he has had no equal in the favor of the reading public,” another review of Bleak House began. Other Victorian writers could sell more books: G. M. Reynolds, for one, whose career began with a plagiarism of The Pickwick Papers, far surpassed Dickens in sales of his sensational series on The Mysteries of London (1845-1855). But Dickens sold extraordinarily well: “I believe I have never had so many readers as in this book,” he remarked in the preface to Bleak House. And these readers were confined to no class. Dickens was a fixture at “every fireside in the kingdom.” When it came to Bleak House—“To ’recommend’ it would be superfluous. Who will not read it?”

Such a popular novel “is, to a certain extent, independent of criticism,” yet another reviewer asserted, effectively throwing up his hands. Nonetheless, critics had to say something, and what they said was quite mixed. There was censure: “Bleak House is, even more than any of its predecessors, chargeable not simply with faults, but absolute want of construction.” There was praise: Bleak House is “the greatest, the least faulty, the most beautiful of all the works which the pen of Dickens has given to the world.” Most readers of Dickens had long agreed that “the delineation of character is his forte,” but whether the characters of Bleak House were “life-like” or “contrived,” “truthful” or “exaggerated” was another matter. So, too, was the plot: in this regard, the novel represented either “an important advance on anything that we recollect in our author’s previous works” or, quite simply, a “failure.” In short, there may have been a great deal of talk about Bleak House, but there was little consensus in what critics said about Bleak House.

Such controversy is notable in itself. Although Dickens’s reputation among critics had fluctuated somewhat, especially in the 1840s, never before had assessments of his work been so conflicting. Nor had derogatory commentary been so pointed. Going beyond the “merits” and “defects” of the work—which was, after all, not exempt from such judgments—criticism of Bleak House became criticism of the author, whose “usefulness, instructiveness, and value” were coming to be increasingly questioned and whose very popularity was becoming grounds for alarm. “Author and public react on one another,” another critic began; where “truth of nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed to mannerism and point,” the effect was not good. Within a few years, Dickens’s reputation among critics—though not his sales—would take an even more pronounced turn for the worse.

Now, though, we bask in Bleak House. Resurrected by a series of influential twentieth-century readers, such as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, Bleak House has come, once again, to be a “regular portion” of literary inquiry, its interest sustained and augmented by the many modes of reading we have available to us, both within academic institutions and without. In the last twenty-five years, more than four hundred studies of one form or another have been devoted to Bleak House,2 and, although disagreements certainly persist, Dickens’s most ambitious novel has come to be widely regarded as his most accomplished one, too. Still, the question of what he accomplished in Bleak House remains worth asking, however partial and provisional the answers may be.


For one thing, Dickens wrote a novel that is about virtually anything and everything in mid-Victorian Britain. Comprehensive in its reach, exhaustive in its detail, Bleak House assimilates the multifarious characteristics of society into a coherent imaginative vision that is also a thoroughgoing revision of the sanguine image society held of itself at the time. “Progress” was the catchword of the day in the early 1850s. as well as an ideology encouraging a nearly boundless confidence in the human capacity to shape the world at will. Looking back over the widespread (albeit uneven) economic growth and increasing social mobility of recent decades, Victorians saw the present as a dramatic advance over the past, and they forecast a future that continued the accelerating pace of improvement. Taking a decidedly different view in Bleak House, Dickens depicted a society bound up in “perpetual stoppage” (p. 164).

This is not because Dickens did not share the belief in progress. On the contrary, his affirmation of his “faith ... in the progress of mankind” had recently and prominently appeared in the editorial manifesto for Household Words, the weekly journal he launched in 1850.There, where he spoke of the writer’s duty to spread “sympathy” throughout society by “cherish[ing] that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast,” he also expressed gratitude for “the privilege of living in the sunny dawn of time” (“A Preliminary Word”). In Bleak House, however, “the fire of the sun is dying” (p. 534); “darkness ... dilat[es] and dilat[es]” (p. 590);the “light of Fancy” glints rather than shines.

Shadows in Dickens’s personal life certainly contributed to the darkening of his imaginative vision.