case may be, Dickens appears pleased with the applicability of Bagstock’s label because he applies it without hesitation in each subsequent reference to Carker as the “right-hand man”—that is, the idiomatic adjective appears without any cross-outs hereafter. These important textual details occur in conjunction with what happens so often and so seamlessly in Dickens’s work: the ironic diction of his characters begins to blend with the diction of his narrators. This phenomenon, which Patricia Ingham (2008, 128) has appropriately termed “the listening narrator,” occurs when the narrator hears and amplifies a characters’ idiosyncratic—and, in this case, idiomatic—ways of speaking.13
In fact, the scene at Leamington is a quintessential example of Dickens’s listening narrator. Just a few pages after Major Bagstock dubs “the man with the teeth” Dombey’s “right-hand man,” for example, the narrator recounts how Bagstock leaves Mrs. Skewton upstairs while he descends to rejoin Dombey “and his right-hand man,” Carker. Here is how the narrator describes the scenario just moments after Bagstock’s original introduction of the idiom: “At length, the Major … went down stairs to enliven ‘Dombey’ and his right-hand man. Dombey was not yet in the room, but the right-hand man was there, and his dental treasures were, as usual, ready for the Major” (410; emphasis mine). Although this scene appears twenty-six chapters into the novel, I concur with Alan Horsman’s (1974, xxxi) belief that Major Bagstock’s part in the second marriage “seems to be among the very earliest plans for the novel, judging by the presence of the military witness at the marriage ceremony in the [monthly number] cover design.” Moreover, in the moments before the wedding (in the presence of Carker), it seems as if Bagstock wants to set the record straight about who is the more worthy “right-hand man” by comically and self-indulgently demonstrating his loyalty in terms of his own literal right hand: “ ‘Dombey,’ says the Major, with appropriate action, ‘that is the hand of Joseph Bagstock; of plain old Joey B., Sir, if you like that better! That is the hand, of which His Royal Highness the late Duke of York, did me the honour to observe, Sir, to his Royal Highness the late Duke of Kent, that it was the hand of Josh; a rough and tough, and possibly up-to-snuff, old vagabond” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 481). This, combined with how the idiom appears in the original handwritten manuscript, what we know about the military provenance of the idiom, and its concentrated use in the Leamington scene, informs my sense that Dickens, at some level, was able to register the idiom’s literal but multiply valenced applicability for the themes of service, surrogacy, and substitution that he was already exploring from the novel’s opening pages when he thought of his principal characters, including Captain Cuttle—the disabled character who, for hundreds of pages, has already performed the role of the text’s most effective “right-hand man.”
Bakhtin’s understanding of how speech operates in the novel genre may help explain the “intentional” complexities involved in this seemingly straightforward scene of dialogue. The listening narrator’s commentary with Major Bagstock’s dialogue partakes of Bakhtin’s (1981, 324; emphasis original) formulation that such speech constitutes a special type of “double-voiced discourse”:
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms of its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author.… And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were—know about each other … it is as though they actually hold a conversation with each other.
If the closely related scenes do constitute a conversation, in the Bakhtinian sense, between Major Bagstock and the narrator, they allow Dickens to compact, reiterate, and transfer the meanings of a heteroglossic and increasingly popularized idiom within a single important though otherwise unremarkable scene where “the refracted intention of the author” may or may not be wholly conscious.
As I have stressed, though, conscious or not, part of what makes Dickens’s idiomatic imagination so remarkable is the way he delights in exploiting the idiomaticity of an expression by continually alternating between—and even violating—its figurative and literal dimensions. We see this, for instance, in the dining room illustration (figure 4) which appears more or less immediately after Carker supposedly takes over from Bagstock as Dombey’s “right-hand man.” The inverted positioning of the characters in the illustrated dinner show Carker at Dombey’s left hand, not his right. Such positioning only pages after Carker has been labeled Dombey’s “right-hand man” perhaps suggests (as well as predicts) the treacherousness of Carker’s true orientation toward Dombey.14
Something similar is implied on a far bigger stage later in the novel when Dombey hosts a “housewarming” dinner party for his business associates. In this instance, the narrator recounts in considerable detail how and where the guests, including Carker, Cousin Feenix, Edith Dombey, Major Bagstock, and Mrs. Skewton, arrive at their seats during the elaborately choreographed dinner. The description of the seating’s specificity is inversely proportionate to one errant guest’s obscurity: “When all the rest were got in and were seated, one of these mild men still appeared, in smiling confusion, totally destitute and unprovided for, and, escorted by the butler, made the complete circuit of the table twice before his chair could be found, which it finally was, on Mr. Dombey’s left hand (Dickens [1848] 2002, 556; emphasis mine). Although it is comical that Dombey’s frozen demeanor even at what is billed as a “housewarming” event causes a seat to be left open on one side of him, it is conspicuously a seat on his left hand because his now publicly declared and professionally instituted “right-hand man,” Carker, is this time seated directly to his right (62).
These kinds of failed applications and reliteralizations of the idiom will become more interesting as they relate to other characters and larger themes in subsequent novels, but for now, it is important to mention briefly the two other (for a total of six) instantiations of the idiom in Dombey. One occurs when Mr. Morfin pays a visit to the home of Carker’s disgraced older brother, John, and his sister, Harriet. Morfin is an underling assistant manager in the commercial hierarchy of Dombey’s firm. He is deeply concerned for Harriet Carker’s well-being (a concern that will develop into romantic interest), and so he offers his services should she ever decide to terminate her resolution to live in isolation with her brother, saying, “If you should see cause to change your resolution, you will suffer me to be as your right hand. My name shall then be at your service” (521). Morfin’s steadfast promise to act as Harriet’s “faithful steward”—another figurative collocation of the “right-hand man” idiom—culminates in his marriage to Harriet at the end of the novel (885). The sixth explicit instantiation of the idiom occurs when Solomon Gills leaves the Wooden Midshipman to search for the presumably drowned Walter Gay—an event that causes a realignment of the shop’s “management.” The narrator informs us that Captain Cuttle, unaware of Rob’s treachery, installs “the Grinder” to be the second in “command” of shop: “[Cuttle] had believed in the false Rob.… He had made a companion of him as the last of the old ship’s company; he had taken command of the little Midshipman with him a[s] his right-hand” (597). And it should be noted, here, that my stance regarding the essential idiomaticity of the expression despite its exact phrasing is bolstered by overwhelming textual evidence culled from Dickens’s entire oeuvre: every other of the 224 instances where the adjectival phrase “right hand” appears in his novels, unlike the two examples above, delineates either literal proprioception (something in the environment’s or a character’s kinesthesiastic place to the right of) or a literal action of a character’s right hand (“holding out a clenched right hand,” etc.).15
Even so, these occurrences of the expression in Dombey also need to be additionally contextualized in terms of their rarity both in Dickens’s fiction and in that of other contemporary novelists. Despite the bourgeoning use of the “right-hand man” idiom in newspapers, magazines, and journals, novelists still hardly ever employed it in their fictional prose. Dickens does not use the idiom even a single time outside of Dombey in the entirety of his career, and a search through the Chadwyck-Healey database Nineteenth-Century Fiction, made up of 250 novels by more than 100 different British and Irish authors, reveals that the phrase is used in only four other instances—once in a military context in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), once in Anthony Trollope’s much later Phineas Redux (1873), and twice in Dickens’s friend Frederick Marryat’s pre-Dombeyan Percival Keene (1842). In my much larger corpus of 3,719 nineteenth-century novels, the idiom appears in only ninety-seven other books—and even then, it occurs a maximum of twice in only four of the nearly four thousand texts.16 Such rarity provides additional context for thinking about the idiom’s relatively dense concentration in Dombey and Son. Its extreme rarity (inside and outside of Dombey) is itself a provocation to explore a more specific question about the idiom’s isolated concentration in only this particular novel.17 Dickens’s concentrated use of the idiom multiple times only in a single novel, especially considering that it was virtually unused in thousands of other nineteenth-century novels, fulfills the definition of what the digital humanities scholar Judith Flanders (2013, 24) calls a true “phraseological peculiarity.”18 Making sense of this phraseological peculiarity remains the central task of this chapter. As we shall see, what might be called “right-hand manness” (and eventually “right-hand womanness”) supersedes the rarity of its numerical instantiation as it comes to pervade almost every aspect of Dombey. So much so, in fact, that it becomes pivotal for how the text represents its most salient themes in various but related ways.
Of course, linguistic usage outside of print is difficult to quantify precisely because of its tendency to proliferate through the unseen (and unverifiable) substrata of a culture. But Dombey is nonetheless one place where I think we can identify Dickens operating at the forefront of such a subterranean linguistic root system. We know from the content of his own later periodicals Household Words (1850–59) and All the Year Round (1859–70) that Dickens was deeply curious about philology, the derivation of everyday phrases, and the social history of language alteration more generally.19 Even before his insistence on the usage “plain English” (“household words”) in his periodicals, however, at this point in his career Dickens seems to possess the ability to predict how idiomatic expressions, carried into new lexical and thematic relationships, act like linguistic burrs that stick and retain some of their original (literal) meaning even as they enter the realm of the figurative. He was fascinated by the ways past meanings could illuminate new but related meanings of a current (or emerging) phrase—what Bakhtin (1981, 288) referred to as “the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language.” The way the “right-hand man” idiom originates in Dombey with Major Bagstock is exemplary in this regard. By virtue of his career in the British army, Major Bagstock has spent his entire life in the profession from which the idiom literally emerged. And as English commerce greatly expanded in the 1840s, the idiom becomes transferable from Bagstock’s “regimental stories” to other nonmilitary contexts. This is precisely what we see in Bagstock’s use of the phrase to introduce Carker to Edith and Mrs. Skewton in Leamington; he transfers it from the “regimental” to Dombey’s commercial and marriage-brokering contexts with Carker operating as “second-in-command,” “go-between,” and “medium of communication” (399, 681, 709). Transferences such as these help account for the spike in usages of the phrase that we see in the graphed figures from the British Library Newspapers and British Periodicals archives. It is a testament to Dickens’s acute awareness of emerging linguistic trends and his mastery of vernacular speech that the phrase emerges in Dombey almost simultaneously and in the same categorical contexts with which it surfaces in much more expansive popular discourse.20
Idiomatic Malleability and Dickensian “Style”
Although critics have yet to recognize how specific bodily derived idioms function in the worlds of Dickens’s novels, I am in good company when it comes to their acknowledgment of his more general ability to connect seemingly insignificant details to his larger artistic aims. Some forty-five years ago, Garrett Stewart (1974, xv–xvi) convincingly argued that Dickens’s “style” often consists of “small moments of almost impossible insight and rightness … sudden illuminations that take our breath away [and] frequently collapse into a single disclosure the largest themes of their books.” More recently, Daniel Tyler (2013, 11) has argued that “Dickens often marshals attributes of his style—his figurative language, his wordplay, his sound effects—to the immediate thematic ends of each fiction.” Tyler’s edited collection, entitled Dickens’s Style (2013), contains eleven articles ranging from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s assessment of “Dickens’s Rhythms” (2013) to Jennifer Gribbles’s exploration of “Dickens’s Figurative Style” (2013).
