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But he is a Dick and not a Richard. Therefore his poetry (his hurrying prose) and
his Romanticism are revealed as being fundamentally flawed, somewhat ludicrous in the
pretensions it cannot maintain; and so, in the end, after a fever he comes down to earth
(almost literally) with the comic tiny servant, known as the Marchioness (Chapter 64). Of
course, he never quite grows out of his Romanticism, but he has come to domestic terms
with it:
Mr Swiveller, recovering very slowly from his illness, and
entering into the receipt of his annuity, bought for the Marchioness
a handsome stock of clothes, and put her to school forthwith, in
redemption of the vow he had made upon his fevered bed. After casting
about for some time for a name which would be worthy of her, he
decided in favour of Sophronia Sphynx, as being euphonious and
genteel, and furthermore indicative of mystery Mr Swiveller,
having always been in some measure of a philosophic and reflective
turn, grew immensely contemplative, at times, in the smoking-box,
and was accustomed at such periods to debate in his own mind the
mysterious question of Sophronia's parentage. Sophronia herself
supposed she was an orphan These speculations, however, gave
him no uneasiness; for Sophronia was ever a most cheerful,
affectionate, and provident wife to him; and Dick was to her
an attached and domesticated husband. And they played many a hundred
thousand games of cribbage together. And let it be added, to Dick's
honour, that, though we have called her Sophronia, he called her
the Marchioness from first to last
(Chapter the Last)
Like many a mixed-up hero or heroine in fiction, Dick Swiveller comes to an
essential realism on the other side of a breakdown or a fever (one might think of Martin
Chuzzlewit or Pip here); but what is especially revealing in this description of the in
creasingly domesticated Richard or Dick is the extent to which it swivels between
Romanticism and Realism: he names her Sophronia (a name adopted by the narrator) but
he calls her the Marchioness (a name which defeats its potential Romance by virtue of
its irony -- no one less like a Machioness than Sophronia). Dick entertains mystery
and indulges in speculation, but his real domestic pleasure is at the cribbage board.
This, you might say, is a halfway house -- domesticated Romanticism. But then
consider the case of Mrs Skewton in Dombey and Son
The discrepancy between Mrs Skweton's fresh enthusiasm of
words and forlornly faded manner, was hardly less observable than that
between her age, which was about seventy, and her dress, which would
have been youthful for twenty-seven. Her attitude in the wheeled
chair (which she never varied) was one in which she had been taken
in a barouche, some fifty years before, by a then fashionable artist
who had appended to his published sketch the name of Cleopatra
Mrs Skewton was a beauty then, and bucks threw wine-glasses
over their heads by dozens in her honour. The beauty and the barouche
had both passed away, but she still preserved the attitude, and for
this reason expressly, maintained the wheeled chair and the butting
