Idiomatic Surrogacy and (Dis)Ability in Dombey and Son

Authors

Peter J. Capuano, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2022

Citation

Published in Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4, December 2022, pp. 462–487.

doi:10.1353/dqt.2022.0037

Comments

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Used by permission.

Abstract

To assert that Charles Dickens possessed a mastery of language unique among nineteenth-century novelists for its vernacular inventiveness is hardly controversial. The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms lists Dickens among its most cited sources (others include the Bible and Shakespeare). Dickens’s use of ordinary, unembellished, and what Anthony Trollope termed vulgarly “ungrammatical” lower-class language sets his novels apart in style and tone from those of his famous peers (249). William Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy and others – despite their many differences – generally composed their fiction in higher, more formal linguistic registers than Dickens. The difference with Dickens is most likely the result of a complex amalgamation of circumstance and sensibility, but his unusual upbringing is undoubtably a major factor. His early life experiences gave him access to a range of rhetorical speech that his peers simply did not possess. Working as a young boy at Warren’s Blacking Factory, regularly visiting his father at the Marshalsea Prison, and later, spending time as a law clerk, a Parliamentary stenographer, and a newspaper editor gave Dickens a broad spectrum of linguistic resources from which to build his fictional idiolect. Garrett Stewart captures this exceptional sense of rhetorical ingenuity in his assessment that “it often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying in wait for Dickens to inherit them – by marrying their riches to his storyteller’s instinct” (“Language” 136).

Given Dickens’s unparalleled command of the English vernacular, I would like to focus on how one idiomatic figuration that has so far escaped critical attention works to produce meaning in one particular novel: the idiomatic expression “right-hand man” in Dombey and Son (1846–48). I concede that this phrase may have escaped critical attention for good reason; it appears only six times in Dombey and Son – Dickens’s longest novel at 356,610 words. But unlike virtually every other idiom that turns up in Dickens’s work, “right-hand man” appears only these six times in Dombey and never again his fictional oeuvre (comprised of twenty-one texts).¹