The BBC’s Dombey and Son

By Lydia Craig, Loyola University Chicago

Few film adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846) exist, possibly due to the novel’s heavy reliance on metonymy, the use of specific objects or distinctive physical attributes to represent characters’ hidden desires. As Robert Giddings notes, film resists lingering narrative focus on descriptive images and physical objects (306). Though it tries to faithfully represent Dickens’s metonymy, the 1983 BBC miniseries Dombey and Son — starring Julian Glover (Paul Dombey), Lysette Anthony (Florence Dombey), and Paul Darrow (Mr. Carker) — struggles to convey symbolic features such as Carker’s teeth. Verbal metaphor in a text, while producing vivid mental images in the reader’s mind, does not always translate accurately in accompanying illustrations, nor yet on screen, as the miniseries demonstrates.

Mr. Carker’s teeth in the BBC adaptation

In Dickens’s novel, Mr. Carker’s teeth metonymically represent his insidiousness. Though Darrow’s intonations expertly capture Carker’s understated menace, the actor lacks the oversized grin betraying the feral beast beneath Carker’s cultivated façade, an instance film critic Jonathan Miller describes in a review for The Sunday Times as illustrating the “logical difference” between the viewed physical reality of film and the intellectual meaning resulting from literature (Supplement, G.9). In order to comprehend Mr. Carker’s vicious character and seductive intentions, Dickens requires the reader to persistently recall his teeth, even when they are not mentioned in specific dental detail. When Florence’s dog Diogenes snaps at Mr. Toots but does not bite him, for example, Mr. Carker offers aid: “‘If the dog’s teeth have entered the leg, Sir -’ began Carker, with a display of his own” (317). The narrative’s initial comparison between Diogenes and Carker’s teeth undergoes a revision in imagery after the dog barks at him, accurately recognizing Carker’s cat-like predatory walk. Unlike a dog, who honestly displays his opinion of others, Carker conceals his true feelings and intentions, and is therefore cunning and untrustworthy.

Phiz’s illustration, “Mr. Carker in His Hour of Triumph”

Dombey and Son, like many of Dickens’s novels, was illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). Several illustrations of Carker depict him with an impossibly wide smile, while others attempt to depict it in a more “realistic” manner, demonstrating the difficulty of even illustrating Dickens’s metonymy. In some illustrations, Phiz relies on other visual aids. Carker’s teeth experience two final symbolic confrontations with “teeth” much sharper and more powerful than his own: the table knife Edith uses to defend her virtue and the train that fatally crushes Carker. Phiz’s ironic illustration “Mr. Carker in his Hour of Triumph” depicts a standing Edith extending a bared arm tauntingly towards a seated Carker, while he averts his face, closed, sullen mouth covered by a hand (759). The BBC version does not follow Phiz’s lead, and instead stages this scene on a boat where Edith clumsily presents the knife, physically struggles to escape Carker’s restraining grasp, and is released only after threatening him with her estranged husband’s approach (Bennett).

While escaping from Mr. Dombey, Carker slips onto a railway track and is killed in full view of his pursuer’s horrified gaze. The train engine is described as an iron-toothed beast with “red eyes,” “a jagged mill, that spun him round and round…and cast his mutilated fragments in the air” (Dickens 779). A desperate but resolute woman and an unthinking machine have twice mastered and bested the teeth, speaking to the ultimate fruitlessness of Carker’s twisted designs and cruel threats. Dogs are shooed away from the remains and men remove the body from the tracks. In the BBC adaptation this scene passes quickly, with Carker seeing and realizing that Dombey has traced him to the station and desperately jumping in front of the train. There is one shot of the wheels turning, while Dombey stares in shock.

Phiz’s illustration, “Coming Home from Church”

Though this miniseries generally remains faithful to Dickens’s novel, minimizing Edith’s agency by showing Carker as physically abusive represents a departure from how  menacing and then ineffectual he appears in the text and Phiz’s illustrations. What this film’s style does accomplish however, especially in its preservation of tense and lengthy drawing room conversations between Carker, Dombey, and Edith, is to emphasize the psychological drama of being trapped within domestic spaces and roles by more powerful individuals due to age and gender. While translating the metonymy of Dickens’s text to screen may present filmic challenges for realistic cinema, film can also use space and atmosphere to capture the novel’s suspenseful tone and illustrate its subtext for the viewer.

Questions for Discussion:

Andrew Davies (BBC Pride and Prejudice) expressed interest in doing an adaptation of Dombey and Son (Singh). Given his period style, how might he represent Dickens’s metonymy? Could the use of “knife” and “tooth” imagery such as close up shots of Carker and Diogenes’ growling teeth, Edith’s knife, the train’s wheels, convey the menace of Carker’s teeth?

