Abstract
In Chapter 5 of Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848), Mr Dombey, who has longed all his married life for a son to inherit the family business, finally acquires one — at the cost of his exhausted wife — and is planning little Paul’s christening ceremony. His sister Mrs Chick, promoting her friend Miss Tox as a potential second wife, hopes Dombey might make her a godmother, but worries that Miss Tox is too negligible for such an honour. “Godfathers, of course,” continued Mrs Chick, “are important in point of connexion and influence”’ — implying that godmothers are less essential in buttressing a family’s social position. Mr Dombey’s tetchy reply is: ‘“I don’t know why they should be, to my son.” ’ He elaborates: ‘“The kind of foreign help which people usually seek for their children, I can afford to despise; being above it, I hope”.’ Miss Tox is therefore ‘elevated … to the godmothership of little Paul, in virtue of her insignificance.’2
We christen an infant phaenomonon [sic] on Saturday, and expect a few friends in the evening in honor [sic] of the occasion.1
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Notes
Madeline House and Graham Storey (eds) (1965) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. One: 1820–1839 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 338.
Charles Dickens (1848, 1970) Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 101–3.
John R. Gillis (1989) ‘Ritualization of Middle-Class Family Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 3, pp. 214, 226.
John R. Gillis (1996) A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 192, 170. Gillis also notes that in the seventeenth century the newly born child would be placed in its father’s arms, and ‘he would show it off to the gathered company,’ ibid., p. 185.
P. Jagger (1982) Clouded Witness: Initiation in the Church of England in the Mid-Victorian Period 1850–1875 (Alison Parkes, Pennsylvania: Pickwick Publications), p. 80.
A. P. Stanley (1879), ‘Baptism,’ Nineteenth Century, VI, 700.
[W. H. Wills], ‘Baptismal Rituals,’ Household Words, I (27 April 1850), 108.
John Keble (1849–50, published 1868) Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service, http://anglicanhistory.org/keble/bapt/sermon1.pdf, p. 2.
Frederick Denison Maurice (1838, revised 1842, 4th edn, 1891), The Kingdom of Christ or Hints to a Quaker Respecting the Principles, Constitution, and Ordinances of the Catholic Church, 2 vols (London: Macmillan), I, p. 333.
Frederick Denison Maurice (1884) The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London: Macmillan), I, p. 238.
Jeremy Morris (2005) F. D. Maurice and the Crisis of Christian Authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 34, 76.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer (2006) ‘Dickens, Fascinated,’ Victorian Studies 48, p. 268.
Graham Storey (ed.) (2002) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 12, 1868–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 188.
Though there are some signs that Dickens knew enough about Puseyism and baptism to make an ‘in’ joke about being born again on his birthday, to the clergyman who gave his ailing daughter Dora an emergency baptism. See Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (eds) (1998) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. Six (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 30.
Madeline House and Graham Storey (eds) (1969) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. Two, 1840–41 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 209.
Cyril Bibby (1872) Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley 1825–1895 (Oxford: Pergamon Press), p. 57.
Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding (eds) (1981) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. Five, 1847–1849 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 90.
William Toynbee (1912) Diaries of William Charles Macready, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall), II, p. 21.
Graham Storey (ed.) (1998) The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. Ten, 1862–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 195.
Charles Dickens (1836), ‘The Bloomsbury Christening,’ Sketches by Boz (London: The Caxton Publishing Co Ltd), p. 558.
Kenneth J. Fielding and David R. Sorensen (eds.) (2004) Jane Carlyle: Newly Selected Letters (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 139–40.
Jan Marsh (1995) Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Pimlico), p. 17.
James O. Hoge (ed.) (1974) The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press), p. 61.
Cecil Y. Long and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr (eds) (1987) The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Oxford: Clarendon Press), II, p. 47.
James O. Hoge (ed.) (1974) The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson, p. 67.
Frederick Denison Maurice (1853, 1891) Theological Essays, 5th edn (London: Macmillan), Dedication.
Hermione Lee (1996) Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus), pp. 104–5.
Francis Darwin (1887) The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including An Autobiographical Chapter, 2 vols (London: John Murray), I, p. 128. The draft of this chapter can be found in The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.
Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith (eds) (1986) The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Vol. Two, 1837–1843 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 303.
Leonard Huxley (1900) Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co Ltd), I, p. 223.
Leonard Huxley (1918) Life and Letters of Joseph Dalton Hooker, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1918), II, p. 59.
Leonard Huxley (1900) Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, I, p. 151.
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© 2009 Valerie Sanders
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Sanders, V. (2009). Godfathering: The Politics of Victorian Family Relations. In: Delap, L., Griffin, B., Wills, A. (eds) The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250796_12
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