- in Bleak House,he also dwelled on what was: because “no part of [Tom-all-Alone‘s] left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality,” he transformed “these hours of darkness” to daybreak, to present the “vile … wonder” to the “national glory” (pp. 590-591). Whether “ ’We can see now’ ” (p. 807),as John Jarndyce says near the close of the re-visionary novel, is an open question—a question that Bleak Housereopens every time we open this arresting, unsettling book. “ ‘We are really spinning along.’ ”
Tatiana Holwayreceived her Ph.D. from Columbia University A specialist in Victorian literature and society, she has published a number of articles on Dickens and has taught at a variety of undergraduate institutions.
Notes
1All quotations from nineteenth-century reviews come from A. E. Dyson’s Dickens’ Bleak House: A Casebookand Philip Collins’s Dickens: The Critical Heritage;see “For Further Reading.”
2This figure comes from Robert Newsom, whose select bibliography for Bleak Housecan be found through links on the Dickens Project web-site : http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html.
3And has been said by D. A. Miller, among others, who argues for the resemblance of the novel to the case in “Discipline in Different Voices.” Critics such as Bruce Robbins (in “Telescopic Philanthropy”) differ with Miller.
4Dickens uses the original spelling of the word, perhaps to emphasize a greater degree of interrelatedness (as in the causal linkages conveyed by the word “nexus”).
5The famous definition comes from Johnson’s survey of the Metaphysical poets. “Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough,” he continued. “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Some nineteenth-century critics said much the same of Dickens’s “peculiar genius”; they also denied that he had any wit.
6This effect is discussed by Robert Newsom in Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things(chapter 3). It should be noted, however, that modern readers are in some disagreement over whether Bleak Houseinduces bewilderment in the reader. J. Hillis Miller, for one, has argued that it does in his influential 1971 essay “The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House.”
Works Cited
Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Davis, John R. The Great Exhibition.Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. “A Preliminary Word” (Household Words,March 30, 1850) and “The Last Words of the Old Year” (Household Words,January 31, 1851). Reprinted in Michael Slater, ed., The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism,vol. 2: The Amusements of the People and Other Papers: Reports, Essays, and Reviews1834-1851. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.
Dyson, A. E., ed. Dickens’ Bleak House: A Casebook.London: Macmillan, 1969.
Ford, George H. Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism since1836. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Miller, D. A. “Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House.”Reprinted in Jeremy Tambling, ed., Bleak House: Charles Dickens.New Casebook Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House.”Reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: Modern Critical Interpretations.New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Newsom, Robert. Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition.New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Robbins, Bruce. “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House.” Reprinted in Jeremy Tambling, ed., Bleak House: Charles Dickens.New Casebook Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Schwarzbach, F. S. Dickens and the City.London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1979.
Storey, Graham, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens.Vol. 6: 1850-1852. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence.London: Hogarth Press, 1984.