But it can be enabling, too, for when we learn that Jo, ”who is of no order and no place“ (p. 602), had been befriended by Nemo, whose name, we are so helpfully reminded, means ”no one“ in Latin, we not only register the identification of the two outcasts, but also recognize the effect of this ”connexion“ : namely, the creation of a provisional, ephemeral community out of ”no one.“ Such a ”creation of consciousness—of recognitions and relationships—seems to me to be the purpose of Dickens’s developed fiction,“ wrote the late Raymond Williams (The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence,p. 33). In Bleak House,the purpose extends directly to readers. Situating us between the third-person narrator’s public purview and Esther’s private milieu, Bleak Housepositions us on the middle ground, where the omnipresent and retrospective perspectives converge, and alerts us to the need to make ”connexions“ not only within the book, but also between the book and the world.
All such “connexions” are focused in Jo. The illiterate crossing sweeper who figures centrally in both narratives and is the pivot on which the plot of the novel turns is also at the center of Dickens’s social vision in Bleak House—avision that comes directly to assimilate us. “It must be a strange state to be like Jo!” the third-person narrator muses:
To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! (p. 222).
Confronting the bafflement of Jo, we may begin to feel baffled ourselves, reading about the experience of being unable to read and wondering, in language, what it is like to be cut off from language. Probing deeper into this “strange state,” the narrator continues:
It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think … what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business, here, or there, or anywhere; … It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human … but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! (p. 222).
Conducting the reader further into the strange state of Jo, the narrator does not do so simply to evince sympathy for Jo. Although Esther is characterized in part by her ready kindness to Jo and unfortunate figures like Jo, even her humanity is inadequate to break down the kind of “iron barrier” that she sees “between us and these people” (p. 117). Rather, the narrator inducts the reader into the bewilderment of Jo in order to create an identification with Jo—an identification that has the effect of “ ‘obliterat[ing] the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion by which things are held together’ ” (p. 541), as Sir Leicester Dedlock would say. Paradoxically, however, the inculcation of bewilderment can bring clarification here. For, in prompting us to identify with Jo, the narrator also prompts us to reflect on how our disregard of Jo has literally bewildered him—forced him to keep “Moving On” (chapter 19) and made him “of no order and no place.” Deterring the kind of interest that the Reverend Chadband takes in Jo, when he expounds on this “tough subject” (p. 346) for his own “ ’spiritual profit’ ” (p. 269), Dickens also curbs the “curious habit of seeming to look a long way off” (p. 50) that characterizes Mrs. Jellyby, whose “Telescopic Philanthropy” (chapter 4), focused exclusively on her African mission in Borrioboola-Gha, diverts her attention away from the chaos at home. Here, the representation of Jo, which turns the focus to Jo and into Jo and then out of him to encompass “me,” makes ignoring the consequences of disregarding “these people” as impossible as it is to disregard Jo. As one reviewer of Bleak Houseput it, Dickens “writes with a purpose.”
This purpose, reform, is the aim of satire, the impulse of which is fierce indignation. And both the impulse and the aim remain palpable on pages written one hundred and fifty years ago.