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Paul spent the greater part of the day at the beach with Florence as his only companion
Clara M. Burd
1929
Chromolithograph
16.6 cm by 11.5 cm (6 ½ by 4 ½ inches) framed
Elizabeth Lodor Merchant's Dickens' Stories About Children, "Paul and Florence Dombey," facing p. 811 (See page 201.).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham.
. . . he went down to the margin of the ocean every day. There he would sit or lie in his carriage for hours together; never so distressed as by the company of children — Florence alone excepted, always. [Chapter 10, "Paul and Florence Dombey," p. 201]
In the original Phiz illustrations for Dombey and Son, Little Paul, the long-awaited male child meant to carry on the powerful firm of "Dombey and Son," behaves rather oddly, and is judged old-fashioned and outdated, yet precociously adult — able, before his premature death, to understand the mystery of the waves and, beyond that, of the entire cosmos. However, in scrutinizing Burd's treatment of a markedly adolescent Paul and his sibling the reader has little sense of this spiritually philosophical child who is the subject of Harrold Copping's Little Paul Dombey and Florence on the Seashore — this was the headpiece illustration for "List of Coloured Plates" in Mary Angela Dickens's Children's Stories from Dickens in the Raphael Tuck edition (1893), which Burd may very well have seen. Significantly, too, Burd has omitted Paul's elderly medical attendant, whom Merchant describes.
Left: W. H. C. Groome's derivative study of Paul Dombey and his sister on the beach at Brighton: She hurriedly put her work aside. (1900). Centre: W. L. Sheppard's version of this same scene in the American Household Edition: "The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?" (1873). Right: Paul's only escape from the dreary halls of the child-minder's Brighton establishment is accompanying his sister to the beach, as depicted by Fred Barnard in the Household Edition: Listening to the Sea (1877).
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). [1846-48] The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1862. Vols. 1-4.
__________. 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 W. L. Sheppard. The Household Edition. 18 vols. New York: Harper & Co., 1873.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard [62 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.
__________. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880. II.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow, 1900, rpt. 1934. 2 vols. in one.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Headpiece for "List of Coloured Plates," Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893. Page 6.
Gribble, Jennifer. "Chapter 3: Dombey and Son: 'What the Waves were Always Saying'." Dickens and the Bible: 'What Providence Meant'. New York: Routledge, 1893.
Merchant, Elizabeth Lodor. Dickens's Stories About Children. Illustrated by Clara M. Burd. London and New York: John C. Winston. Encyclopedia Americana, 1929.
Created 28 May 2025