My contribution to these discussions of Dickens’s style is to point out that the most exceptional of Dickens’s thematic wordplay is often directly related to his unique constructions of idiomatic embodiment—a dimension of Dickensian style that none of Tyler’s contributors mention. Dickens’s penchant for idioms involving the body also fits with what we know of his performative personality: he loved bodily performance as much as he loved phrasal virtuosity, and he especially delighted in combining the two. As John Bowen and Robert Patten (2006, 5) have suggested, bodily performance “structured [his] creative process itself, which for him sometimes involved a physical process of embodiment and acting-out, even before a mirror whose reflections of his impersonated characters he could study and transcribe.” Indeed, what we might call Dickens’s use of a bodily vernacular is sometimes hard to detect precisely because of the way it blends in so organically to wider issues of characterization or thematic plotting. His verbal bravura often resides in those moments that participate in the surrounding themes which they so unsuspectingly parallel—a participation so imbricated with the novel’s themes that it sometimes becomes a condition of its own invisibility. In Dombey, the text’s abiding concern for what I have been calling a kind of “right-hand” surrogacy acts in organic concert with the ways in which individual characters occupy positions “as deputy and proxy for some one else,” to use the novel’s own language (Dickens [1848] 2002, 60). Catherine Waters’s (1997, 56) listing of the various relationships suggests just how dominant this theme is in Dombey: “Polly Toodle acts as surrogate mother to Florence and Paul, Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle act as surrogate fathers to Walter and Florence respectively, Florence is a surrogate mother for Paul, Walter is a surrogate brother for Florence, Edith is a surrogate mother for Florence (for a time), Miss Tox becomes a surrogate aunt to the Toodle family.” Andrew Miller (2008, 164) casts Dombey’s “well-nigh structuralist penchant for substitution” in terms of a “particularly fluid interchange” of surrogate replacements.21
Another prominent and post-Dombeyan example of this organic process of idiom pertinence (and prevalence) occurs a few years later in Hard Times (1854) with the connection between Mrs. Sparsit’s “Coriolanian nose” and the inherent “nosiness” of her persona (Dickens [1854] 2003, 48). Not only does Dickens identify her nose over twenty times in this short novel, but more importantly for the process of idiomatic extension and expansion that I am analyzing, he has Josiah Bounderby repeatedly refer to Sparsit with a conspicuously nasal idiomaticity, such as when the Bully of humility talks of “hav[ing] the skin off her nose” because of his annoyance at the housekeeper’s tendency of “pok[ing] her officious nose into [his] family affairs” (251). This more refined and sustained ability to oscillate between the literal and the figurative in various narrative voices—what Peter Brooks (2005, 44) has aptly called Dickens’s “quicksilver agility of [his] narrator’s styles”—is certainly of a piece with how “right-hand manness” operates almost ten years earlier in Dombey. Thus, the scene at Leamington where the narrator “listens in” on and repeats Bagstock’s own repeated appellation of Carker as Dombey’s “right-hand man” is an as-yet-unremarked-upon instance of Dickens’s linguistic inventiveness that becomes interwoven with the novel’s larger themes in a process of idiom absorption. The idiom, once articulated and repeated, becomes absorbed into the text whole cloth in such a way that its literalization, abstraction, or even its explicit violation emerges as new agents for thematic innovation, “soak[ing] through and through” as Leo Spitzer (1948, 27) held, into “the atmosphere of the work.”
One of the principal ways that “right-hand manness” becomes absorbed into Dombey is paradoxically through the continued presence (in prose and illustration) of the character who has no right hand. The novel’s first monthly installment, at the start of October 1846, introduced readers to Captain Cuttle with an unequivocal “hook-first” description. We learn that he is “a former pilot, skipper, or privateersman … with a hook instead of a hand attached to his right wrist” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 55; emphasis mine). Here, the narrator’s important first description includes Cuttle’s most distinguishing feature. Moreover, this description parallels his first illustrated appearance (figure 5), where his right-hand hook appears almost levitating at the very center of the sketch—its centrality to his characterization mirroring its central location in the illustration.
The narrator also consistently emphasizes the specific placement of Cuttle’s hook on his right hand. To cite just a couple of instances that span the text, Cuttle “re-attache[s] the hook to his right wrist” after he had “screwed a knife into its wooden socket” during an early dinner scene (139, 138). Later, we are reminded that Cuttle cannot write with his (right) hook and so applies “his own left-handed signature” to a set of documents for Jack Bunsby (601).
None of this “handed” specificity would matter very much, of course, were it not for my argument that it works in close conjunction with how Dickens imagines idiomatic surrogacy in Dombey. Part of this conjunction also involves thinking about Cuttle’s appearance in an outsized share of the novel’s illustrations. He shows up in better than a quarter of the novel’s total illustrations—more than any other character besides Florence Dombey (Carker, the supposedly explicit “right-hand man,” appears in only four illustrations).22 This is significant in terms of the novel’s planning because Dickens worked closely with Hablôt K. Browne (“Phiz”) to ensure that the coordination of his prose and illustrations matched the spirit of his imaginative outlay. Doing so was no easy task, especially at the start of the novel when Dickens was writing from Lausanne and Browne was illustrating from London.23 Perhaps the most important point here is that the spirit of Captain Cuttle’s representation—both in illustration and in prose—is unilaterally one of warm and genial capability and almost always associated with the use of his right hook: the use of “his one hand and his hook with the greatest dexterity … overflow[s] with compassion and gentleness” (725). Because of this, I wish to consider Cuttle’s characterization not only in terms of an idiomatic interplay between the literal and the figurative but also in its association with important notions of how his surrogacy operates in the context of ability and disability. One of the central themes in Dombey revolves around the embodied relationship between physically abled but emotionally limited characters and those that are physically disabled but emotionally competent. Moreover, there is a crucial interrelationship between the wider idiomaticity of the “right-hand man” expression and the text’s concern for surrogate affiliations that become defined amid a backdrop of ability and disability, competence and incompetence.
Dombey and (Dis)ability
More than sixty years ago, Kathleen Tillotson was among the first critics to comment on the difference in Dickens’s large-scale planning and organization, which began with Dombey and Son’s overall and monthly-number plans. Although this view has now reached near total critical consensus, I return to Tillotson’s formulation because her specific choice of diction in presenting Dickens’s new approach is particularly germane for the line of inquiry that I am tracing in this section. She maintained that “with Dombey [Dickens] began to write novels founded on a theme, embodied in a relation between characters” (Tillotson 1956, 159; emphasis mine). Tillotson does not pursue material embodiment in her analysis, but the sense of an embodied relation between Mr. Dombey and Captain Cuttle is pivotal precisely because of what its stark inversion reveals about how the novel’s themes manifest themselves through the interplay between bodily and characterological dispositions (see Gitter 2004). For instance, if Dombey is the chief embodiment of selfish pride and emotional frigidity, Cuttle is the fullest embodiment of generous humility and tender care. But these thematic embodiments are also literal embodiments as the narrator insists again and again on the radical contrast between these two characters’ physical and dispositional representations. Where Dombey appears “hard, inflexible, unyielding” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 655), “stiff with starch and arrogance” (110), and “unbending [in] form” (469), Cuttle appears with “impenetrable equanimity” (259), with “a lively sense upon him” (265), with “a manner that [is] at once comfortable, easy, and expressive” (260).24
There is little question that Dickens, especially in his early fiction, either sentimentally objectifies or bluntly villainizes characters with disabilities. As Julia Miele Rodas (2006, 373) notes, though, “disability in Victorian fiction [also] indicates … a desire to experiment with places and roles.”25 The opposing descriptions of Dombey and Cuttle, like those cited above, might be a place where this sort of experimentation emerges in Dickens’s more mature work. Rodas (2004, 79–80) maintains that the disabled in such cases can “seem to exist, not apart from, but along a continuum with other ostensibly nondisabled characters.” In the general descriptions of Dombey and Cuttle, however, the continuum appears less homogenous than directly reversed. Dombey’s unfeeling bodily demeanor of inflexibility and stiffness, in comparison with Cuttle’s empathetic liveliness and comfort, complicates the question of what it means to be abled or disabled in the world of this novel. We know from Dickens’s letters that he was keenly interested in conflated notions of able- and disable-bodiedness elsewhere in Dombey. He wrote to Browne, for example, that Mrs. Skewton should be shown “shoved about in a Bath chair” by an assistant “even though nothing [is] the matter with her to prevent her from walking” (March 10, 1847). The spirit of Mrs. Skewton’s feigned disability matches almost exactly the narrator’s prose description of her meeting with Major Bagstock: “The beauty and the barouche had both passed away, but she still preserved the attitude, and for this reason expressly maintained the wheeled chair and the butting page: there being nothing whatever, except the attitude, to prevent her from walking” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 319).
Dickens extends (and reverses) this kind of able-bodied conflation most specifically to Dombey and Cuttle. Where Dombey’s bodily inclination is to coldness—bearing a “cold, hard armour of pride” (608), Cuttle’s is to warmth—offering a “manner of warm approval” to all he encounters (260). Perhaps Dickens’s most revealing and embodied juxtaposition of these opposing dispositions appropriately comes with the first narrated meeting between the two characters, which occurs when Cuttle goes to Brighton as Walter Gay’s “right-hand man” in an attempt to secure a loan from Dombey for the struggling Wooden Midshipman. Cuttle’s role as an effective “right-hand man” to Walter in this scene is thus paradoxically but powerfully underscored by his repeated “waving his hook” and “kiss[ing] his hook” throughout the negotiations (150, 155). The emphasis becomes most intensely focused on the actions of Cuttle’s hook and hand, though, once the loan is secured and preparations are made to leave: “[Cuttle] could not refrain from seizing [Dombey’s] right hand in his own solitary left, and while he held it open with his powerful fingers, bringing the hook down upon its palm in a transport of admiration. At this touch of warm feeling on cold iron, Mr Dombey shivered all over” (155).
