ABSTRACT
Dickens in particular, with his professional background as a journalist in the Doctors’ Commons, and as a political reporter, clearly worked from obser vation as well as personal experience to show the sufferings of children right across the board. That meant looking upwards too, for the equally pitiful death of quite a different child character, Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son, dem onstrates well ‘what the plight of the cherished rich man’s child has in common with that of the foundling parish boy’:11 the account of Paul struggling down stairs with his stack of English, Latin, ancient and modern history, maths and general knowledge books suggests another effective way in which children could be overburdened and disposed of, and shows that this part of the picture (of childhood in the Victorian novel) was wretched and widespread indeed.
