Abstract

“Othellos, Dickenses, and Dombeys” situates Dickens’s Dombey and Son within the context of the novelist’s lifelong interest, indeed obsessive interest, in Shakespeare’s Othello, particularly the stage history of the play, and most particularly the play’s role as a source for popular Victorian burlesque. Seen in this light, the novel emerges as Dickens’s tortured meditation on the problem—a pressing one, apparently, for Victorian males—of how one might successfully dispatch one’s wife without at the same time becoming a black man.

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