43 - Domesticity

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.