At least a part of the effectiveness of this arresting handshake tableau is the way in which it formally, and physically, establishes the inverted relationship between what counts as ability and disability by reversing expectations. Cuttle’s “touch of warm feeling” emanates from the way he uses his left hand in tandem with his prosthetic hook, while Dombey “shiver[s] all over” because he senses only cold iron in the touch. Dombey does not yet possess the (cap)ability for “warm feeling” that characterizes the entirety of Cuttle’s physical and temperamental disposition from the start.
Writing about touch in the context of disability, Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (2002, 69; emphasis original) argue that “touch frustrates hierarchy” because it “has the power to disrupt devaluing fantasies of autonomy, superiority, and normalcy.” Dombey certainly wields fantasies of extreme autonomy and superiority over the one-handed sea captain whom he has just met, and these feelings culminate in his frustration that his daughter Florence—following “the earnestness of her heart”—attempts to leave this scene in the “low” company of Cuttle and Walter rather than stay with her father and the household servants: “Mr Dombey called her back, and made her stay where she was” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 155). As Dombey is emotionally incapacitated, and therefore inclined to coldness, he is incapable of registering the “earnestness of [his daughter’s] heart” and the “warm feeling” emanating from the captain’s entire disposition; instead, he sees and senses only the irregularity of Cuttle’s body and, as a result, feels only the “cold iron” of the prosthetic touch. However, Cuttle’s use of his prosthetic device as if it is endowed with the capabilities of a fully functioning hand importantly reflects his own sense of capability which, as we will see, forecasts his ability to continue acting as a far better “right-hand man” than the technically abled but emotionally deficient Carker with whom the idiomatic phrase originates.26
Lennard Davis (2012, x) has recently argued that the problem with “metamorphiz[ing] disability” is that it creates a process that is “a substitutive one in which you say something is something else”—where “the effect is to distract, to disengage from the original [disabled] subject.” Davis’s sense of “metaphorizing,” no doubt, obtains similarly to “idiomatizing” disability in the way that I am construing it here with Cuttle. Referring to someone as a “right-hand man”—and associating the idiom with a character not possessing a right hand—necessarily, and perhaps unfairly, abstracts meaning away from the actual body; it avoids, elides, or even erases “seeing the object as in itself it really is,” to use Davis’s terms (x). At times in Dombey, this is quite obviously the case. In the same scene from above where Dombey “shivers” at the sight and touch of Cuttle’s hook, for example, Miss Tox stumbles over how to describe Cuttle to Dombey just prior to their introductory handshake. She eventually settles on an all-too-familiar ableist description which reduces Cuttle to his physical “irregularity.” Unable to introduce Cuttle with a description that recognizes him beyond the visual horizon of his impairment, she stammers through her introduction and, finally, cannot refrain from making it the focal point of her announcement: “ ‘The gentleman with the …—Instrument,’ pursued Miss Tox, glancing at Captain Cuttle,’ ” as she introduces him to Dombey (Dickens [1848] 2002, 154; emphasis mine). Reactions such as Miss Tox’s to Cuttle’s prosthetic hook encourage the pitiable spectacles of readerly stare that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2002, 59) has attributed to the harmful visual rhetoric of nineteenth-century conceptions of bodily “irregularity.”27
Moreover, critics correctly note that Dickens has a tendency to use disability and disfigurement as a visual shorthand for varying levels of villainy, incompetence, or pity throughout his entire career (see Holmes 2004 and Janecheck 2015). Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Daniel Quilp, Mr. Dick, and Silas Wegg are just a sampling of the iconic characters Dickens has generated in this regard. And yet, as the representation of Cuttle’s capability may indicate, it is every bit as problematic to emphasize the “saintliness” of disabled characters who heroically manage to overcome their disabilities. Lennard Davis, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and others have pointed out how damaging “supercrip” narratives can be because their stereotypical focus on overcoming, heroism, and the extraordinary all too often “erases” impairment (see especially Davis 1995, 106 and Holmes 2004, 194). Other disability scholars have analyzed how these supercrip representations focus on individual attitude, work, and perseverance rather than on social barriers, making it seem as if all effects of disability can be erased if only one works hard enough (see Schalk 2016, 73). More specifically, Vivian Sobchak (2006, 24) has expressed concern about the overuse of the metaphor of prosthesis and its ramifications—namely, the forgetting of the material reality of prosthesis and the lived experience of those with prosthetic body parts.
I am in no position, nor do I desire for the purposes of this chapter, to adjudicate Cuttle’s supercrip status. Instead, I want to focus on how Cuttle, as the text’s most effective “right-hand man,” (literally and idiomatically) embodies how Dickens imagines his first planned novel’s central concern for the possibilities of surrogate care. My sense is that Cuttle’s very real disability, beyond functioning as a simple trope, metaphor, or idiomatic emblem, compounds his importance and complexity in framing the deepest themes of Dombey insofar as it is a novel about what it means to live ably—fully, generously—even if by surrogate relations—in a world where too many have gravely limiting emotional and moral deficiencies. Captain Cuttle is easily one of the most generous and decent characters in the cruel world of this novel, and it is worth considering further how he most often expresses his generosity and decency through the actions of his iron-hooked “hand.”28 This point deserves emphasis because during the nineteenth century, it was widely assumed that the physically disabled required rather than dispensed assistance. With Cuttle, Dickens simultaneously imagines and tests how alternate forms of surrogacy may be successfully achieved—how one may be a viable and genuine “right-hand man” even without possessing a right hand and, as we shall see, even without being a man.
Situating Victorian disability as a relational category, Holmes (2004, 29) argues that some novels “posit an emotional exchange system in which currents of feeling, stimulated by the presence of a corporeally ‘different’ body, connect people who are not disabled to people who are.” It is in this way that Captain Cuttle operates as a fulcrum of filial surrogacy—a kind of parental “right-hand man”—to those like Walter Gay and Florence Dombey who have lost the “blood” element of direct family relation.29 We witness this acutely in Cuttle’s deft preparation of meals for both of these surrogate children. Early in the novel, Cuttle prepares a dinner for Walter Gay consisting of “loin of mutton, porter, and some smoking hot potatoes, which he had cooked himself.” The narrator tells us matter-of-factly that “he unscrewed his hook at dinner-time, and screwed a knife into its wooden socket, instead, with which he had already begun to peel one of these potatoes for Walter” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 138). Cuttle’s resourcefulness reaches even greater heights while cooking for Florence at the Wooden Midshipman—her surrogate home—after she has been brutally disowned by her father and cast out of his house:
The Captain spread the cloth with great care, and was making some egg-sauce in a little saucepan: basting the fowl from time to time … as it turned and browned on a string before the fire. Having propped Florence up with cushions on the sofa … the Captain pursued his cooking with extraordinary skill, making hot gravy in a second little saucepan, boiling a handful of potatoes in a third, never forgetting the egg-sauce in the first, and making an impartial round of basting and stirring with the most useful of spoons every minute.… The dinner being at length quite ready, Captain Cuttle dished and served it up, with no less dexterity than he had cooked it.… He wheeled the table close upon Florence on the sofa, said grace, unscrewed his hook, screwed his fork into its place, and did the honours of the table. (737)
These passages remind the reader that Cuttle accomplishes an elaborate set of culinary tasks with one hand and a set of prosthetics, but they do so without isolating this aspect. The change from hook to fork occurs not in isolation but right alongside wheeling the meal closer to Florence, saying grace, and doing the honors of the table. This swift and matter-of-fact description endows Cuttle with a practicality, warmth, and general demeanor that focuses on, rather than erases or diminishes, his competencies. In other words, the narrator does not elide but, in fact, merely includes Cuttle’s prosthetics in his meal preparation for Walter and Florence as one aspect of his surrogate competency, which is both practical and emotional. This makes space for an idea that highlights the possibilities of an alternative relationship between physicality and inner character—one where the “regular” or “irregular” features of the body simply and without fanfare take their place alongside other aspects in the spectrum of identity.
Such a presentation nonetheless ironically situates Cuttle in striking contrast to the able-bodied characters like Dombey who need all manner of “right-hand men” or those operating as supposed “right-hand men,” like Carker, who have such egregious emotional and ethical shortcomings. In characteristically Dickensian wordplay, this thematic irony is also embedded in the referential rhetoric attached to his characters’ names, with which we know Dickens famously experimented (see Hardy 2016, 43). Thus, D-o-m-b-e-y—an anagram of “embody”—may be the “Head of the Firm,” but he has no heart and fails miserably as the “Head of the Home Department”;30 Captain “Cut-tle” may have a hand “cut off” from his body, but he manages his role as a “right-hand man” (to Florence, Solomon, Walter) far more competently than “Carker the [actual] Manager”—who, as we have seen, is supposed to be the novel’s explicit and official “right-hand man” to Dombey. According to Derek Attridge (1989, 193), in an effective and well-crafted pun “two similar sounding but distinct signifiers are brought together, and the surface relationship between them is invested with meaning through the inventiveness and rhetorical skill of the writer.” The “Cuttle/ cut-off” pun thus raises the possibility that Dickens conceived of his name not in terms of lack but rather in terms of overabundant competence. After all, a cuttlefish is an eight-limbed mollusk, and it is hard to fathom that this punning association would have been lost on Dickens.
Herbert Sussman and Gerhard Joseph (2004, 620), in “Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis,” come closest to my view of Cuttle’s amplified but unsensationalized capability when they assert that his hook is “both ‘iron’ and ‘hand’ … a synecdochic ‘helping hand,’ however mechanical.” It is worth recalling that the sense of a “helping hand” as Sussman and Joseph use it (whether synecdochic, metonymic, or metaphoric) is embedded in the OED’s definition of the idiomatic “right-hand man” that was beginning to take root just as Dickens was starting to compose the novel: “an indispensable helper to another.” But there was also a historical “prosthetic precedent” for Cuttle’s singular optimism and for his varied use of multiple appendages. After losing his right arm in the Battle of Vittoria (1813), Captain George Webb Derenzy published Enchiridion: or A Hand for the One-Handed (1822)—a text that was well circulated in England through the 1830s as the nation confronted waves of disabled veterans returning home from the Napoleonic Wars. Frederick Marryat, Dickens’s Royal Navy friend in Lausanne when he was beginning Dombey, owned a copy of Enchiridion, and the many corresponding prosthetic attachments shared between the real-life Derenzy and fictional Cuttle suggest that Dickens may have modeled the one on the other. Derenzy’s litany of missing hand attachments prefigure several of those used by Cuttle: a “regular” hook, boot hook, nail file, syringe, egg holders, penknife, quill holder, ruler, cardholder, nutcracker, knife, fork, and (one of Cuttle’s favorites) a toasting fork. The fictional Cuttle and the historical Derenzy also share similar aspects of personality. As Sue Zemka (2015, 4) has observed, Derenzy’s book is “a testimony to his adaptation.” Derenzy (1822, iv) states only once (and in no detail) in the opening dedication to his book that he lost most of his right arm at war, but his brief “confession of helplessness prefaces a manual replete with [a] description” of the multiple ways in which he successfully and without alarum uses his right limb (Zemka 2015, 3). Zemka maintains that Derenzy’s sanguine characterization of his use of the multiple attachments ensures that “the overall tone [of the book] is one of satisfaction with the can-do ingenuity of the devices” (3).
