How a Slave Was Made a Woman: Dombey and Son and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

In 1845, the year before Dickens begins Dombey and Son, the fugitive slave Frederick Douglass arrived in Ireland and Britain where he became a speaking and publishing sensation. Designed to advance the cause of abolition, Douglass's page-turning Narrative employs a range of rhetorical modes from irony to pathos and uses sentimental and sensational scenes to expose slavery's horrors. This article considers the influence of Douglass's autobiography on Dombey and Son, arguing that Dickens invokes it in the plotting and characterization of his novel. Read through the lens of Douglass's text, the troubling gender and family dynamics of Dickens's novel come into different focus. By considering how Dickens reimagines Douglass's Narrative to tell a woman's story, this article offers a radical reassessment of Dombey and Son that includes Dickens's conception of Edith and her fate.