The fact that Dombey is a wealthy man plays only a subordinate part in these accounts of his motive. There are many hints thrown out in the opening chapters of the book which lend colour to the idea that it is to be read as an attack upon a society, represented by Dombey, that is obsessed with money. But then, as the story develops, we find that a different theme occupies more and more the centre of the stage - we feel, like Miss Tox, that Dombey and Son is a daughter after all (D&S ch59 p941 & chl6 p298), and what we thought was to be a story about a commercial house, turns out to be a story of a father's failed relationship with his daughter. There is no direct link between these themes. We cannot say, for instance, that Dombey fails in his relationship with Florence because he is too obsessed with money, because he spends too much time in getting money, or because he sacrifices her to his business or uses her as a means to make money. There are some links, of course. His original failure to value Florence is due to his obsession with carrying on the firm. His conviction that he can buy people (Polly, Edith, Good Mrs Brown) plainly has much to do with his failure to develop natural human relationships,
and generally the position of dominance that his money has given him has engendered the sullen pride which is his undoing. The idea of rivalry, which recurs in his thoughts about Florence, is an obvious carry-over from the commercial world into private life. But despite these strong indirect connections, it is hard to feel that money is an essential ingredient in Dombey's failure to love his daughter.
We tend to think that the evil effect of money is primarily due to its corrupting influence as a motive: people go wrong because they want to get money. Dickens is unwilling to accept the motiveless evil of a villain such as Squeers or John Chester, and so invents financial motives for them. In Dombey & Son it is different. James Carker needs money to finance his vices, and when he makes a fortune (legally, as Morfin assures Harriet (D&S ch53 p843)) he plans to spend it on a life of luxury and ease. Vice and poverty, not the love of money itself, are the sources of the two criminal acts in the novel, John Carker's embezzlement and Mrs Brown's theft. Where economic wrongs are committed, they are committed against the House of Dombey, but if we consider the overall balance, the House of Dombey appears as the principal wrong-doer, which suggests that while the conventional money motive is present in the book, it is weak when compared with other sources of evil.
Edith, in the world's view and in her own, marries for money, but it is hard to see money as a motivating force. Indeed she seems to lack any motive beyond a desire to escape from an intolerable situation. It is economic dependence, that defines her situation and renders it intolerable, but this does not make it a motive that she strongly feels - not as Bella Wilfer will feel it in Our Mutual Friend. Dombey's wealth is her excuse, rather than her motive, for marriage, as though she feels, like the Veneerings' guest, that she 'may do anything lawful for money, but for no money - bosh!' (OMF IV 17 p891) Nor is her extravagance after her marriage a sign that she married in order to get the means to be extravagant. The intention behind her extravagance is rather to punish Dombey and show her indifference to him, and above all to punish herself. The 'most innocent allusion to the power of his riches degraded her anew, sunk her deeper in her own respect, and made the
blight and waste within her more complete' (D&S ch35 p584), but by her extravagance she enforces more and more the allusion to the power of his riches, and so degrades herself. She is also turning his money into a weapon against him - he is embarrassed and awkward amongst the 'voluptuous glitter' with which she has surrounded herself. (D&S ch40 p651)
The complex of aggression towards herself and towards Dombey, and its connection with both money and sex, can be seen if we follow what she does with her white arms in the course of their great argument:
... folding her white arms, sparkling with gold and gems, upon her swelling breast ... ... turning a bracelet round and round upon her arm; not winding it about with a light womanly touch, but pressing and dragging it over the smooth skin, until the white limb showed a bar of red.
... The hand that had so pressed the bracelet was laid heavily upon her breast... ... raising the hand she pressed upon her bosom, and heavily returning it ...
Throughout she had spoken in a low plain voice, that neither rose nor fell; ceasing, she dropped the hand with which she had enforced herself to be so passionless and distinct ...
... pointing with an imperious hand towards the door.
(D&S ch40 pp650-656)
The association of ideas here is taken a step further when we learn that for Edith, as for Paul, white arms are a symbol of death, beckoning 'in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away'. (D&S ch41 p673)
The evil Dombey does lies not in what he does for the sake of money, but in what he does with the money when he has it, and in what his money does to him. His money makes him proud and he uses it to sustain his pride. His pride has numerous strands. His exclusiveness is the most obvious - in Leavis's phrase 'the reinforced spirit of class, with its cold, brutal and extreme repudiation of what Lawrence calls "blood-togetherness"'.14 When coldness and money fail to keep intrusive humanity at bay, his pride turns to anger and, in the extreme case, to violence. There is a sort of strength in this pride, which Dickens is willing to appreciate. It 'shows well', Morfin says, in his behaviour towards his creditors.
(D&S ch58 p914) Dombey's despair and humiliation do not reduce him quite as far as Carker is reduced, to 'imbecile discomfiture and rage' (D&S ch55 p870) - a moral superiority demonstrated as the two men confront each other across the railway track.