If anything, Dickens perhaps outdoes Derenzy with his frequent depictions—in both illustrations (figure 6) and prose—of Cuttle’s unconscious physical capability.
This particular illustration (figure 6) depicting Cuttle using his prosthesis as a toasting fork is preceded by the following prose description: “The Captain, without knowing what he did, had cut a slice of bread from the loaf, and put it on his hook (which was his usual toasting-fork), on which he now held it to the fire” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 748; emphasis mine). Cuttle reveals a similar degree of matter-of-fact substitution between his hand and his hook as he describes life at sea to Florence: “ ‘Think on it when the stormy nights is so pitch dark,’ said the Captain, solemnly holding up his hook, ‘as you can’t see your hand afore you, excepting when the wiwid lightning reveals the same’ ” (745). Cuttle even “put[s] his iron hook between his teeth” to, as he says, “ ‘bite his nails a bit’ ” when cogitating upon difficult situations (238). Comical though they may be, such descriptions of Cuttle’s prosthetic hook (or knife or fork) are decidedly not pitiable spectacles of readerly stare or objectification of the kind we saw associated with Miss Tox’s stammering reference to Cuttle as “the gentleman with the …—Instrument” (154). Instead, they focus on an unconscious and prosthetically symmetrical body that does not need or require “repair.”31
Insofar as Captain Cuttle displays an unconscious but practical competence—cheerfully “arrang[ing] his hair with his hook” (259), regularly “flourish[ing]” it to embellish his conversation (255), earnestly “wav[ing] it in token of welcome and encouragement” (482), and “kiss[ing]” it “with great elegance and gallantry” (155), nervously “bit[ing”] it instead of phantom fingernails (238)—the injury becomes depathologized and, consequently, begins to merge with what Tobin Siebers (2008, 8) calls an “ideology of ability.” If this is true, Cuttle’s eminently practical and even comfortable proficiency in all sorts of settings begins to align with disability studies’ seminal notion that impairment is a process dependent on the social (constructed) hierarchization of bodies rather than something inherent in the body itself (Garland-Thomson 1997, 7). And ultimately, my point is that this kind of portrayal serves as an alternate but important vector in the novel’s larger thematic paradigm: Cuttle’s surrogate ability to be a right-hand man to so many different people in the novel despite not having a right hand emphasizes a sense of competence that depends not on the binary limitations of ability and disability but rather on the way we experience our bodies as both features and extensions of our deeper selves.
That deeper, surrogate self for Cuttle involves his acting not just as a practical (food-preparing) “right-hand man” but also, importantly, as an emotional “right-hand man” in the world of Dombey. Indeed, we witness Cuttle’s deepest and most generously proficient self when he attends to the physically and emotionally scarred Florence at the Wooden Midshipman after she has been mercilessly cast out of her father’s house. Dickens’s description of Cuttle’s actions at this pivotal stage in the novel “overflo[w] with compassion and gentleness,” which underwrite his practical physical competence: “Finding [Florence] insensible … Captain Cuttle snatched from his breakfast-table, a basin of cold water, and sprinkled some upon her face” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 724). Even more impressive is how Cuttle merges the practical with the emotional so that his physical practicality and emotional care become indistinguishable. The narrator describes Cuttle’s use of “his one hand and his hook with the greatest dexterity” as he transforms the upper chamber of the Wooden Midshipman into a surrogate home of emotional refuge:
The Captain … converted the bed into a couch, by covering it all over with a clean white drapery. By a similar contrivance, the Captain converted the little dressing-table into a species of altar … that made a choice appearance. Having darkened the window, and straightened the pieces of carpet on the floor, the Captain surveyed these preparations with great delight, and descended to the little parlour again, to bring Florence to her bower … and the Captain carried her up out of hand, laid her down, and covered her with a great watch-coat. (728; emphasis mine)
The point is not that Cuttle performs all of these tasks with only one hand and his hook, though. Rather, it is that Dickens repeatedly emphasizes Cuttle’s loving and emotional ability to be so much more than a fragmented body.
This is significant because a legacy of Dombey criticism has treated Cuttle as fragmented, “fractured,” and fundamentally lacking many qualities, especially normative masculinity. Robert Newsom (1989, 210) considers whether Cuttle’s fractured body makes him a “model androgyne,” and Gillian Gane (1996) in “The Hat, the Hook, the Eyes, the Teeth: Captain Cuttle, Mr. Carker, and Literacy,” as her title suggests, analyzes prosthetic masculinity through the lens of reading proficiency, a capacity that Cuttle quite obviously lacks in comparison to Carker who can read and write in several languages. More recently, Rosemary Coleman (2014, 126–27; italics original), in “How Dombey and Son Thinks about Masculinities,” sees the text as laboratory “to solve the enigma of masculinity” and, in so doing, concludes that the novel “is unable to conceive of [even] … one whole man.” But if we think of Cuttle’s deep concern for Florence’s well-being as situated at the intersection of questions about gender and disability, it becomes possible to recognize how “disabled” men may successfully access alternative notions of masculinity and embodiment. For example, Russell Shuttleworth (2004, 175) identifies disability as an opportunity to expand a “masculine repertoire” that can more flexibly accommodate so-called feminine roles. Thomas Gerschick and Adam Miller (1995, 265) likewise interpret the fragmented male body as offering a unique chance for men to recraft their masculine identity “along the lines of their own abilities, perceptions, and strengths”—all of which help to inaugurate positive and diversified categories of disabled masculinities. It is hard to imagine Captain Cuttle as ever being less than an earnest, cheerful, and caring person, but it is possible that the loss of his hand at sea heightens, rather than diminishes, these qualities. So Dickens does not so much soften Cuttle’s disability with a fragmented feminization of it; he exalts it in a way related to what Holly Furneaux (2009, 214) has called “reparative masculinity.” Indeed, with Cuttle’s impairment, Dickens has created a most unexpected aberration: “the seamless fusion of hard metal and soft flesh … as the instrument of love and nurturing care” (Sussman and Joseph 2004, 620).
Dickens ([1848] 2002, 728; emphasis mine) acknowledges this prospect in the decidedly manual rhetoric he uses to describe how the one-handed “Captain carried [Florence] up out of hand, laid her down, and covered her with a great watch-coat” as he makes a new home for her at the Wooden Midshipman. Knowing what we do about Dickens’s unrivaled penchant for cross-phrase puns and aural syncopations, it also seems likely that Dickens aims to draw the reader’s attention in this crucial scene to the relationship between acts performed “out of hand” and Cuttle’s performance of these very same acts “without a hand.” Such a tight pun would certainly seem to qualify as one of Dickens’s “small moments of almost impossible insight and rightness” (Stewart 1974, xv) because, in Jonathan Culler’s (1985, 2) formulation, it reveals “unexpected connections, whose suggestiveness shimmers on the borders of concepts.”32 The idiomatic blending of the figurative with the literal which we witness here, where auricular wit manifests itself as the phonematic partaking in the semantic, will come to characterize the Dickensian imagination more and more definitively in later novels.33
Davis and others have long maintained that an accurate understanding of disability requires a recognition that seemingly neutral norms exist only in contrast to forms of deviance and disfiguration—in this case, of one-handedness. Just such a crucial component of contrast exists in Dombey, even if in reverse order. Whereas Dombey uses his ableism to strike his daughter with such force that “on her breast there was [a] darkening mark of an angry hand,” Captain Cuttle uses his prosthetic hook to minister to Florence’s pain and grief with the sensitivity and sympathy of genuine human touch (Dickens [1848] 2002, 736, 734). The brilliant Dickensian thematic irony is that the prideful Dombey requires a retinue of “right-hand men” (Carker, Morfin, Bagstock, Blimber, etc.) and “right-hand women” (Polly Toodle, Mrs. Skewton, Edith Granger, eventually Florence) while Cuttle, the character with no right hand, becomes a “right-hand man” for the novel’s most fellow-feeling characters. In this sense, Cuttle is a case study in contrast to Dombey, and the contrast may be observed most starkly in the discrepancy between their participation in and reliance on the idiomatic valences of “right-hand manness.” Dombey’s body, an “unbending form” of “cold, hard armour,” mirrors his emotional rigidity in a way that limits his able-bodiedness and requires other seemingly-abled characters to act as his appendages in a surrogate process of emotional and literal fragmentation (469, 608). The captain, with his “cut off” (Cut-tled) body, operates oppositely as a consolidator of the novel’s disparate characters, feelings, and plots. It is an important paradox that the physically fragmented Cuttle acts as a bodily (and emotional) consolidator in a novel that has traditionally been interpreted as being preoccupied with a “particular [masculine] anxiety about going to pieces or being torn to pieces,” as Carker is by the train in one of its most famous scenes (Newsom 1989, 204). But if we focus more on Cuttle, the particular coalescence of such opposing forces within his character provides a striking exemplar of Stewart’s (2001a, 137) general contention that “characters in Dickens appear as embodied rhetorical strategies.” Cuttle’s ability to act as a right-hand man is not just an embodied rhetorical strategy, however; he is the central figure and catalyst for an embodied and variously refracted thematic strategy which registers the novel’s deepest concerns for alternate forms of care and surrogacy.
