"Let Him Remember it in that room, years to come" — Thirty-ninth illustration for "Dombey and Son" (April 1848) by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)

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Let Him Remember it in that room, years to come

Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)

13.5 cm by 9.5 com

Dickens's Dombey and Son, Chapter 59, facing 481 (vol. II)

Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage illustrated: An Effusion on the Value of Memory and Remembering

And the ruined man. How does he pass the hours, alone?

"Let him remember it in that room, years to come!" He did remember it. It was heavy on his mind now; heavier than all the rest.

‘Let him remember it in that room, years to come! The rain that falls upon the roof, the wind that mourns outside the door, may have foreknowledge in their melancholy sound. Let him remember it in that room, years to come!"

He did remember it. In the miserable night he thought of it; in the dreary day, the wretched dawn, the ghostly, memory-haunted twilight. He did remember it. In agony, in sorrow, in remorse, in despair! ‘Papa! Papa! Speak to me, dear Papa!’ He heard the words again, and saw the face. He saw it fall upon the trembling hands, and heard the one prolonged low cry go upward.

He was fallen, never to be raised up any more. For the night of his worldly ruin there was no to-morrow’s sun; for the stain of his domestic shame there was no purification; nothing, thank Heaven, could bring his dead child back to life. But that which he might have made so different in all the Past — which might have made the Past itself so different, though this he hardly thought of now — that which was his own work, that which he could so easily have wrought into a blessing, and had set himself so steadily for years to form into a curse: that was the sharp grief of his soul. [Chapter LIX, "Retribution," 480-81, vol. II]

An Analysis by Michael Steig in Dickens and Phiz

Carker's actual death is reserved for the allegorical context of the frontispiece, and we are left with two more plates which bear significantly on the Edith-Dombey-Carker situation and the theme of unhappy marriage and female predation. Let him remember it in that room, years to come (ch. 59) depicts the moment before Florence's reconciliation with her father, but in a way it illustrates much more; it is probably not accidental that the particular passage in which Florence comes into the room occurs not at page 595, where the illustration is placed in the first bound edition, but four pages later. In between, the text dwells upon Dombey's thoughts, centered around the sentence which forms the plate's title, and brings him almost to the point of suicide just as Florence enters. The details of the illustration emblematically encompass much of this extended indirect monologue. Society (including the worldly Major), which has abandoned Dombey, is represented in the rolled up map of the world and the disapproving bust of Mr. Pitt. The screen shows three images which contrast with Dombey's condition: children at play, a pastoral scene of a young man playing the flute to a young woman, and a rather undefined scene outside a church, possibly a wedding. If the latter is correct, the three panels embody the sequence of a happy boy-girl relationship from childhood through courtship and marriage. The candle on Dombey's dressing table, nearly burnt down, is a traditional image suggesting Dombey's approaching death. In this context, Florence's appearance with sunlight behind her perhaps should not be taken quite literally, for it gives one the impression that she is a visionary apparition rather than a real person. And so it must strike anyone reading the novel for the first time in a bound volume (assuming the illustration is placed as in the original bound edition), since such a reader will not know for four pages whether Florence actually appears or this is her ghostly image. [Steig, 107-8]

Related Material, including Other Illustrated Editions of Dombey and Son

Dombey and Son (homepage)
O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 1, 1862)
O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 2, 1862)
O. C. Darley's Frontispiece in the New York edition (Vol. 3, 1862)
Sol Eytinge, Junior's 16 Diamond Edition Illustrations (1867)
Fred Barnard's 61 illustrations for the Household Edition (1877)
Groome's illustrations of the Collins Pocket Edition of Dombey and Son (1900, rpt. 1934)
Kyd's five Player's Cigarette Cards, 1910
Harry Furniss's illustrations for the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910)
Harold Copping's Captain Cuttle's Bright Idea, 1924.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The London Edition, Volume 4. London: Caxton & Ballantyne, 1901.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

_________. Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. IX.

Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 16: Dombey and Son."The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition.Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17, 294-337.

Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London (1899) edition.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Ch. 12, "Work, Work, Work." Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004, pp. 128-160.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 86-112.

Vann, J. Don. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, October 1846-April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 67-68.

Created 8 August 2015

Last modified 21 January 2021