Dickens’s strength lies as much in a “slangular direction” (p. 155) as any other. He can do many things with words.

But in the volubility of Bleak House, we see and hear a difference, a withholding of words. In this novel, the very dash that is the means for connecting Jingle’s incongruous utterances becomes a mark for the final disconnection that occurs when Jo dies while reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “ ‘Hallowed be—thy—‘ ” (p. 609). This hiatus marks a dead end for language. Dickens can indicate it, or he can write around it. “This world of ours ... has its limits,” the third-person narrator observes, “ (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it, and are come to the brink of the void beyond)” (p. 23). Bringing us as far as the “closing” of “the reverberating door” (p. 534), the narrator’s circuit stops at another “blank.” In the verbal tour de force of Bleak House, Dickens’s language repeatedly calls attention to itself coming up short.

This emphasis on boundaries is quite emphatic in Bleak House, where Dickens demonstrated himself to be at another peak of creative power, yet did not indulge in the novelist’s consummate powers of captivation and mystification. Bewilderment is ample in the book and world, but even as Dickens disclosed some of its sources, he did not promise to dispel the fog once and for all. Pointing to the horrors “around us every day,” he acknowledged the very real need for distraction from them: after all, we have the sheer pleasure of Bleak House. For all of Dickens’s capacity to do with words, he also offered a moderated vision of imaginative writing. Turning from the “sunny dawn of time” to the “time [of] shadow” of Bleak House, “when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes” (p. 535), Dickens acknowledged the power of the imagination, even as he restrained his “Fancy” and rested in the realm of likeness and un-likeness, the realm of “as if.” “Purposely dwell[ing] upon the romantic side of familiar things” (p. 6) 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 House reopens every time we open this arresting, unsettling book. “ ‘We are really spinning along.’ ”


Tatiana Holway received 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

1 All quotations from nineteenth-century reviews come from A. E. Dyson’s Dickens’ Bleak House: A Casebook and Philip Collins’s Dickens: The Critical Heritage; see “For Further Reading.”

2 This figure comes from Robert Newsom, whose select bibliography for Bleak House can be found through links on the Dickens Project web-site : http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html.

3 And 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.

4 Dickens 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”).

5 The 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.

6 This 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 House induces bewilderment in the reader.