Indeed, while John Ruskin argued that the number of deaths in Bleak House(nine, by his miscount; there are more) answered “a craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement” and that such a novel “entertain[ed]” the jaded reader “by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness the horrors, of Death,” this criticism is offset by Ruskin’s own observation that the number of deaths in Dickens’s fiction is “a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London.” But the point Dickens makes is closer to home. When Jo, the crossing sweeper who figures centrally in Bleak House,succumbs to slum-propagated diseases, he is one of many “dying thus around us every day” (p. 610).
At the same time that Dickens pointed insistently in the novel to the need for reform, he also engaged in a reform of the novel. That is, beyond the subversion of conventional narrative patterns, apart from the introduction of new conventions as well, Bleak Houseis a radical—and fundamentally unsettling—experiment in story-telling. Marked by its rudimentary difference from any novel written before, Bleak Houseis equally marked by the acute difference incorporated within, in the rupture that is created by the presence of two narrators and sustained throughout the entirety of the book. To be sure, the play of multiple voices and perspectives in fiction is not unprecedented. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818) comes readily to mind as an early nineteenth-century example. What distinguishes Bleak Housefrom other novels that employ a plurality of points of view, however, is how entirely incommensurate Dickens’s two narrators are in persona and perspective.
Speaking in “the voice of the present” (p. 84), the third-person narrator is omnipresent in his portions of Bleak House.Able to move from scene to scene “as the crow flies” (p. 23), covering territory both “National and Domestic” (chapter 40), he guides us through the far-flung reaches of the book and prods us to recognize relationships between its seemingly disparate elements. “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom … ?” (p. 220), this narrator asks in a famous rhetorical question that re-emphasizes the “connexions” to which Dickens everywhere points.4Possessed of the ironic consciousness that can assimilate the diffuse and contradictory features of the book and the world, the third-person narrator exemplifies what Dickens termed “a long-sight,” which “perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted person” (preface to Martin Chuzzlewit).He can also see clearly what characters in the novel perceive “only … by halves in a confused way” (p. 518). For all of his perspicuity, however, the third-person narrator can no more “ ‘read the heart’ ” (p. 523) or the minds of characters than they themselves can. Singularly canny, ever “On the Watch” (chapter 12), the third-person narrator is not omniscient. His perspective, which encompasses many points of view, does not comprehend all points of view.
After all, there is Esther Summerson, whose narrative also occupies Bleak House. At first glance, Esther’s difference from her counterpart is striking. Whereas the third-person narrator is supremely urbane, majestically confident, Esther is painfully inhibited, agonizingly uncertain. “I know I am not clever” (p. 30 and elsewhere)—unthinkable coming from the other narrator—is a refrain in her part of the book. The source of Esther’s self-denial is the denial of herself that she experienced as an illegitimate orphaned child. Raised by the harsh Miss Barbary, Esther is not permitted to know anything about her own or her mother’s identity except that both are bound up in guilt: “ ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers’ ” (p. 32).While Dickens lays a foundation for melodramatic plot complications in this scene, he also demonstrates the acute sensitivity to the impressionable fragility of children for which he is so well known. Told “ ’It would have been far better, little Esther, … that you had never been born!‘ ” (p. 32), she grows up to feel that she is “no one.” Self-denigration—even in the face of affirmation—is her habitual mode. “O my goodness, the idea of asking my advice” (p. 107),she demurs in a way that has rankled generations of readers. Modern readers have also been irked by Dickens’s depiction of Esther’s selflessness (the other and better face of her self-denial) and not just because she embodies a stereotype of feminine virtue (which some Victorian readers regarded with incredulity as well) . More troubling still is Dickens’s positing Esther’s acts of goodness as a foil to Chancery’s acts of injustice. Esther’s “circle of duty,” which “gradually and naturally expand[s] itself” (p.