Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away” in Dombey and Son

Abstract

This essay analyzes the relationship between empire and ecology in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48) in order to identify problems of representation that accompany the Victorian novel’s effort to grasp global systems, highlighting the methodological differences between ecological and symptomatic readings of the novel. Although Dombey’s failure to directly represent the “invisible regions” of empire problematizes its rhetoric of economic and domestic reform, this essay argues that its reliance upon the atmosphere and weather as mediating images foregrounds the imaginative structures necessary to understand the imperial underpinnings of domestic locales. The logic of the novel’s atmospheric and meteorological imagery shows the ways in which realism relies upon both metaphor and metonymy to represent systematic interconnection on a global scale.