Dombey’s “Right-Hand (Wo)men”
The thematic strategies that surround the idiomatic and literal senses of “right-hand manness” in Dombey also reverberate far beyond Captain Cuttle’s dynamic presence, and they, too, emerge from deviations, failed applications, or ironic violations of the original idiom. These wider reverberations help confirm what Douglas-Fairhurst (2006, xiii) has noted in a different context: “the contagiousness of [Dickens’s] vocabulary, the way in which [his] prose often takes up its own earlier terms.” In this vein, the earlier terms of Carker’s explicit role as Dombey’s “right-hand man” and Cuttle’s more successful capabilities as a genuine “right-hand man” contagiously redound to other characters and additional scenarios but crucially to ones that continue to highlight idiom’s generative relationship to the novel’s dominant thematics of surrogacy and substitution. Hence, the novel’s invocation of and preoccupation with “right-hand manness” is not restricted to the masculinist contexts of the military and commercial worlds despite the idiom’s almost exclusively gendered orientation within those nineteenth-century worlds. Just as the novel’s most adept “right-hand man” does not possess a right hand, attaining a level of competent surrogacy designated by the idiom does not require one to be a man. There are many important “right-hand women” in Dombey, and they, too, play pivotal roles in establishing the larger imaginative structure of the narrative. As Andrew Elfenbein (1995, 366) observes, “Dombey and Son is never more a business novel than when it concentrates on the home” where “the magic of analogy allows the good woman [Florence] to supplant the bad manager [Carker].”
Unfortunately, though, since Victorian women lived within a cultural system that granted them power only as auxiliary subordinates of men, the possibilities of what a “right-hand woman” might be—both in the wider world of mid-nineteenth-century Britain and within this novel—are considerably more vexed. Their gender alone already conferred many women “right hand” status in the sense of the idiom’s definition as an “indispensable helper [to a man].”34 Dickens himself certainly maintained this view. For example, he often referred to his sister-in-law, lifelong house manager, and unwavering adviser, Georgina Hogarth, as his “little right hand” (Dickens to W. H. Wills, October 21, 1855). But because of the spectacular failures of seemingly important men, “right hand” (Carker) and otherwise (Dombey Senior and Junior), an anxiety of feminine competence nonetheless pervades Dombey. This anxiety stems from the various ways in which women assume (in the singular), execute (in solidarity), and even refuse their status as traditionally inferior “right-hand women” in relation to men.
In fact, it is precisely the awareness of a decidedly competent female network of surrogacy and the accrual of significant and powerful “right-hand women” that fuels the elder Dombey’s anxious and growing indignation toward women as the plot unfolds. At the very outset of the novel, for instance, Dombey is thoroughly humiliated—and embittered with “angry sorrow”—that the future of his all-male firm is so entirely dependent on Polly Toodle’s surrogate function as a wet nurse to the newborn Paul:35 “That the life and progress on which he built such hopes, should be endangered in the outset by so mean a want; that Dombey and Son should be tottering for a nurse, was a sore humiliation. And yet in his pride and jealousy, he viewed with so much bitterness the thought of being dependent for the very first steps towards the accomplishment of his soul’s desire, on a hired serving-woman” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 27). In this early scene, the death of Mrs. Dombey imperils the sustenance necessary to sustain the family heir. Her premature death ensures that it is the woman’s breast, not her hand, that makes her an indispensable surrogate that no traditional “right-hand man” could fulfill at the outset of the novel.
There is also evidence that Mr. Dombey prefers his “right-hand women,” if forced by necessity to employ them in such stark dependence for the future of the firm, to be considered as nearly as possible “right-hand men.” We see this in the fact that Polly Toodle may only enter the Dombey household under the masculine pseudonym “Richards” to perform her surrogate function as the family’s wet nurse.36 Such a curious arrangement reflects the lengths to which Dombey will go to recast his humiliating dependence on women as an unfeeling business transaction wherein he may recuperate masculine dominance and control. “It is not at all in this bargain,” he assures the newly named Richards, “that you need become attached to my child, or that my child become attached to you. I don’t expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting” (28–29).
Jules Law (2010, 36) has emphasized how the “milk kinship that Dombey abhors becomes in fact the guiding principle of sociality for the remainder of the novel.”37 It does so because it forces Dombey to recognize his dependence on a kind of feminine capability that threatens his exclusively masculine view of the world. Law is correct that we witness this early in the novel in Dombey’s insistence on a thorough inspection of the domestic and the feminine: Miss Tox has to testify to the hygienic conditions of the Toodle household and Miss Chick must examine Polly, her children, her marriage certificate, and so forth—all steps that lead the narrator to comically but accurately refer to Dombey as “the beadle of our business and our bosoms” (71). Yet, in contrast, the “business” that the recreant, Carker, will assume receives not even the slightest of professional vetting.
These gendered assumptions sharpen, as Hilary Schor (1999, 58) notes, into “anxiety that women can do quite well without the firmness of Mr. Dombey” and the other normative genteel men connected to him in surrogate mercantile associations. Throughout the novel’s middle sections, there is a tragic lopsidedness in the relationship between Dombey’s unexamined acceptance of the baleful “management” activities of his “right-hand man,” Carker, in comparison to his deep and explicit mistrust of those who become “right-hand women” in his life. Where Dombey takes for granted the success of Carker’s management of the firm’s day-to-day activities, he appears “almost foaming” with anger at what he perceives to be the mismanagement of his household by his female staff (668). One particular outburst directed at Mrs. Pipchin is representative of Dombey’s escalating misogyny. “Do you call it managing this establishment, Madam,” an excoriating Dombey says, “to leave a person like this [Susan Nipper] at liberty to come and talk to me! A gentleman—in his own house—in his own room—assailed with the impertinencies of women servants!” (668; emphasis original). He is here referring to how Susan Nipper, acting in the capacity of a “right-hand woman” to Florence, takes it upon herself to berate her longtime employer for the “sinful” mistreatment of his daughter (668). Dombey’s eruption at Mrs. Pipchin is also likely affected by his indignation and utter disbelief that his second wife, Edith, has by this point in the plot bluntly refused to assume her expected position as a subservient “right hand woman” of her husband and their new domestic sphere. Dombey no doubt sees these relationships as simple questions of “management”: the “right-hand man,” Carker, is the manager of the firm while Edith’s “right-hand” role is supposed to be to manage the “home Department.” Instead, Edith is “imperious to all the house but [Florence]” and this flabbergasts the “Colossus of commerce” whose entire life had, until his second marriage, been spent in “magnificent supremacy” (553, 610).
Because he is accustomed to “duty and submission” everywhere, Dombey appears unproblematically reliant on the “right-hand men” in his life, and yet he exhibits a marked anger with and distrust of women acting in similar surrogate capacities who operate independent of his authority. This misogyny is heightened by Dombey’s selfish and mounting recognition that Edith Dombey acts unequivocally more as a “right-hand woman” to his daughter, Florence, than she does for him as a dutiful (submissively normative) Victorian wife. Here, as in the case of Susan Nipper’s defense of Florence, “right-hand” surrogacy built on feminine allegiance is unfathomable to Dombey. However, the strength, depth, and emotional connection between Florence and her stepmother is forged in contradistinction to the cold, proud aloofness that Edith maintains in the company of her new husband. While she maintains an “indomitable haughtiness of soul” toward her husband, Edith “entreat[s] [Florence] to love and trust her … and would have laid down life to shield [Florence] from wrong or harm” (462, 463). The love and trust between stepmother and stepdaughter is mutual. After Florence confides in Edith about her dire concern for the banished Walter Gay, Edith responds with an emotional ardency and warmth which surfaces only in her relationship with her stepdaughter. She assures the lonely and scorned Florence, “I will be your true friend always. I will cherish you, as much, if not as well as any one in this world. You may trust in me … with the whole confidence even of your pure heart” (551).
This compassionate interaction with Florence, and the feminine solidarity it reflects, becomes additionally conspicuous because it appears in the chapter immediately preceding the one in which Edith “disdain[fully] and defiant[ly]” spurns the entire collection of East India Company brass, its directors, and “chairmen of public companies” that Dombey automatically expects her to entertain with subservience at his “housewarming” party (555–56). The fact that Edith “receives [these businessmen] with proud coldness, [and] show[s] no interest or wish to please” infuriates Dombey, who believes that it is her wifely “duty … to have received [his] friends with a little more deference” (560, 564). Dombey becomes even more thoroughly nonplussed by her outspoken refusal of his direct and “sovereign command … to be deferred to and obeyed” (613). Surely, his disbelief is exacerbated by the “bare ceremony of reception” Edith maintains at the housewarming party in comparison to the “loving consideration” he sees her cultivating in the relationship with her stepdaughter (560). It is clear that Dombey senses and despises the growing bond between his new wife and his daughter, telling Carker in no uncertain terms that he “do[es] not approve of Mrs. Dombey’s behaviour towards [his] daughter” (647). These two aspects of Edith’s refractory imperiousness culminate in her early exit from Dombey’s housewarming party, as she abruptly terminates her participation in the event—“swe[eping] past [Dombey] with his daughter on her arm” (559). Since Edith is “imperious and proud to all the house but [her stepdaughter],” Dombey’s physical striking of Florence may also be seen as an expression—and extension—of his feckless resentment that he possesses so little power over a defiant woman who refuses to be the “right-hand woman” of his elaborately renovated domestic sphere. Rather than hazard any further direct encounters with “this rebellious woman” whom he senses is “powerful where he [is] powerless,” Dombey enlists Carker, his “second in command,” to be his “go-between” and “medium of communication” (711, 399, 681, 709).
Perhaps Edith Dombey’s most symbolic act of rebellion in her refusal to be a normative (“right-hand”) wife, though, comes from what she does literally to her left hand—the hand that Helena Michie’s (1987, 98) work has demonstrated to be a powerfully synechdocal representation of the female married heart and its sexual organs. At the moment she realizes that both Dombey and Carker desire to claim her hand, as it were, Edith “str[ikes] it on the marble chimney-shelf, so that, at one blow, it was bruised, and bled” (655). This act of “dark retaliation” is as brutal and ruthless as it is discreet and discerning, however (698). The maiming of her left hand symbolically breaks “the manacle that … fetter[s]” her married life to Dombey via her ring finger, but it also erases (or at least mitigates) the kiss Carker adulterously applies to her same left hand and, in so doing, simultaneously ensures her refusal to be neither a “right-hand wife” nor a “right-hand” mistress (699). In terms of the latter, Edith’s decision to damage, and hence disable, her ring-bearing hand is a gorgeously conceived preemptive maneuver. When Carker pruriently attempts to kiss her hand again, assuming that she has decided on a path of infidelity, it is prophylactically bandaged and gloved (684).
