"You must not distress yourself, my dear!" — sixth illustration by W. L. Sheppard for Dickens's "Dombey and Son" (American Household Edition, 1873)

"You must not distress yourself, my dear!" by W. L. Sheppard. Sixth illustration for Dickens's Dombey and Son in the American Household Edition (1873), Chapter V, "Paul's Progress and Christening," p. 27. 9.3 x 13.5 cm (3 ⅝ by 5 ⅜ inches) framed. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Passage Illustrated: Miss Tox and Mrs. Chick are confidants — for the moment

“I quite fret and worry myself about her,” said Mrs. Chick, with a sigh of modest merit. “I really don’t see what is to become of her when she grows older, or what position she is to take. She don’t gain on her Papa in the least. How can one expect she should, when she is so very unlike a Dombey?”

Miss Tox looked as if she saw no way out of such a cogent argument as that, at all.

“And the child, you see,” said Mrs. Chick, in deep confidence, “has poor dear Fanny’s nature. She’ll never make an effort in after-life, I’ll venture to say. Never! She’ll never wind and twine herself about her Papa’s heart like —”

“Like the ivy?” suggested Miss Tox.

“Like the ivy,” Mrs Chick assented. “Never! She’ll never glide and nestle into the bosom of her Papa’s affections like — the —”

“Startled fawn?” suggested Miss Tox.

“Like the startled fawn,” said Mrs Chick. “Never! Poor Fanny! Yet, how I loved her!”

“You must not distress yourself, my dear,” said Miss Tox, in a soothing voice. “Now really! You have too much feeling.”

“We have all our faults,” said Mrs. Chick, weeping and shaking her head. “I daresay we have. I never was blind to hers. I never said I was. Far from it. Yet how I loved her!” [Chapter V, "Paul's Progress and Christening," p. 26]

Commentary:"Miss Tox elevated her eyebrows, and was again full of commiseration."

To begin with, Fanny Dombey, the merchant-prince's first wife and Mrs. Chick's sister-in-law, has recently died after giving birth to a son and heir to the Dombey business and fortune. The obsessive Mrs. Chick seems almost cast blame on Dombey's daughter, Florence, for the sweet-natured and passive Fanny's dying and leaving her brother a widower. In her mind, Florence is no true Dombey because she has inherited her mother's soft, yielding disposition rather than her father's hard-headed business acumen. "Yet how I loved her!" seems a painfully ironic summation to this wholly negative assessment of Fanny and daughter.

The sympathetic interlocutor, the old maid Miss Lucretia Tox, has set her cap on the eligible widower. She seeks to ingratiate herself with Dombey and his sister by efficiently and discretely managing domestic affairs. However, her plans go awry when she and Mrs. Chick have an inevitable falling out. Dickens has already provided the following description of Miss Tox which Sheppard effectively realizes:

The lady thus specially presented, was a long lean figure, wearing such a faded air that she seemed not to have been made in what linen-drapers call ‘fast colours’ originally, and to have, by little and little, washed out.

Phiz's original illustration for this chapter: The Christening Party, Ch. V (November 1846)

Related Material, including Other Illustrated Editions of Dombey and Son (1846-1924)

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the personwho scanned it and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. L. Sheppard. The Household Edition. 18 vols. New York: Harper & Co., 1873.

_______. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1862. Vols. 1-4.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.

_______. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard [62 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880. Vol. II.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

__________. Dombey and Son> Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow, 1900, rpt. 1934. 2 vols. in one.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 9.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

"Dombey and Son — Sixty-two Illustrations by Fred Barnard." Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, Being Eight Hundred and Sixty-six Drawings by Fred Barnard, Gordon Thomson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), J. McL. Ralston, J. Mahoney, H. French, Charles Green, E. G. Dalziel, A. B. Frost, F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

Created 14 January 2022