There, the condition-of-England question has a clear answer: “Fog everywhere.” If anything is obscure about the country as represented in Bleak House, it is how it came to be in such a dire state. Referring to the ubiquity of filth and disease and death in mid-century London, F. S. Schwarzbach writes: “One of the great mysteries of the Victorian period is how stark realities such as these needed to be ‘discovered’ by people who could barely avoid daily contact with them” (Dickens and the City, p. 125). One answer Dickens gives is that such realities are so awful as to be beyond belief. Hence, we find Mr. Snagsby “pass[ing] along the middle of a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water ... and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses” (p. 306). While this recognition of a shocking senselessness in itself begins to make sense of the mystery, Esther’s narrative clarifies further. When she first encounters London, she sees everything in “such a distracting state of confusion that I wondered how the people kept their senses” (p. 42). The answer lies in distraction itself: distraction away from such “distracting state[s] of confusion” provides a means for relief.

That had been one of the attractions of the Crystal Palace, which could divert attention away from the “volcanic ... nightmare” (p. 590) of urban slums, as well as reinforce the “agree[ment] to put a smooth glaze on the world, and to keep down all its realities” (p. 164) . In Bleak House, distraction is the allure of Chancery as well. The bewilderment induced by the chaos that appears to be outside Chancery is what gives rise to the desire for meaning and order in Chancery—to the meaning and order that Chancery both promises and withholds. “ ‘There’s a cruel attraction in the place,’ ” Miss Flite explains. “ ‘You can’t leave it. And you must expect’ ” (p. 473). With the expectancy that what makes no sense will yield some keeping the perpetual suspension of meaning and judgment of Chancery in motion, the result is the accumulation of more mud on the street.

This could be the effect of the novel, too, which was after all a diversion, however seriously undertaken by Victorians, who held that the duty of literature was to amuse and to instruct. Dickens appears to have added to these a duty to incite in Bleak House, and, in so doing, he antagonized those critics who felt that he was overstepping the proper bounds of fiction. While this increasingly forthright tendency in Dickens, as much as the savage irony of many of his later works, contributed to the falling off of his reputation among some critics, their remonstrances do not seem to have affected Dickens’s popularity or his social influence, which were both pronounced. Indeed, it was Dickens’s very capacity to act on consciousness through language that formed a constant theme in the otherwise varying views critics had of the novelist throughout his career. A reviewer of Bleak House put the matter thus: “With tens of thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen, Dickens is a hero. His very name gives a sanction to everything to which he lends it. He could do many things among his fellow-creatures, for no other reason than that he wrote Pickwick and Copperfield.” While Dickens’s power to do is a given, the doing remains an open question, and it is one that Dickens himself opens in Bleak House. For, what he also did in this novel was direct attention to what writing can do.


Dickens’s attention to writing itself is not a novelty in his work.