Sydney Dobell's Roman: The Poet's Experience and His Work

It is difficult to read much about the Victorian era without hearing about the Victorian father. Ladies and gentlemen of other periods had fathers, but not Victorian fathers. Why the father is so awesome a figure in this age it is difficult to say. But we must be aware of the problem to understand the mentality of the age. And we can see the figure repeatedly in its literary products. The fathers in Dickens' novels are a case in point. (1) More spectacular is Samuel Butler's thinly veiled attack on his father in The Way of All Flesh. And in biography we have the harrowing account in Father and Son of Edmund Gosse's relations with his stern scientist father.

In these last two works the authoritarian father is identified with religious extremism, and the revolt against the father becomes also a revolt against his whole oppressive puritanical world. The Roman by Sydney Dobell (2) is another literary expression of this revolt against the father and his religion — but with the difference that Dobell's attack is unconscious. His upbringing was every bit as harrowing as that of Gosse — indeed I know of nothing in the literature of the nineteenth or any other century to compare with the painful story of Dobell's early years. Dobell did not utter his feelings directly, perhaps he did not even recognize them himself. Nevertheless their intense force unconsciously found expression through certain images and situations which occur consistently in his Roman.

To understand the expression of the father-son situation in the poem we must know something of Sydney Dobell's personal background.