SOURCE: “The Triangle in Charles Dickens,” in Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, University Press of Florida, 1998, pp. 54-79.

In the following excerpt, Ford traces events in Dickens' life that parallel a search for first love depicted in many of his works. She explains that Dickens' lifelong fascination with father/daughter relationships was explored in most of his novels, and that Dombey and Son is an especially significant work on this theme.

The relationship between psychobiographical data and the recurrent father/daughter theme is particularly explicit for Charles Dickens (1812-70). The early trauma of his relegation to the blacking factory at the age of twelve, which entailed his own banishment from the oedipal circle at home,¹ occurred at the outset of a life punctuated by a series of unhappy or unsatisfactory relationships with women. Mollie Hardwick sums this up:

His strange, deep idealistic love for Mary Hogarth...