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TREY PHILPOTTS, The Companion to dombey and Son. Liverpool university press, 2014. pp. xiv + 575. iSbn: 978-178138-127-4. £75.
Trey Philpotts has done it again. he has compiled an awesomely detailed 500-page 'companion' to a major Dickens novel. his formidably knowledgeable companion to Little Dorrit appeared in 2003, and as this reviewer noted at the time it made for absorbing reading from cover to cover. The same can be said for this companion to Dombey and Son. The research is meticulous. Philpotts catches those elusive echoes - of old nautical songs, street ballads, moral tracts etc -which are now pretty much out of earshot. Likewise he retrieves the fugitive literary and biblical allusions, the topical references (those Peruvian Mines, Russian trade fairs and English railways), and the contemporary public debates (on education, sanitary reform, suburban spread). The sprawling, noisy, colourful life of mid-nineteenth-century London and England spreads out in prolific, vivid detail in these pages. Philpotts draws on recondite sources with some startling revelations, as in his discussion of the origins of Mr Dombey himself. He finds one fascinating partial parallel in the pen portrait of 'The Capitalist' in Heads of the People (1841). According to this, the generic English capitalist is a 'new species', proud and reserved, and with 'an exaggerated notion of the power and capacity of wealth', living in an aristocratic house in the West End, and 'is often found in a state of...