Idiomatic Surrogacy and (Dis)Ability in Dombey and Son

Abstract:This article interprets Dombey and Son using several methodological practices not typically combined in Dickens scholarship: digital computation, disability studies, and historicist close reading. It first contextualizes Dickens's usage of the idiomatic expression "right-hand man" six times in only this one of his fictional works. Such usage is all the more exceptional because Dombey is the only Dickensian novel in which a major character–Captain Cuttle–conspicuously has no right hand; he has a hook, along with various other prosthetics. At this article's core, though, is a literary-historical and cultural argument–not a statistical one. My central contention is that Cuttle's obvious physical impairment paradoxically highlights the multiple meanings cohering around "right-hand manness," but, moreover, that such flexible idiomaticity informs the ways in which Dombey and Son explores its deepest and most interrelated themes of succession and surrogacy, pride and pathos, commerce and commitment, ability and disability.