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  • The Companion to Dombey and Son by Trey Philpotts
  • Robert R. Garnett
Trey Philpotts. The Companion to Dombey and Son. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. Pp. xiv +575. $120.00; £75.00

Like the children of Dombey and Son’s philoprogenitive Mr. and Mrs. Perch, books on Dickens arrive steadily, with a spate since Dickens’s 2012 bicentennial. Few can be more welcome than the latest volume in The Dickens Companion series. Next to the (also ongoing) Pilgrim Letters project, the Companions series ranks as the most valuable new scholarly resource for Dickens scholarship.

Trey Philpotts’ Companion to Dombey and Son is particularly welcome for several reasons. The tenth volume to appear, it’s the first addition in a decade, since Philpotts’ own earlier contribution, The Companion to Little Dorrit (2004), and Dickens scholars can only hope that future Companions (to the five novels not yet “companioned”) arrive at shorter intervals (and that Trey Philpotts does not have to produce all of them).

There’s a good reason that these works appear at wide intervals. With over 500 pages of detailed and often extensive annotations, The Companion to Dombey and Son is not only an encyclopedia of mid-century Victorian culture, but also a tour of the baroque palace of Dickens’s mind, as well as a reminder that even palaces have lumber rooms. Samuel Johnson boasted that in compiling his great English dictionary, he had singlehandedly accomplished what it had taken forty members of the French Academy forty years to complete for their own language. In locating sources and analogues for thousands of Dombey references, allusions, parallels, sources and cultural context, Trey Philpotts has performed a nearly Johnsonian feat.

Since the series’ inception the Companions have grown longer and more comprehensive. The Companion to Dombey and Son is almost twice as long as the earlier Companions to Our Mutual Friend (1986) and Bleak House (1988). Perhaps this is due to the growing ambition of the volumes’ authors; and perhaps the rise of the worldwide web with its online texts and mountains (and dustheaps) of data and information has made it possible to expand the scope of the Companions. It may be, as well, that the internet has made it necessary for reference volumes like the Companions to justify themselves with deeper and more extensive annotation. Wikipedia can provide quick undergraduate-level glosses to many issues and allusions in Dickens, but the Companion to Dombey goes far deeper into such sources than anything [End Page 255] available on the internet. Computers may be able to defeat grandmasters at chess, but not yet at diligent and intelligent scholarship.

Roughly speaking, the Companion to Dombey provides two overlapping kinds of information. It is, first, a mine of information about mid-nineteenth century English conditions and culture, from the mean streets of London – with, for example, over twenty-five citations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor – to the latest in scientific (and pseudo-scientific) knowledge and technology: most famously, the revolutionary advent of the railroad. With profound and analogous revolutions in our own time – both technological and cultural – the England of the 1840s diminishes from our view like a scene rapidly receding through the wrong end of a telescope. Dickens, we may hope, is not for an age but for all time, but he does not float above his age; he was deeply, enthusiastically, and angrily immersed in it, and Philpotts helps us visit the material circumstances and intellectual climate in which he lived and from which he inhaled his assumptions. The Companion takes us into food and cookery, buildings, medicine, empire, decoration, transport, schools, and more.

This was the public world of Dickens. More idiosyncratic are allusions and references, often fragmentary, which take us into his private experience and reading. A good example is Captain Cuttle, initially a minor comic character who grew in Dickens’s fancy and sympathy until he comes to dominate large stretches of the later chapters. Cuttle’s strange nautical jargon – as obscure to us, probably, as to the baffled Mr. Toots – and his habit of mixing and muddling quotations must have presented a particular challenge to Philpotts, who has nonetheless managed...

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