But these brothers do not reappear in the novel: they need have no other than a stylistic existence. Little Paul, however, is to be a central character and cannot be confined to the surface brilliance, the purely and ostentatiously verbal existence, that makes the minor characters in Dickens so memorable. Paul has a life to lead, albeit a brief one, and must enter the world of motives and affections, of hopes and disappointmentsthe world, in short, of personages with a biography.
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So, now, a short biography. Paul Dombey, second child and only son of a rich city fellow (as Cousin Feenix calls him) lost his mother at birth: poor dear Fanny, as her sister-in-law remarked sadly, just did not make an effort. Paul was nursed by Polly Toodle, the mother of an almost unlimited number of babies; he was fussed over by his aunt and friends; he was worshipped with a stiff dynastic love by his stiff, reserved Papa; and he was loved by, and passionately loved in return, his older sister Florence. He was sent to Brighton for his health, where he (and Florence, whom he could not bear to be without) lived with Mrs. Pipchin, a highly respectable widow, whose husband broke his heart in pumping water out of the Peruvian mines ("Not being a Pumper himself of course"). Then at the age of six he was sent to Dr. Blimber's Academy, where he made little progress with Latin grammar, but was a universal favorite, his fellow-students and teachers realizing, along with the reader, that he was not long for this world. He left the academy in a whirl of affection and delirium, and went back to the Dombey mansion to die, leaving his sister and father heartbroken, and plunging, as Forster said in his life of Dickens, a whole nation into mourningwith nearly three quarters of the novel yet to run.
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The sister and the father, though both heart-broken, do not grieve in the same way. No one in the novel is as shattered by Paul's death as his father, yet, though Mr. Dombey feels most intensely the sorrow that the death is designed to arouse in the reader, he does not feel it as he should. This naturally produces in the reader an ambivalent response to his response, both sharing and repudiating his love for Paul, since it was love for the idea of Dombey-and-Son rather than for the actual old-fashioned child whom Florence loved so devotedly and maternally. Yet Florence in her turn showed little response to Paul's quirky individuality (which will be discussed below): her protective love saw him only as pitiable and weak. So it is only the reader who responds with an appreciation of little Paul's full complexity.
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Mr. Dombey's stiff repudiation of comfort ("Louisa, have the goodness to leave me. I want nothing. I am better by myself") tells us that his grief
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