Edith’s endurance of such a violent self-inflicted wound also reveals the ways in which Carker overplays his own hand—both professionally and romantically. Instead of procuring what he thought he was (carnally) with the unsolicited kiss to Edith’s hand and the subsequent fleeing to Dijon, Carker gets a “resolute,” “steadfast,” and “undauntable” woman “with no more fear of him, than of a worm” (823). This is appropriately rendered, especially since Dickens extends the saurian characterization only a few pages later when the narrator tells us that Carker becomes “trodden down by the proud woman” and “spurned like any reptile” (829).38 Furthermore, the dramatic shift in gendered power is reinforced by the accompanying illustration (figure 7), which is sarcastically titled “Mr Carker in His Hour of Triumph.”
The shifting power in what Michael Steig has appropriately called “the theme of male-female conflict” in this illustration is multiply valenced: the erectly standing Edith offers her left hand to the sitting and slouched Carker while her right hand remains concealed behind her body (94).39 Even the blocked hand positioning in the illustration registers Edith’s refusal to be Carker’s “right-hand mistress,” though. This is at least in part because the right hands of the women whom we can see in the illustration—Judith slaying Holofernes in a painting above and a warring Amazon woman on horseback in a statuette below—are facing Carker’s open legs and poised in positions of fierce bellicosity. Although no one could ever (correctly) identify Dickens as a reliable advocate for feminine autonomy, these refusals of traditionally gendered, subservient “right-hand womanness” lend an idiomatic context to what Nancy Armstrong (2005, 89) and Barbara Hardy (2008, 102) have recently discussed as the “spectacularly scandalous” and “radically feminist” dimensions of Edith’s character.40
Dombey and Daughter
If Edith’s most powerful role in Dickens’s idiomatic imagination resides in her steadfast resistance to becoming a submissive “right-hand woman” for any male character, Florence’s development offers a striking contrast but one no less important in terms of the idiom’s centrality to the novel’s themes. Put simply, though for a myriad of reasons, Florence is the text’s most earnest and capable “right-hand woman”; and because of this, she matches Captain Cuttle, as she eventually transforms her surrogate, substitutional, and subordinated status to one of exceedingly competent and even lifesaving primacy. Florence assumes this kind “right-hand” capacity in relation to her brother early on when she takes up the young Paul’s studies adjacent to him at Doctor Blimber’s forcing school so that she might “track Paul’s footsteps through the thorny ways of learning” (187). The books, travel, and tutoring required for her to support Paul’s learning are certainly not easy to arrange, but Susan Nipper—whom we have already seen in the role of “right-hand woman” to Florence—“is not easily baffled in the enterprise” (187). Paradoxically, this feminine partnership is precisely what allows the young Paul to make “great progress” at Doctor Blimber’s (all-male) school: “Regularly … Florence was prepared to sit down with Paul on a Saturday night, and patiently assist him through so much as they could anticipate together, of his next week’s work” (189). We learn that “it was not long before she gained upon Paul’s heels, and caught and passed him” (187). Florence’s indispensable role in Paul’s education also importantly predicts the ways in which she will transcend her subservient “right-hand” status in relation to the novel’s other male characters.
It is in this sense that Florence importantly eclipses her status as a normative “right-hand woman” in her assertive romantic courtship of Walter Gay. Where her stepmother disables her hand in a prophylactic maneuver to retain agency, Florence uses hers to secure marriage to the man she desires. The narrator tells us that she “put[s] her trembling hand in [Walter’s]” as she proposes marriage to him in an extremely rare Victorian inversion of the traditional, heteronormative, gendered construction of female passivity that her own father so desperately prizes: “If you will take me for your wife, Walter,” she says while taking Walter’s hand, “I will love you dearly” (770). Most importantly, the union she initiates and the home it provides for the ruined and bankrupt Dombey makes Florence a remarkably forgiving and effective “right-hand woman” to her father after the novel’s explicit but depredating “right-hand man,” Carker, conspires to have the firm’s riches to “mel[t] away” (906). Elfenbein (1995, 378) correctly observes that “Carker is foiled by two women who prove better managers than he.” And since Elfenbein correctly uses the terms “manager,” “second-in-command,” and “surrogate” more or less interchangeably, it is hardly a stretch to say that Edith and Florence are better “right-hand women” than the novel’s definitively labeled “right-hand man.” By the late stage in the novel where this poetic irony comes to pass, Dombey’s cold inability to feel has transformed itself into a physical incapacity with grave tangible consequences. The loss of his business, his associates, his home, and all his belongings threatens to leave “the white-haired gentleman” etiolated and alone to perish in his old age.
But Florence transcends the idiom’s gendered and necessarily subservient connotations as she fulfills the place that each and every one of Dombey’s “right-hand men” could not by rescuing him from desuetude and immanent suicide, making him a part of her family. In doing so, she operates as what disability theorists call a “satellite” (Rodas 2004, 51). Florence “orbits” for the entire novel with a seemingly endless desire to rehabilitate her father’s disabled emotions. This is not to suggest that Florence’s orbiting makes her a perpetual caretaker for the disabled. Her rotation through important parts of the novel, as we have seen, benefits from Cuttle’s and Edith’s care and empathic rehabilitation when she needed it.41 The reception of such care affords Florence the endurance to maintain her own unflagging concern for her father’s emotional (and later, physical) deficiencies. After a painful duration that lasts most of the novel, this eventually pays off for both Dombey and daughter. Florence so effectively rehabilitates her father’s emotional incompetency and physical infirmity to the (almost miraculous) extent that by the novel’s final pages, “he hoards her in his heart,” “cannot bear to see a cloud upon her face,” and “cannot bear to see him sit apart” from her (Dickens [1848] 2002, 947). Dickens specifically anchors this rehabilitation in Dombey’s emerging ability to feel—that emotion he so conspicuously lacked in his physical interactions with others, as we saw reflected so early on in his introductory “handshake” with Cuttle. Note, for example, the narrator’s quintupled emphasis on Dombey’s new sense of physical and emotional feeling as he embraces his daughter for the first time in a brief paragraph 910 pages into the novel: “He felt her draw his arms about her neck; he felt her put her own round his; he felt her kisses on his face; he felt her wet cheek laid against his own; he felt—oh, how deeply!” (910; emphasis mine). Such a conversion to expansive feeling, though its swiftness has often been criticized as too pat, is consistent with disability theorists’ commitment to a relational ethics of limitation and care. Davis (2013, 275), for example, calls for understanding of all humans as disabled, as “partial, incomplete subjects whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence.” Similarly, Talia Schaffer (2021, 6) has emphasized what is at stake in acknowledging the realities of interdependence and the value of depending on others and being depended on in what she terms “communities of care”: the fluid “care dynamic is a complicated, flexible set of actions” where “the carer and cared-for roles slip around.” “For if ‘being human’ is defined as ‘that which needs help,’ ” Schaffer (2016, 167–68) writes, “then the disabled become the clearest type of humanness. They are not the exception; they are the exemplar.”
Dombey’s movement from “domineering coldness” to “deep affection”—from being humiliated by dependence (particularly dependence on women) to accepting it—helps him become fully human for the first time. His disabilities enable him to become a person who needs and appreciates care, and perhaps most crucially, one who can finally dispense it as well. This process is also one that other recent critics have identified as a situation uniquely fitted to plots featuring prominent disabilities. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000, 53) argue that “the concept of narrative prosthesis evolves out of [the following] specific recognition: a narrative issues to resolve or correct … a deviance marked as abnormal or improper in a social context.” Mitchell and Snyder further outline the schematic of the “prosthetic narrative structure” that could easily serve as a blueprint for Dombey:
First, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to the reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center stage of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story seeks to rehabilitate or fix the deviance in some manner, shape, or form. This fourth move toward the repair of deviance may involve an obliteration of the difference through a cure, [or] the rescue of the despised object from social censure. (53–54)
The irony, of course, is that it is Dombey—the seemingly able-bodied character—and not Cuttle—the one with the prosthetic hand—who most requires care, rehabilitation, and rescue from social censure in the end. It is Dombey toward which the plot moves for a “repair of [emotional] deviance” and an “obliteration of difference through a cure.” Meanwhile, far from requiring repair or cure of any kind, Cuttle proudly transcends the role of Solomon Gills’s “right-hand man” at the Wooden Midshipman as he becomes a full and equal partner in the newly named business, “GILLS AND CUTTLE” on Dombey’s final pages (Dickens [1848] 2002, 943).
The multiple collisions between what constitutes a “right-hand man” and a “right-hand woman,” what counts as ability and disability are, in this regard, part and parcel of how the novel imagines the importance of surrogate relationships. The narrator tells us at the relative outset that “Florence had tried so hard to be a substitute for the one small [Paul] Dombey, that her fortitude and perseverance might have almost won her a free right to bear the name herself” (187). Thus there is undeniably a sense of poetic justice linking Florence’s ascension as her father’s most genuine and capable “right-hand woman” and Miss Tox’s prescient idea after little Paul’s death “that Dombey and Son should be a Daughter after all!” (253). It is worth noting as well that Dickens may have had this in mind for Florence all along; he ends his first installment (chapter 4) with Walter Gay’s prescient toast: “Here’s to Dombey—and Son—and Daughter” (58).
There is also a paradoxically reversed but apposite reciprocity at work here in the novel’s conclusion where Dombey’s refocused filial pride and feeling actually makes him his daughter’s “right-hand man.” We learn that Dickens’s most prideful character’s “only pride is in his daughter and her husband. He has a silent, thoughtful, quiet manner, and is always with his daughter” (942–43). Andrew Miller (2008, 174) suggests that Florence’s child allows her to become “a model for Dombey to follow”: “she has learned what parental love is, and is now displaying for [her father] what he could never display for her.” This would help explain how Dombey’s new devotion extends to the proud, active relationship he takes in the lives of his grandchildren: he “talks” with them, “walks” with them, “attends” on them, and “watches” them “as if they were the object of his life” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 947). This kind of extended family cohesion, as those fortunate enough to have it know, is one of the finest examples of a practical and loving surrogacy where a grandparent may assume the status of a “right hand” to the parents.
Viewed from the perspective achieved at the novel’s close, then, even the realigned title predicted by Miss Tox and Walter Gay, Dombey and Daughter, contains a kind of embodied, filial, and (properly) “right-handed” surrogacy without subordination that would have been unthinkable at the outset of the story when Florence is ignored precisely because of her gender. Its full realization by the conclusion registers the extent to which Dickens’s idiomatic imagination pervades the ways in which this sprawling novel treats characterization, plot, theme, and meaning. The singular numerical use of the idiom “right-hand man” in only this novel—containing a prominent character with no right hand—reflects perhaps an early characterological and conceptual manifestation of Dickens’s imaginative planning. This is not a novel that simply deploys the idiom on multiple occasions. Instead, it explores what it means and does not mean to be a “right-hand man” at the very time when the phrase was entering the era’s popular lexicon. This exploration of the idiom throughout Dombey allows us to see in new ways how Dickens explores the interrelationships between substitution and service, pride and impairment, kindheartedness and competence.
