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This paper explores how Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) demonstrates the connection between the transformation of masculinity and the changes in the notions of vision and the observer in the early nineteenth century by focusing on its three male characters: Paul Dombey, James Carker, and Dombey’s son called little Paul. From his original status as a Cartesian subject, which is established in Dickens’s use of camera obscura images for him, Dombey degenerates into a being-as-object who is stupefied into passivity and lethargy after losing his controlling patriarchal power. I scrutinize how Dombey’s downfall is associated with the collapse of the camera obscura model of vision and subjectivity. I read Carker— e.g. his failed attempt to use his versatility and sharp eyes to subvert and steal Dombey’s social and economic power—through a changed meaning of the camera obscura in The German Ideology (1845-46) by Marx and Engels as a degenerative metaphor for procedures and forces that conceal, invert, and distort ideologies. Little Paul’s awareness of his subjectivity as being-as-object, which exists only in front of the other-as-subject, can be read as a precursor to the twentieth-century discourse on the reorganization of the visual relationship between subject and object and the decentralization of the subject-as-observer’s ruling position by Sartre. However, the early death of Paul Jr. implies that he fails to provide an alternative model of reciprocal male gazer/subject.