Emblems and Ecphrases in Dombey and Son (Critical Essay‪)‬

The pictorial element in Dombey and Son resolves into issues of "how" and "what," the "how" centering on the deployment and adaptation of specific pictorial modes, and the "what" on the (largely notional) pictures hung at various points of the narrative. These pictures are themselves the fruits of "how," since they can be traced back to Hogarth's "novelization" of the emblem. In contrast to George Eliot, who in Middlemarch concretizes her text with allusions to specific painters from Raphael to Berghem, and in contrast even to Fielding, who directly invokes Hogarth in Tom Jones, Dickens prefers to traffic in generalities. Regina Oost advances a charitably thematic construction of these blanks in her reading of Bleak House: The anonymity of all the portrait painters in this novel has the effect of calling attention to the sitter rather than to the imaginative or technical abilities of the artist: artistic skill is valued insofar as it produces a recognizable portrait, and the artist becomes an instrument by which to record a likeness. (Oost 151)