Director Joss Whedon (Buffy, The Avengers) has also expressed interest in doing an adaptation of Dombey and Son (Plumb). Consider the style of Whedon’s other films. How might he represent Carker’s teeth? Would giving an actor an impossibly white and wide CGI-enhanced grin like that of the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland) help translate Dickens’ absurd textual characterization from text to screen?

Besides Carker’s teeth, other examples of Dickens’s metonymy appear throughout Dombey and Son’s text, as critics have noted. Which of the other characters are represented by items, features, or characteristics such as an unusual laugh or repeated phrase? How well do these other metonymic devices transfer from text to screen in the BBC version? Do they appear at all and if not, why were they excluded?

Works Cited:

Bennett, Rodney, director. Dombey and Son. Performed by Julian Glover, Lysette   Anthony, and Paul Darrow. BBC, 1983. Film.

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1846. Oxford University Press, 1987.

Giddings, Robert. “Great misrepresentations: Dickens and film.” Critical Survey, vol. 3, no.3, 1991, pp. 305-312.

Miller, Jonathan. “The debate of the film of the book.” The Sunday Times. 12 February 1989. Factiva. Web. 17 July 2017.

Plumb, Ali. “Joss Whedon on Dombey and Son Movie Ambitions.” Movies. EmpireOnline. 18 June 2013. Web. 17 July 2017.

Singh, Anita. “BBC period drama has gone downmarket, says Andrew Davies.” The Telegraph. 28 September 2009. Web. 17 July 2017.

Further Reading:

Altick, Richard D. “Varieties of Readers’ Response: The Case of ‘Dombey and Son.’” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 10, 1980, pp. 70-94.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “Emblems and Ecphrases in ‘Dombey and Son.’” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, 2010, pp. 102-118.

Guida, Fred. “Some Thoughts on the BBC, British Silent Films, Dombey and Son, Rich Man’s Folly & The Changing World of Charles Dickens.” Fred Guida’s Charles    Dickens On Screen. 10 January 2012.

Reed, John R. Dickens’s Hyperrealism. Ohio State University Press, 2010.

Stewart, Garrett. “Dickens, Eisenstein, film.” Dickens on Screen. Edited by John Glavin. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 122-144.

Stone, Harry. “Dickens and Leitmotif: Music-staircase Imagery in Dombey and Son.” College English, vol. 25, no. 3, 1963, pp. 217-220.

Watt, Kate Varnell and Kathleen C. Lonsdale. “Dickens Composed: film and television adaptations 1897-2001.” Dickens on Screen. Edited by John Glavin. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 201-216.


“Coming Home from Church.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Brown, otherwise known as ‘Phiz.’ Dombey and Son. London, 1846.

“Dombey and Son frontispiece.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Brown, otherwise known as ‘Phiz.’ Dombey and Son. London, 1846.

“Mr. Carker in his Hour of Triumph.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Brown, otherwise known as ‘Phiz.’ Dombey and Son. London, 1846.

Clare B. Dunkle’s The House of Dead Maids

By Sonya Sawyer Fritz, University of Central Arkansas

Cover of House of Dead Maids, from Clare B. Dunkle’s website.


One of the greatest mysteries of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is the origin of Heathcliff. Plucked from the streets of Liverpool by the benevolent Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff is introduced as a strange, dark child who at first speaks nothing but “gibberish”

and who reveals over time an almost inhumanly cold and cruel nature; the narrator Nelly Dean speculates in the novel’s final chapter, “‘Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?….where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?’” (Brontë 313). Clare B. Dunkle’s The House of Dead Maids (2010) does not fully address these questions, but it does speculate on the situations and events that formed this orphan boy into the terrible yet compelling anti-hero he would become as Brontë’s Heathcliff.

This young adult novel follows Tabby Akroyd, an eleven-year-old orphan living at a charity school in eighteenth-century England, as she is hired by a mysterious lady to serve as nanny and playmate to a young child at a strange and gloomy estate called Seldom House. Tabby soon realizes that the house and its inhabitants are in no way ordinary or benign, and that she and her young charge—a wild and fearless boy with no name and no clear origins whom Tabby eventually just calls “Himself’—are in great danger. It is not until the end of the story that the novel’s connections to Wuthering Heights and the Brontës are revealed: Tabby grows up to become the Brontë family’s housekeeper, the real-life Tabitha Akroyd, who thrills her employer’s children with tales of her terrifying childhood experience at Seldom House. The last time she sees the child Himself is when a gentleman in Liverpool takes pity on him and decides to carry him home to a place called Wuthering Heights. But the Gothic elements that characterized much of the Brontës’ work are explicitly woven into Dunkle’s text from the beginning, reflected in the ghosts that terrorize the residents of Seldom House and the ancient, evil power the estate holds, as well as in the grotesque parody of family created by the house’s residents: the disingenuous Mr. Ketch, his prickly consort Miss Winter, and the two children Tabby and Himself/Heathcliff.