The Idiomatic Beginning in Dombey’s Ending
It is crucial to emphasize my sense that the “right-hand man/woman” expression and all of its attendant collocations does not come prior to meaning, as a mere and fleeting idiomatic flourish in this first “planned” Dickens novel. I have argued that the idiom’s extreme rarity—both inside and outside of Dickens’s work—provides the provocation to look more closely at how the multiple associations that abide in the vernacular expression soak into the fabric of Dombey’s imaginative world in a process of idiom absorption. Raymond Williams (1970, 81, 82; emphasis original) identifies something of this process when he discusses how the “fictional world of the novelist is directed by an idea, or a complex of ideas … [that] are so deeply embodied that they are in effect … dissolved into a whole fictional world.” Following his logic, we see tangible evidence of this kind of dissolved absorption even at the very “end” of Dickens’s compositional process in Dombey. The cover design illustration (figure 8), which appeared on the first number in October 1846 and repeated through to the final installment in March 1848, allegorically portrays the “pride goeth before the fall” moral of the narrative.
Without explicitly giving the plot away, the original cover design illustration charts a line of prosperity and promise that runs upward (clockwise) from the left, through precariously balanced ledger books, to the top center where Mr. Dombey sits enthroned on an office chair mounted on an enormous cash box, and down through a tumbling house of cards on the right, finally resting on the slumped shoulders of a physically disabled Dombey who uses crutches to hold himself upright. As all novelists did in the process of moving from wrapper illustrations to the title pages in bound volume editions of their work, Dickens settled on a new cover page illustration when the novel was issued in book form by Bradbury and Evans in April 1848. And germane for my wider argument, he replaced it with a title page illustration (figure 9) that features Captain Cuttle pointing his hooked hand across a table at Rob the Grinder—a character who himself is a “right-hand man” to both Carker as a spy and to Cuttle when he takes over the Wooden Midshipman in the absence of Solomon Gills. The decision to have only Cuttle, of all the novel’s major characters, on this title page vignette may also reveal the growing prominence that Dickens saw Cuttle fulfilling as the novel developed. The only problem is that the illustration reveals an obvious mistake: Cuttle’s hook appears on his left hand.
There are several possible explanations for what has happened here. Most commentators, if they notice the issue at all, chalk it up to the complications related to the procedures of nineteenth-century book illustration, where artists created their work, hired engravers to etch the work onto copperplate quarto, which then appeared “reversed” from the original in the actual printed illustration. In this scenario, Phiz would have drawn the illustration “correctly” with the hook on Cuttle’s right hand (as it always appears in the text and other illustrations), showed it to Dickens, only to have the engraver, Robert Young, etch it into the copperplate incorrectly (reversed). We know for a fact that this kind of mistake sometimes caused errors to make it all the way through the proof stage and, in other illustrations in Dombey, even to the final printing. Incongruent details that appear in figure 3 (Miss Skewton in her wheelchair) reveal as much.
Note that in the top right portion of the illustration, there is a sign with a pointing finger that reads (correctly): “TO THE PUMP ROOM.” But in the top middle of the illustration, the sign above the hotel reads (incorrectly, reversed): “LETOH.” This means that multiple errors in orientation could occur even in a single illustration as the drawing went from the author’s directive to the artist’s rendition and finally to the engraver’s etching. This is the conclusion reached in 1884 by David Croal Thomson in the Life and Labours of Hablot Knight Browne, “Phiz” (233–35), in 1899 by Frederic Kitton in Dickens and His Illustrators (90–101), in 1906 by Alex Philip in the “Blunders of Dickens and His Illustrators” (294–96), and in 1980 by Sarah Solberg in “Dickens and Illustration: A Matter of Perspective” (128–37). Even so, once we enter the world of nineteenth-century engraved illustration, we are entering a hall of mirrors where the multiple levels of intentional (in)distinguishability become infinitely precarious. It still remains a possibility—however far-fetched—that there was no mistake: that Dickens thought so much of Cuttle as a “right-hand man” that he, perhaps, wanted to show the utter transformation of Cuttle in that role by giving him a “real” right hand in the end. None of these scenarios necessarily proves anything about my argument—nor do I desire any of them to do so. Thankfully, we will never know for certain what Dickens was thinking. But the central placement of Cuttle on the title page should provoke us to ask new questions about how and why Dickens made—consciously or not—the decisions he did in his first novel that showed a new and increased level of planning. As I have maintained throughout this chapter, I think it is unlikely that mere coincidence could explain Dickens’s first and only use of the “right-hand man” idiom in conjunction with the imaginative invention of a major character42 who has no right hand; he is just too fastidiously punning an artist for this to be the case. Beyond this, though, I do not make the facile claim that Dickens consciously intended or consciously designed every thematic instantiation of the idiom that I have analyzed simply because critics agree on Dombey’s status as his first “planned” novel. What is more likely the (aleatory) case is that Dickens began the imaginative work of the novel with an interest in how substitution, surrogacy, and proxy operate in business and domestic contexts at just the time when an idiomatic phrase that “embodied” these concepts was emerging in the English vernacular. Thus, his rare but sustained literal and figurative employment of it throughout the novel may be seen as both creatively opportunistic and structurally dynamic regardless of any specifically conscious or unconscious design. In the end, language endlessly frustrates intention because, as David Bromwich (2019, 1) has recently argued, “no conceptual category, no enforceable distinction can seal off language from its effects … whatever an author might have meant, the consequences of language are not controlled by the author.”43
One of the most illuminating recent literary biographers of Dickens, Rosemarie Bodenheimer (2007, 36), shrewdly claims that none of his fiction could be made “without a mysterious interplay between conscious and unconscious energies.” I agree and think that the “mysterious interplay” involving Dickens’s idiomatic energies in Dombey is far more interesting than any attempt to pin down exact areas or instances of linguistic intentionality. Perhaps the case that Harry Stone (1985, 191) discusses in relation to Dickens’s readers—that “hindsight [and] wisdom … comes only after we have been made privy to the grand design of the novel”—turns out (and why would it not?) to be true of the author/artist himself.44 Maybe only after the book’s completion was Dickens himself convinced of the extent to which “the grand design of the novel” involved a kind of right-handed surrogacy that Cuttle paradoxically but compellingly embodies better than any other character. These are creative circumstances that gladly cannot be solved definitively, and this chapter about the beginnings of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. I simply submit that one of the generative components of Dombey and Son involves the emerging idiomaticity of a newly circulating expression that caught Dickens’s attention because of its unique and expansive thematic elasticity. Just how generative and consequential this particular idiom is in Dombey must be evaluated alongside the ways Dickens uses other individual body idioms in the processes through which he imagines several of his major post-Dombeyan novels. It is likely that the best measure of the “mysterious interplay between conscious and unconscious energies” at work in the process by which I am arguing Dickens “began” to idiomatically imagine and compose his most sophisticated novels starting with Dombey may only be seen in retrospect, as Harry Stone suggests. But to look back and assess the right-handed idiomaticity of Dombey is only to begin a discussion of Dickens’s penchant for idiomatic inventiveness, not to end it. That is, we must start that retrospection by assessing how much Dickens relies on what I am calling his idiomatic imagination in generatively accretive ways with his other major novels, beginning with Dombey but continuing in the four subsequent years with David Copperfield (1849–50) and Bleak House (1852–53), which are the subjects of the next chapter.
1. The following seventeen works are the texts in which I searched and which, for the purposes of this book, I consider his “fictional oeuvre”: Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
2. These four instances represent the places where the idiom is explicit. It is directly implied in at least two other places in Dombey.
3. “right-hand man, n. 1,” http://
www (accessed July 24, 2016). There is also a powerful and lasting influence from the multiple “right hand” anthropomorphic phrasings in the Judeo-Christian tradition where Christ appears dextera domini, at the right hand of the Lord. For only few biblical examples, see Colossians 3:1, Romans 8:34, Hebrews 8:1 and 12:2, Acts 2:33, Matthew 22:64, Mark 16:19, and Luke 22:69. Dickens was no doubt aware of this biblical inflection, as he weaves it into the comic preposterousness of Dombey’s myopically selfish worldview presented in chapter 1: “Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A. D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei—and Son” (12)..oed .com /viewdictionary /entry /165885 4. Even so, no collection of texts, no matter how vast, can ever hope to represent anything close to the totality of social, linguistic, or literary history. See Gailey 2016 and Katherine Bode 2018.
5. I feel confident making this statement because the relative rarity of the idiom into the middle of the nineteenth century allowed me to “hand sift” the digital results analogically. My protocol was the following: I wrote a script to return all instances of the phrase “right-hand man” from 1733 to 1846 in the British Library Newspapers Digital Archive and the British Periodicals databases. I then manually sorted through the 324 returns from in the British Library Newspapers Digital Archive and the 532 returns from the British Periodicals database, sorting (and counting) each of the returns into military, religious, political, juridical, and commercial categories.
6. Dickens would have been aware of the idiom’s published usage no later than 1837, when an article he edited in Bentley’s Miscellany, “A Visit to the Madrigal Society,” used the phrase in its description of the society’s organization hierarchy (Hullah 1837, 466). The idiom also appears in an 1842 article in The Examiner—a weekly edited by John Forster, Dickens’s closest confidant and eventual biographer—wherein William Gladstone is referred to as Robert Peel’s “right-hand man.” See Hunt 1842, 753.
7. Counterintuitively, Dombey is the one early Dickens novel that Donald Hawes (1972) does not analyze in connection with the two authors’ personal and literary relationship.
8. The actual Marryat novels containing the idiom before Dombey are Peter Simple (1834), Rattlin the Reefer (1836), Joseph Rushbrook (1841), and Percival Keene (1842).
9. Criticism of the novel in the last twenty-five years has focused on this theme of surrogacy and substitution. Waters (1997, 56) correctly notes “the prominence given to surrogate and substitute relationships of various kinds in the novel.” “The prevalence of surrogate family relationships,” Waters asserts, “is truly remarkable” (56). Andrew Miller (2008, 164) traces Dickens’s “well-nigh structuralist penchant for substitution” in Dombey. Armstrong (2005, 90) explores “the figure of the go-between, who substitutes” for a myriad of Dombey’s characters. Law (2010, 35) reads Dombey’s “relay of substitutions” in terms of as “[breast]milk kinship.”
