In so doing, he produced a more inclusive vision of mid-Victorian Britain than the Crystal Palace had done. Having spoken of the need to “study the Humanities through thesetransparent windows” (“Last Words”) , Dickens looked squarely at streets of “ ‘perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out; without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder; the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust’ ” (p. 106). If he was among “ ’the few’ ” who could “ ‘distinguish the grim misery lying underneath the magic brilliance which dazzles the visitor in the Great Exhibition’ ” (the Leader,quoted in Davis, The Great Exhibition,p. 192), Dickens was in an even smaller minority in taking a grim view of the entire condition of England. For, by mid-century, he had come to realize forcefully that Britain’s problems could not be isolated from one another, confined within class divisions, compartmentalized under discrete headings. Far from being local, such problems were inherent in the structure, the institutions, the practices, and the attitudes of society. From this perspective, Dickens could represent the disease emanating from the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s as “work[ing] its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high” (p. 590). Equally, he could represent the abuses of Chancery, the highest court in Britain, as leaving deadly “ ’impressions … all over England’ ” (p. 106). And, where this court could, and did, hold property interminably in its bureaucratic grasp, he could, and did, link the institution that was supposed to be dedicated to equity with the slum that gave ample evidence of inequity.
When Dickens began writing Bleak House,the injustices perpetrated and perpetuated by the court were not just topical; they were already proverbial. The Oxford English Dictionaryindicates that the phrase “in Chancery” referred, among other things, to “the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything, and the certainty of cost and loss to property” and dates this usage from the 1830s. Twenty years later, when the abuses of Chancery were being widely publicized in the press, Dickens’s indictment of the court extended to the equally dilatory procedures of Parliament, as well as to the reactionary upper classes, figured in the novel by the Dedlocks and their milieu. Both the world of Chancery and that of Fashion are “things of precedent and usage” (p. 23) in Bleak House,where Dickens further links the two in the cohesive symbolic pattern that encompasses all of Britain: “Fog everywhere.” “And … at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor, in his High Court of Chancery,” where dozens of bewigged lawyers are “mistily engaged” (p. 18) in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a “slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing” (p. 28).