Behind the arrogance of wealth and power are weaker aspects of Dombey's pride. He is utterly dependent on others, not only in ways that are merely human, as in his dependence on Polly, but also in ways that derive specifically from his exclusiveness. Above all it is Carker who has made himself an indispensable buffer between his master and rude reality. But Dombey also depends upon his sister, making his relationship with her a graceless parody of Paul and Florence: 'Louisa, my dear, arrange with Richards about money,' he says, much as Paul says, 'There are some creatures ... I forget their names, but Florence knows ...' (D&S ch2 p68 & chl2 p216)
If we want to see Dombey not just as a proud man, but as a proud man of a particular class, the most interesting element in his pride is his insecurity. Whereas a miser might bestow on money the passion that should be reserved for a beloved person, Dombey adopts towards the object of his human love the greedy, anxious possessiveness of the miser. (D&S ch2 p71) His absurd fear that Polly will swap her own baby for Paul arises from a misapprehension as to the nature of parental love, and a fear that she will adopt towards him the ethics of the market, where self-interest rules and one takes what advantage one can. This is precisely the attitude he demands that she should adopt when he tells her that her relationship to the family is to be 'a question of wages, altogether'. (D&S ch2 p68) The employer insists that his relationship with his employee is a bargain of wages for services and nothing more; in moments of nightmare like this he sees the full consequence of such a relationship, sees the need for constant vigilance, and falls back on the comfortable thought that the servant will not be 'wicked enough' to take unscrupulous advantage.
Dombey's insecurity is evident too in his recurrent thoughts of Florence as a rival: 'Did he see before him the successful rival of his son, in health and life? Did he look upon his own successful rival in that son's affection?' (D&S chl8 p328) Again he is introducing the mentality of the market-place into personal relationships. Polly, Walter, Florence, Polly's husband - he sees everyone as 'a bidder against him' setting up 'some claim or other to a share in his dead boy'. (D&Sch20 p353) Love is a scarce commodity, with only a finite number of shares available, and Dombey wants to corner the market.
At some points it seems as though Dombey represents the hard money-making men of the time, a class-warrior in ruthless pursuit of profit:
IToodle] was a strong, loose, round-shouldered, shuffling, shaggy fellow, on whom his clothes sat negligently: with a good deal of hair and whisker, deepened in its natural tint, perhaps by smoke and coal-dust: hard knotty hands: and a square forehead, as coarse in grain as the bark of an oak. A thorough contrast in all respects, to Mr Dombey, who was one of those close-shaved close-cut moneyed gentlemen who are glossy and crisp like new bank-notes, and who seem to be artificially braced and tightened as by the stimulating action of golden showerbaths.
(D&S ch2 p68)
There are, throughout the novel, enough references to class differences to keep alive the expectation that it is, like other novels of the 1840s, such as Sibyl, Mary Barton or
Shirley, a novel about social conflict, whose resolution will point to a reconciliation between the classes. And sure enough, at the end, there is a chastened Mr Dombey taking wine with his social inferiors. But, if that is what we expect from the novel, we can hardly fail to feel disappointed. For one thing, Dombey (unlike Miss Tox) is drinking not with the genuinely proletarian Toodles, but with Sol Gills and Captain Cuttle, occupants of a social never-never land. Furthermore Sol's investments have turned out well, Walter is doing very nicely in trade and Dombey himself is living on James Carker's money, which even the prostitute Alice Marwood would not degrade herself by touching. Considerations such as this weaken the effect of the final scene as a parable of social reconciliation.
Dickens does not convey any strong sense of Dombey as an effective money maker. Until the frenetic activity at the end, the only decisions connected with the firm that we see him take are dictated by personal considerations - the decisions to
lend money to Sol Gills and to send Walter to the West Indies. The effect of Paul's birth upon his business practice is noticed by his employees - it makes him keep a sharper eye on the books: whether this is merely commonplace prudence or debilitating obsessiveness, he is allowing personal considerations to determine his business practice. (D&S ch4 p99) When his personal affairs begin to absorb his interest, during his courtship of Edith, he becomes less attentive to business, giving ground to Carker which, one suspects, the confidential manager never relinquishes.
(D&S ch26 p452)
The golden showerbaths have not only made Dombey proud and sullen, but also left him pretty incompetent as a man of affairs. His talk is never of the family, always of the firm, but what does the firm mean to him? He is impatient for Paul to grow up - Blimber's forcing academy is 'the way indeed to be Dombey and Son, and have money'. (D&S chll p208) Here the clause and have money has the sound of an afterthought, as though for Dombey the firm is more important even than the ostensible reason for its existence, money-making. This is the reality of the golden shower in which Dombey has been drenched since childhood:
Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has never risen up upon the wings of a free mind - drooping and useless soon - to see her in her comprehensive truth!
(D&S ch47 p737)
Business, for Dombey, is not a rational pursuit of self-interest, but the acting out of an obsession, of his compulsion to 'be Dombey and Son', to fit himself to his 'one idea'.
His thoughts, on the birth of his long-awaited son, turn to his own father - not unnaturally, but there is something odd about the way he expresses it:
'... I wish his grandfather were alive this day! There is some inconvenience in the necessity of writing Junior,' said Mr Dombey, making a fictitious autograph on his knee; 'but it is merely of a private and personal complexion. It doesn't enter into the correspondence of the House. Its signature remains the same.' And again he said 'Dombey and Son,' in exactly the same tone as before.
What is behind this grotesque association of ideas? It shows Dombey's preoccupation with the forms of business practice, and it shows that he has a curious grasp of the details of his fantasy.15 Perhaps the suggestion is that Dombey, for so long unable to produce a son, has felt a nagging inadequacy in comparison with his father. My idea of him is of a man playing at being his own father. (Dombey's characteristic position is standing in front of the fire. We are told that Carker has copied it from his chief - and we might ask, whom did Dombey himself copy it from, if not from his father.) There is no clear justification for this idea in the text, but at least we can say that his whole reaction to the birth of his son, with his extraordinary indifference to the suffering and death of his wife, is the reaction not just of an arrogant and callous man, but of a mentally unbalanced man.