10. The influence of Marryat on Dickens as he began his new novel in Switzerland may also be seen in the choice of another important fictional character. Dickens gives his Dombey daughter the name of “Florence,” the same name as Marryat’s oldest and most precociously literary daughter, who was often among them at their gatherings in Lausanne during the mid-1840s. Florence Marryat went on to become a prolific novelist and her father’s biographer; she dedicated her novel Véronique (1869) to Dickens.
11. J. Hillis Miller (1958, 143) maintains that Dombey and Son has a “coherence which was entirely lacking in Pickwick Papers.” For just a partial list of others who contribute to this critical consensus, see Williams (1970, 221), Hardy (1970, 60) and (2008, 88), Stone (1987, 56–57), Schlicke (1999, 183), Philpotts (2014, 24), Stewart (2015, 161), Adams (2012, 113), Hartley (2016, 64), and Douglas-Fairhurst (2011, 272).
12. See the introduction for an analysis of what I call Dickens’s “idiomatic embryonic” as it surfaces sporadically in these early novels.
13. Hardy (2008, 79) has also referred to this phenomenon as “rhetorical miming.” Ingham’s “listening narrator” and Hardy’s “rhetorical miming” reflect Bakhtin’s (1981, 415–16; emphasis original) earlier analysis: “authorial language itself still remains a stylistic system of languages: large portions of this speech will take their style (directly, parodically, or ironically) from the languages of others, and this stylistic system is sprinkled with others’ words, words not enclosed in quotation marks, formally belonging to authorial speech but clearly distanced from the mouth of the author by ironic, parodic, or polemical or some other pre-existing ‘qualified’ intonation.”
14. I am indebted to one of Cornell University Press’s anonymous readers for this valuable suggestion.
15. The sole possible exception to these 224 instances could be the scene in Little Dorrit ([1855–57] 2003, 284) when Mr. Meagles arranges for Daniel Doyce and Arthur Clenham to form a joint business venture, saying that “each of you will be a right hand to the other.”
16. This larger corpus is comprised of a combination of the following databases: Chadwyck-Healey’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Nebraska Literary Lab.
17. The fact that the idiom appears very rarely in a corpus spanning one hundred years, of course, does not prove that it was actually rare at that time. Rather, it demonstrates that it is rarely present in the novel types which exist in that particular corpus. But it is a corpus that is far more representative of the expansive number of Victorian novels than we typically are asked to consider as evidence in a strictly “analogue” argument.
18. For a discussion of how data mining that “brings forth idiosyncratic uniqueness” still requires close contextual interpretation and analysis, see Rockwell and Sinclair 2016.
19. Dorothy Deering (1977, 12) has demonstrated how Household Words and All the Year Round contained a significantly larger portion of articles on the English language and its usage patterns than in Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the Cornhill, Bentley’s, and the Edinburgh Review.
20. This process operates on the threshold of what Bakhtin (1981, 363) calls “stylization” and “variation”: “Variation freely incorporates material from alien languages into contemporary topics, joins the stylized world with the world of contemporary consciousness, projects the stylized language into new scenarios, testing it in situations that would have been impossible for it on its own.”
21. Andrew Miller (2008, 164) writes, “Mr. Dombey imagines his son to be an extension of himself, and understands that, in the future, he will be replaced by his son in the family business.… But, in the event, the son dies and is replaced by Dombey’s daughter. Similarly, Dombey’s first wife in the novel, Fanny, is replaced by a second, Edith—who in turn replaces Dombey with the perfidious Mr. Carker. But in Carker’s company, Edith herself is only a replacement for the woman Carker long ago deserted, the outcast Alice.”
22. The theatergoing public similarly acknowledged Cuttle’s centrality to the novel. As Kreilkamp (2009, 101) points out, one of the more famous and long-running stage adaptations of the novel was John Brougham’s, which ran at the Burton Theater under the title not of Dombey and Son, but of Captain Cuttle.
23. For a more detailed account on this complicated process, see J. Cohen 1980, 90.
24. See Bourrier (2015), where she argues that disabled male characters in Victorian novels are often used to fill out the interiority of strong, taciturn male heroines, especially in cases where the disabled character is able to articulate feelings for the taciturn man of business.
25. According to Rodas (2004), it is in David Copperfield (1849–50) that Dickens begins to experiment with and to widen his views of disability.
26. The early work of Davis first historicized how concepts of “normalcy” in relation to “disability” are themselves constructions that arose out of and were confirmed by the radically changing industrial conditions of the mid-nineteenth century. Enforcing Normalcy (1995, 24) demonstrates how “the word ‘normal’ as ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differing from, the common type or standard, regular, usual’ only enter[ed] the English language around 1840.”
27. For Garland-Thomson’s book-length study of this phenomenon, see Staring: How We Look (2009).
28. Davis uses as his literary example a scene from Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) where coachman with “a prosthetic hook for an arm” maintains a bearing far different than Cuttle’s. The one-armed man exclaims, “ ‘This ain’t an easy world.…’Ard on ’osses, but dam’ sight ’arder on poor chaps like me’ ” (quoted in Davis 1995, 47).
29. Waters (1997, 56) maintains that “the ties of blood are shown to matter much less [in Dombey] than the affective bonds of the middle-class family, which have been naturalised as universal human values.”
30. For a general discussion of the intentionality of anagrams, see Ahl 1985.
31. These manual substitutions reveal Cuttle’s capacity to live in way that echoes Merleau-Ponty’s (1962, 234) phenomenological notion of motility, where objects attached to the body may transform into more capable extensions of the limbs themselves.
32. Culler is building on Roman Jakobson’s (1987, 60) analysis of “sound texture,” where “punlike, pseudo-etymological figures, by involving words similar in sound, stress their semantic affinity.”
33. As Jonathan Culler (1985, 9) further notes, “The most general claim for puns as the foundation of letters would doubtless come from focusing on what Roman Jakobson called the poetic function of language: the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, so that similarity becomes the constitutive device of the sequence.” Culler himself is no doubt referring to Jakobson’s famous reading of the word nevermore in Poe’s “The Raven.” “However great the variety of contextual meanings, the word nevermore, like any other word,” writes Jakobson (1987, 58–59; emphasis original), “retains the same general meaning through all its varied applications. The tension between this intrinsic unity and the diversity of contextual or situational meanings is the pivotal problem of the linguistic discipline labeled semantics, while the discipline termed phonemics is primarily concerned with the tension between identity and variation on the level of language.”
34. Think, for instance, of the nearly simultaneous scenario Brontë (2019, 439) describes at the end of Jane Eyre (1847) where Jane acts a traditionally construed “right hand woman” for Rochester: “Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union: perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very close; for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.” This is all the more interesting if we consider how Brontë must mean this idiomatically because it is Rochester’s left hand and arm that are maimed in the fire at Thornfield Hall.
35. Claire Tomalin (2011, 192) is certainly correct to think about this in terms of Dickens’s own life: “Reading the Polly Toodle chapter makes you wonder about the wet nurses who came to work for the Dickens family year after year, and what sort of conversations Dickens may have held with them.”
36. It is true that servants were often called by their surnames at this time (and in Dickens’s other novels). However, Dombey’s insistence on calling Polly by the invented and masculinized name “Richards” is considerably different than if Dickens had chosen to have Dombey call her by her actual surname, “Toodle.”
37. For an earlier treatment of the novel’s gendered binary oppositions in terms of the “nurturing female breast,” see Houston 1994, 90–122.
38. These reptilian characterizations of Carker are interesting as well for the way they reverse contemporary male representations of “slithering” female heroines. Think, for instance, of Thackeray’s infamous depiction of Becky Sharp in his concurrently running Vanity Fair ([1847–48] 1963, 617) as a “fiendish marine cannibal.” The best analysis of this phenomenon is still Auerbach 1982.
39. Steig (1978, 94) also says the following regarding this illustration: “Since much of the novel is devoted to Dombey’s attempt to crush his second wife’s spirit, our sympathies do tend to rest with Edith, but this illustration (along with subsequent plates) helps to state the theme of male-female conflict, with the woman a match for the man.” For a more detailed use of the biblical story of Judith slaying Holofernes, see Philpotts 2014, 470.
40. Hartley (2016, 55–57) has even more recently noted that although Dickens often fails to convincingly construct adult women, he sometimes “does give us complex female characters, often with elements of sexuality” with whom he fashions “heroine material” out of “potential victims.” See also Hager’s (2010, 91) argument that Edith Dombey’s spectacular defiance of and flight from her husband “makes available a feminist Dickens, or, at the very least, Dickensian heroine who looks more like a New Woman than an Angel in the House.”
41. Schaffer (2021, 15) identifies the ways in which Florence, “an iconic ‘angel in the house’ … in the heyday of the feminized ideal,” benefits from the care of many characters, both male and female.
42. I am aware that claiming Cuttle as a major character is a contested topic. Most recently, Clare Walker Gore (2021, 22; emphasis original) claims that “a crucial feature of Dickens’s minor characters” is that “they are all to some extent marginalised within the novels they enliven by their failure as realist characters, more or less disabled in narrative terms by their embodiment. We know upon meeting a minor character in Dickens that they are minor because their [disabled] bodies betray them as such.” This may be the case for other minor characters in Dickens, but it hardly applies to Cuttle. In the case of Cuttle, I am more inclined to think, like Alex Woloch (2003, 130) that a “Dickensian minor character can pull the narrative focus away from a more important character, reconfiguring the contours of the novel.”
43. Garrett Stewart (2015, 31) puts it similarly well in describing his own questions about authorial meaning as a young adult reading poetry: “What if I didn’t know what meaning held the poet in its slippery grip? Here I sensed … what I’ve made methodological since: that it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter ultimately, what the writer had in mind, because the only mind in which those thoughts are now to be had, in which they happen, is the reader’s own, guyed and guided by the filaments of a written syntax.”
44. Apropos of Dickens’s sometimes obliviousness to seemingly obvious (conscious) intentions, we should recall how he was apparently “much startled” when Forster pointed out that the initials of his eponymous character in David Copperfield (1849–50) were “but his own reversed.” “Why else,” he mused about his semiautobiographical novel, “should I so obstinately have kept to that name once it turned up?” (Forster 1892, 2:84).
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