Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Notes on references
- PART I LIFE AND AFTERLIFE
- PART II SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 12 Popular culture
- 13 The rise of celebrity culture
- 14 The newspaper and periodical market
- 15 Authorship and the professional writer
- 16 The theatre
- 17 Melodrama
- 18 The Bildungsroman
- 19 Visual culture
- 20 The historical novel
- 21 The illustrated novel
- 22 Christmas
- 23 Childhood
- 24 Work
- 25 Europe
- 26 The Victorians and America
- 27 Educating the Victorians
- 28 London
- 29 Politics
- 30 Political economy
- 31 The aristocracy
- 32 The middle classes
- 33 Urban migration and mobility
- 34 Financial markets and the banking system
- 35 Empires and colonies
- 36 Race
- 37 Crime
- 38 The law
- 39 Religion
- 40 Science
- 41 Transport
- 42 Illness, disease and social hygiene
- 43 Domesticity
- 44 Sexuality
- 45 Gender identities
- Further reading
- Index
43 - Domesticity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Notes on references
- PART I LIFE AND AFTERLIFE
- PART II SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 12 Popular culture
- 13 The rise of celebrity culture
- 14 The newspaper and periodical market
- 15 Authorship and the professional writer
- 16 The theatre
- 17 Melodrama
- 18 The Bildungsroman
- 19 Visual culture
- 20 The historical novel
- 21 The illustrated novel
- 22 Christmas
- 23 Childhood
- 24 Work
- 25 Europe
- 26 The Victorians and America
- 27 Educating the Victorians
- 28 London
- 29 Politics
- 30 Political economy
- 31 The aristocracy
- 32 The middle classes
- 33 Urban migration and mobility
- 34 Financial markets and the banking system
- 35 Empires and colonies
- 36 Race
- 37 Crime
- 38 The law
- 39 Religion
- 40 Science
- 41 Transport
- 42 Illness, disease and social hygiene
- 43 Domesticity
- 44 Sexuality
- 45 Gender identities
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Love of home life assumed unprecedented importance for the Victorians, and Dickens was hailed by his first reviewers as one of its earliest proponents. His domestic ideal can be seen in Dombey and Son, in the description of the house across the road from Mr Dombey's chilly mansion occupied by ‘rosy children’, who eagerly await their father's return from work, and who romp with him ‘or group themselves at his knee, a very nosegay of little faces, while he seemed to tell them a story’ (ch. 18). Although the family is sadly motherless, the hallmarks of the happy home are nevertheless evident as her absence is filled by the cheerful and orderly housekeeping of her eldest daughter, who ‘could be as staid and pleasantly demure with her little book or work-box, as a woman’, making her father's ‘tea for him – happy little housekeeper she was then!’ (ch. 18). Closely watching this domestic tableau from her lonely window across the street, Florence Dombey's longing gaze is framed by the imaginative movement inwards, from exterior to interior perspective, that typifies Dickens's vision of the bright, cosy home sequestered from the chill outdoors. Elsewhere in his writing – in the metropolitan Sketches of ‘Boz’ or the wanderings of Little Dorrit, locked out of the Marshalsea with Maggy, or the night walks of the ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ – the movement inwards is projected from the street, a perspective that was vital to Dickens's imagination.
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- Information
- Charles Dickens in Context , pp. 350 - 357Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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