Overall, the novel is clearly inspired by its inter-text Wuthering Heights, but the scope of its relationship with the Brontës extends beyond that: by linking the fictional Heathcliff to the real-life Tabitha Akroyd, Dunkle seeks to provide a backstory not only for Emily Brontë’s most famous character but for the genre and tone of the Brontë sisters’ oeuvre itself, creating metafictional connections between what the Brontës created as writers and what shaped them as writers. As a result, while The House of Dead Maids works as a standalone novel, the book becomes its most interesting when read alongside Wuthering Heights and other Brontë novels or within the larger context of the Gothic tradition, making it a great work to include in a course on Victorian British literature or on Gothic literature through the ages.

Questions for Discussion:

Dunkle represents herself as having “done what every published literary critic does: I’ve used my book to call attention to the elements of Wuthering Heights that most interest me,” which includes first and foremost the character of Heathcliff. How might Dunkle’s novel change our interpretation or understanding of Heathcliff as Brontë originally represented him? In what ways is Dunkle’s portrayal of the character in dialogue or even contention with Brontë’s?

Aside from Heathcliff, how might other characters in the novel be interpreted as mirroring or speaking to the characters of Wuthering Heights in some way? Can we find echoes of Brontë’s original characters in Tabby, Miss Winter, Mr. Ketch, Mrs. Sexton, or Arnby?

One key element of the Gothic narrative is the way in which it builds psychological terror. What aspects of The House of Dead Maids might be considered particularly psychologically disturbing, especially when it comes to the novel’s representation of children and how they are treated by adults?

Through connecting a real-life figure, Tabitha Akroyd, to a fictional figure, Heathcliff, Dunkle’s novel blurs the line between fiction and reality, encouraging readers to interrogate the relationship between the two. How might this metafictional move affect readers’ perceptions of or attitudes toward Wuthering Heights as a work of fiction? What added meaning or significance might it lend to Brontë’s original novel?

Further reading:

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Signet Classic, 1959.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1998.

Jackson, Anna, Roderick McGillis, and Karen Coats. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2008.

Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben, eds. Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual, and Cultural Politics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011.

Stoneman, Patsy, ed. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

April Lindner’s YA Bronte Novels

by Sara K. Day, Southern Arkansas University

Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights, both originally published in 1847, offer readers strong-willed heroines, moody romantic heroes, and memorable settings. They Jane coverhave also become touchstones of the Victorian era for many readers, due at least in part to their frequent appearances on high school and college reading lists. April Lindner’s two recent young adult novels Jane (2010) and Catherine (2013) capitalize on the existing link between the Brontё sisters’ novels and adolescent readers by retelling these works set in modern-day America.

Jane opens on the struggles of college student Jane Moore as she struggles to regain her footing after the sudden death of her financially secure but emotionally bankrupt parents. Already distanced from her two older siblings—who stand in for the cruel cousins of Brontё’s tale—she must leave school and secure employment. She quickly finds herself employed as a governess by Nico Rathburn, a world-famous rock star. Though Jane considers herself plain and unlovable, Nico engages her in a whirlwind romance that soon culminates in a proposal, a series of tragic revelations, and an eventual happy ending.

Like Jane, Lindner’s Catherine puts a rock and roll spin on its Victorian source material: in this case, the title character grows up not in Wuthering Heights but in an apartment above The Underground, the famous rock club her father owns. Decades later, her teen daughter Chelsea travels to The Underground to search for her long-missing mother and finds Hence, a one-time rock star who had also been Catherine’s first and enduring love. In a narrative that pairs Chelsea’s modern-day story with diary entries from her mother’s adolescence, Lindner slowly unravels the mystery of Catherine’s disappearance.

Because many adolescent readers will encounter the original Brontё novels (either as class assignments or through other cultural references, such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga), Lindner’s works can act as accessible ways to engage with some of the major themes and conflicts of the source material. Notably, though, some of the most important discussions that might emerge from comparisons of these novels to the Brontёs’ texts should involve the portrayal of gender roles and attitudes towards romance, passion, and marriage, since Lindner’s modern adaptations might in many ways be understood as more “conventional” than their Victorian roots. These texts may also be a useful starting point for the differences between adaptation and fanfiction, as some readers have raised questions and debates about how Lindner’s novels might blur those boundaries.

Questions for Discussion:

The English moors in which both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are set have become important elements of the ongoing critical conversations about both novels. How does relocating these tales to modern-day America affect other textual elements such as mood, atmosphere, and characterization? Can New York City, in particular, be understood as an analog to the English moors?

