His father’s death in March of 1851 was followed a month later by that of an infant daughter. In 1852, several close friends died as well. While his wife suffered from a prolonged illness, Dickens, who confessed to feeling “as if I could have given up” (April 5, 1851),did not. The press of the necessity to work was always upon him, regardless of the degree of financial security he attained, and, alongside the discharge of his own daunting agenda of self-appointed duties—which included the painstaking conduct of Household Words, the conscientious management of a “Home for Homeless Women,” a taxing tour of amateur theatricals on which he embarked, and much else besides—there was the obligation to fulfill the ever-increasing demands made upon him by virtue of his stature as a public figure. Having attained an unprecedented measure of success in Victorian letters and prominence in public life, Dickens was coming to be oppressed by his own achievements. However strong such a feeling may have been, though, it extends far beyond Dickens or any individual in Bleak House. “Fog everywhere,” the novelist asserts on the first page of the book. There, Dickens’s severely critical, fiercely satirical vision of society also had something to do with the atmosphere of complacency that had been thickening in mid-Victorian Britain and was consolidated in London in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was a colossal endeavor, as its full title announces. Among its many aims, the representation and the promotion of progress through a display of industrial manufactures and technological ingenuity were foremost. If the vast miscellany of goods assembled from many nations (not quite “all”) served this agenda rather unevenly—the hordes of visitors to the exhibition tended to be overwhelmed by the sight—the revolutionary plate-glass and iron edifice that was built to house the display did so spectacularly well. Dubbed the “Crystal Palace,” the monumental structure covered nineteen acres of Hyde Park, where it stood as an impressive testament to Britain’s achievements and a potent symbol of its dynamic modernity. Indeed, although the Great Exhibition was initially conceived as an international project, its result was to focus global attention on the triumphs of Britain, which were widely—and wildly—praised. In the rhetoric of the moment, Britain was said to have attained the pinnacle of civilization and to be ushering a time when “Utopia ... will take the form and substance of a possible fact” (Illustrated London News, May 3, 1851).In effect, the condition-of-England question—much investigated, widely debated before and after Thomas Carlyle’s coinage of the famous phrase in 1839—seemed to have found a conclusive answer in the summer of 1851.

Inasmuch as the Great Exhibition may have suggested that this condition was exemplary, if not better, the vision it projected, however compelling, was partial. It excluded the condition of the working classes and the impoverished population of the country. Eclipsed by the Crystal Palace and the goods it encased, these realities were also effectively erased in 1851,when “the Exhibition—its glories and its wonders, its accomplishment in the present, and its example to, and promise of, the future” were “the only topics of writing, speaking and reading, and form[ed] almost the only subject... of the draughtsman and the engraver” (Illustrated London News, May 3, 1851). While Dickens had spilled his share of ink on the topic of the day, he was never an avid enthusiast. Privately, he said he was “ ‘used up’ ” by the spectacle. “I don’t say ’there’s nothing in it‘—there’s too much,” he wrote after a foray into the Crystal Palace. “So many things bewildered me” (July 11, 1851). By mid-summer, he was also utterly fed up with the mania for the exhibition and its puffery by the press. It was at that time that he began “pondering afar off” a new novel: “Violent restlessness, and vague ideas of going I don’t know where, I don’t know why are the present symptoms of the disorder” (August 17, 1851), Dickens reported. But he had already indicated his direction earlier that year. Having commented with some admiration on the great resources and extraordinary ingenuity being devoted to the production of the Great Exhibition in an article entitled “The Last Words of the Old Year” (January 31, 1851), Dickens had gone on to ask: “Which of my children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants, of England equally united, for another Exhibition—for a great display of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by the steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all hearts and hands, set right?” Bleak House is that “great display,” in which Dickens turned his back on the other one.

In so doing, he produced a more inclusive vision of mid-Victorian Britain than the Crystal Palace had done. Having spoken of the need to “study the Humanities through these transparent windows” (“Last Words”) , Dickens looked squarely at streets of “ ‘perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out; without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder; the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust’ ” (p. 106). If he was among “ ’the few’ ” who could “ ‘distinguish the grim misery lying underneath the magic brilliance which dazzles the visitor in the Great Exhibition’ ” (the Leader, quoted in Davis, The Great Exhibition, p. 192), Dickens was in an even smaller minority in taking a grim view of the entire condition of England. For, by mid-century, he had come to realize forcefully that Britain’s problems could not be isolated from one another, confined within class divisions, compartmentalized under discrete headings. Far from being local, such problems were inherent in the structure, the institutions, the practices, and the attitudes of society.