When he first introduces Harriet Carker in Dombey and Son, Dickens makes it clear that she differs significantly from her predecessors in English fiction. And even though she remains a marginal figure in the novel, one senses that she is being used as a stalking horse for a new kind of heroine that the novelist is planning for the future: By a verbal sleight-of-hand Dickens has shifted the word "heroic" from its functional sense of "relating to a heroine" toward the moral color of the word, and fixed that color in atypically humble and domestic terms. In doing so, he bids a satiric farewell to the romance heroine even while, in the same novel, she is partially figured forth in the person of Florence Dombey. The epithets "sordid" and "low" are likewise subject to semantic shifts, for while they recall the socio-structural prescriptions of Aristotle's Poetics ("Comedy is ... an imitation of characters of a lower type--not however, in the full sense of the word bad, the Ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly" [59]), they have been re-inflected to satirize the superficial and intolerant responses likely to come from readers of romance. Dickens's tone and phrasing here resemble George Crabbe's in The Village, the project of which was to