The Brontёs’ novels begin with extended descriptions of their main characters’ early lives, from Jane’s time in the home of her uncaring aunt and as a student at Lowood to Catherine and Heathcliff’s wild childhoods on the moors. In her retellings, Lindner offers only a very brief consideration of her protagonists’ experiences as children; indeed, Catherine and Hence do not even meet until late adolescence. Why would Lindner omit or abridge her protagonists’ childhoods, and what impact does this have on our understanding of Jane, Catherine, and their respective romantic partners?

The Brontё sisters—including Anne, whose Tenant of Wildfell Hall has not (yet) inspired a retelling by Lindner—have all been credited with expressing protofeminist ideas in their personal and fictional writings. How do these YA retellings engage with the potential feminism of the original Jane and Catherine?

Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights feature famous Byronic heroes in the form of Rochester and Heathcliff. How is the figure of the Byronic hero portrayed in Lindner’s novels, and how does their status as YA literature shape these portrayals?

Further Readings:

Franklin, Caroline. The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Kapurch, Katie. “‘Unconditionally and Irrevocably’: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37.2 (2012): 164-87. Print.

Rubik, Margarete, and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann. A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Print.

Stein, Atara. The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print.

Stoneman, Patsy. Brontё Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. New York: Prentice Hall, 1996. Print.

Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna

by Emma Burris-Janssen, University of Connecticut




Questions for Discussion





Further Reading



Pulver, Andrew, and Henry Barnes. “Hardy’s Blood-Heat Melodrama Transfers Remarkably Smoothly.”, 2012. Web. 28 April 2015.




Mr. Holmes

By Victoria Ford Smith

Recent television shows, movies, and novels have transported Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, from the end of the nineteenth century to all manner of places and times, and director Bill Condon’s 2015 Mr. Holmes is no exception. The film begins in 1947, and the audience finds Holmes (played by Ian posterMcKellen) aged, troubled by a failing memory, and retired to a country house in Sussex. There he tends bees, pesters his housekeeper (Laura Linney), and befriends her young son Roger (Milo Parker). However, his country house idyll is disrupted by memories of an unresolved case: the death of a woman mourning two devastating miscarriages. Holmes has located a rare Japanese plant to help restore his memory, but when that remedy fails him, he attempts to untangle the case’s details by calling on his own fragmented recollections and the help of Roger, whose love and knowledge of Holmes’ methods makes him a convenient assistant.

The movie—itself an adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind—is an adaptation preoccupied with the pleasures and troubles of adaptation. The plot hinges on Holmes’ ability (or inability) to tell his own story amid other voices trying to tell it for him, and the movie includes sometimes-humorous asides to the misalignment of popular images of Holmes and his identity in the stories themselves. For example, McKellen’s Holmes chuckles at melodramatic film adaptations of his cases, and more than one character wonders aloud about the aged detective’s missing pipe and deerstalker hat. Condon’s movie, then, is an excellent resource for teachers looking to introduce questions of Conan Doyle’s creation as a cultural icon and issues of adaptation and fidelity. While perhaps too long to show during a single class meeting, as it runs just over an hour and 40 minutes, it would be a useful addition as an out-of-class screening or as material for students interested in researching the afterlife of Sherlock.

Questions for Discussion

How does Sherlock Holmes exist as a person, a character, and a legend in Conan Doyle’s original stories and in Condon’s movie? Where do these identities overlap? What are the consequences of defining Holmes in one way or another?

Some would argue that Holmes’ reputation as a detective relies on his attention to detail and his ability to access the truth through observation. How does Mr. Holmes reinforce or trouble those assumptions?

What strategies (narrative, filmic, etc.) does Condon use to represent Holmes’ astute observations, his failing memory, his emotional state? Are these techniques parallels of strategies Doyle uses in his stories?

Japan plays a vital role in Mr. Holmes. For example, the movie references throughout the devastations of WWII. How does the film represent Japan and Japanese characters? Do you see these representations as departures from or reiterations of representations of “the East” in Doyle and other Victorian literature and culture?

Further Reading

Cunningham, Henry. “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Race.” The Journal of Popular Culture 28.2 (Fall 1994): 113-25.

Leitch, Thomas. “The Hero with a Hundred Faces.” Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007. 207-35.

Meslow, Scott. “Film’s 111-Year Obsession with Sherlock Holmes.” The Atlantic (16 December 2011). Web. 30 July 2015.

Porter, Lynette. Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on New Adaptations. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012.

Vrettos, Athena. “Displaced Memories in Victorian Fiction and Psychology.” Victorian Studies 49.2 (2007): 99-107.