The Imitable Charles Dickens

For many critics, Charles Dickens’s use of the sea produces problematic effects, as solid features of his nautical scenes continually dissolve into literary cliché. By contrast, this chapter suggests that it is the mobile doubleness of the literary sea—at once unique and commonplace, credible and implausible—that appeals to Dickens. The discussion focuses on Dombey and Son and the Uncommercial Traveller essay ‘The Shipwreck’, tracing clichéd marine associations (including the sea as divine), figures (the midshipman), and set-pieces (the shipwreck). By involving the sea in his prose, Dickens often finds a means by which both his characters and the individuals he encounters as a journalist can be made to coexist in his imagination with their ideal or literary doubles.