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|2| D O M E S T I C V I O L E N C E A N D M I D D L E - C L A S S M A N L I N E S S Dombey and Son I   “Meditations in Monmouth Street” (Morning Chronicle,  October ), Charles Dickens turns his attention to the connection between manliness and domestic assault. Gazing at an array of secondhand men’s clothing in a shop—a boy’s suit, some corduroys and a round jacket stained with ink, a threadbare suit, a vulgar suit, a green coat with metal buttons, and a coarse common frock—he imagines the clothes as the possessions of one individual, the detritus of a life: “There was the man’s whole life written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us” (SB, ). From the schoolboy in the inky suit to the ruffian in the coarse frock, he reads the man’s moral deterioration in the clothing. Crucially, the man’s imagined moral descent is signaled by acts of domestic assault: Dickens pictures him hitting his mother with a “drunken blow” and striking his wife as she holds a “sickly infant, clamouring for bread” (SB, , ). Finally, Dickens imagines the mother dying in poverty and the family destitute, while the man (now a criminal) is transported and dies a lingering death. “Meditations in Monmouth Street,” then, depicts manly virtue eroding into laziness, drunkenness, domestic violence, and crime. The sketch thus deploys family violence as a key sign of lost manliness. As a Times editorial stated on  March , “a man [shows]  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. that he has no claim to consideration as a man by acts of brutal violence against a woman or a child” (d). While the sketch “Meditations in Monmouth Street” focuses on violence against women as a sign of lost manliness, Dickens’s other early writings reveal a nascent interest in the conscience of the male abuser. In Jack’s sobbing in “The Hospital Patient,” and Sikes’s haunting by Nancy in Oliver Twist, Dickens probes the possibility of the abuser’s redemption even as he celebrates female passivity. In Dickens’s early work these are still gestures; the central point of narrative interest remains the abused woman. In –, however, Dickens published Dombey and Son, his full anatomy of failed manliness. Here, as in the Monmouth Street sketch, domestic assault marks the nadir of masculine failure, in this case in Mr. Dombey’s descent from Victorian businessman and paterfamilias to lonely bankrupt. When Dombey’s wife leaves him (as he thinks) for his business manager, Mr. Carker, he fantasizes about “beating all trace of beauty out of [his wife’s] triumphant face with his bare hand” (DS, ). Instead, in his impotent rage, he strikes his daughter Florence in the central hall of their home, conflating the women in a symbolic assault on both of them. When he commits this assault on wife and child, his business, his home, and his very identity collapse. Through his inability to understand his obligations within the domestic sphere—in particular his duty to protect wife and child—the successful middle-class businessman falls into the role of the abuser, widely perceived by Victorians as that of the unmanly and unclassed. Paradoxically , then, even as Dombey and Son draws public attention to middle-class family violence, the text’s symbolic language—of slums, tenements, and class descent—still points to the identification of such violence with the working class. “Much More a Man’s Question” That Dickens should turn his attention in Dombey and Son to the connections between manliness and family violence points to a growing trend in the s and s for Victorians to see domestic assault as a man’s issue. Lewis Dillwyn, MP for Swansea, exemplified this trend when in  he introduced to the House of Commons a bill proposing flogging as punishment for wife abusers. He described wife assault as “not altogether a Dombey and Son |  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. [3.133.108.241] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10...

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