Dombey and Son: “the golden water would be dancing on the wall”

1/ Dickens’s novels are always full of interesting images and unusual similes. 

“Spitfire seemed to be in the main a good-natured little body, although a disciple of that school of trainers of the young idea which holds that childhood, like money, must be shaken and rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright.” (ch.3) 

I’m just poking at Dombey and Son, and pointing at random passages I like. 

“It being a part of Mrs Pipchin’s system not to encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster, the moral of these lessons was usually of a violent and stunning character: the hero—a naughty boy—seldom, in the mildest catastrophe, being finished off anything less than a lion, or a bear.” (ch.8) 

2/ I don’t think Dombey and Son has expansive and elaborate motifs as we see in Bleak House or Little Dorrit—the main motif is the iciness of Mr Dombey—but sometimes Dickens does extend his metaphors.  

“… In fact, Doctor Blimber’s establishment was a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work. All the boys blew before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys, under the frostiest circumstances. Nature was of no consequence at all. No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other.” (ch.11) 

He extends it: 

“… one young gentleman, with a swollen nose and an excessively large head (the oldest of the ten who had “gone through” everything), suddenly left off blowing one day, and remained in the establishment a mere stalk.” (ibid.) 

And: 

“In short, however high and false the temperature at which the Doctor kept his hothouse, the owners of the plants were always ready to lend a helping hand at the bellows, and to stir the fire.” (ch.12) 

3/ Some of you might complain that the rest of this blog post is full of spoilers, though I would argue that it’s quite obvious from the very beginning, when Mr Dombey talks about his hopes and anticipations, that his Dombey and Son is going to lose the Son.

When little Paul is dying, he watches the light on the wall:

“When the sunbeams struck into his room through the rustling blinds, and quivered on the opposite wall like golden water, he knew that evening was coming on, and that the sky was red and beautiful. As the reflection died away, and a gloom went creeping up the wall, he watched it deepen, deepen, deepen, into night.” (ch.16) 

Dickens repeats the image:  

“Thus, the flush of the day, in its heat and light, would gradually decline; and again the golden water would be dancing on the wall.” (ibid.)

And repeats it: 

“How many times the golden water danced upon the wall; how many nights the dark, dark river rolled towards the sea in spite of him; Paul never counted, never sought to know. If their kindness, or his sense of it, could have increased, they were more kind, and he more grateful every day; but whether they were many days or few, appeared of little moment now, to the gentle boy.” (ibid.) 

Sadness pervades Dombey and Son. Dickens writes about the loneliness of Florence and Paul—their father doesn’t want a daughter and doesn’t see Florence, but he also doesn’t see Paul, because his vision of a son is of an adult son working in his firm in the future, not of a child—there are many moving passages in the book as the sister and brother cling to the nurse and to each other, having lost their mother and getting no affection from their father, and it’s especially moving when Florence loses the only remaining family member who loves her. 

As Mr Dombey gets shut up in his room after Paul’s death, not seeing Florence and not letting her reach him, she watches the light on the wall: 

“It was not very long before the golden water, dancing on the wall, in the old place, at the old serene time, had her calm eye fixed upon it as it ebbed away. It was not very long before that room again knew her, often; sitting there alone, as patient and as mild as when she had watched beside the little bed. When any sharp sense of its being empty smote upon her, she could kneel beside it, and pray GOD—it was the pouring out of her full heart—to let one angel love her and remember her.” (ch.18) 

That image of the light dancing is, in Florence’s mind, associated with little Paul and his last days, and it comes back later when she imagines herself dying and receiving some love for her father at last. 

“The golden water she remembered on the wall, appeared to Florence, in the light of such reflections, only as a current flowing on to rest, and to a region where the dear ones, gone before, were waiting, hand in hand; and often when she looked upon the darker river rippling at her feet, she thought with awful wonder, but not terror, of that river which her brother had so often said was bearing him away.” (ch.24)