Set against the “ ‘bedevilment’ ” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the plot moves forward, gathers momentum, and then, accelerating in “Flight” (chapter 55) and “Pursuit” (chapter 56), yields “A Discovery” (chapter 61) and “Another Discovery” (chapter 62) in the climactic final chapters of the book. Contributing to the vogue for sensation fiction, which flourished in the 1860s, Bleak House, like the later work of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is a thoroughly good read.

It is also a strange one. A novel in which Dickens answers the wish of the opening chapter of the book for “the whole” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce to be “burnt away in a great funeral pyre” (p. 23) with something as bizarre as the “Spontaneous Combustion” (p. 436) of Krook, the gin-sodden rag-and-bottle dealer who styles himself the Lord Chancellor, follows this with the “ ‘smouldering combustion’ ” (p. 526) of Richard Carstone as this youthful hero becomes absorbed in the case, and then goes on to represent the suit as being consumed by its own costs is evidently up to something unusual. “Unnatural” is the word critics of Bleak House used.

While the apocalyptic theme is one of the many linkages between the story line (or snarl) that concerns Jarndyce and Jarndyce and the one that pursues detection—apocalypse being a mode of discovery, unveiling—these strands of the novel are also structurally consistent, as well as being consistently subversive of the onward and upward motion of progress and of narrative that follows this path. As one of the earliest instances of detective fiction, Bleak House demonstrates the distinctive circularity of this genre, which begins after the fact—after the action, criminal or otherwise, that instigates the investigation—and moves forward, gathering the clues and making the discoveries through which the original actions and motives and means are reconstructed. In the backward-looking logic of the forward-moving detective plot, the end recapitulates the beginning. This recursive narrative pattern is even more prominent in the proceedings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. “ ‘It won’t do to think of it!’ ” says John Jarndyce. “ ‘When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the beginning of the end!’ (p. 105). So it is with Richard, who does not heed such warnings, and, ” ‘hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification’ “ (p. 105), becomes another victim of the ”ill-fated cause“ (p. 21).

In these and other ways, Bleak House coheres in a deadly whole that is emblematic of the deadly condition of England. Indeed, while John Ruskin argued that the number of deaths in Bleak House (nine, by his miscount; there are more) answered “a craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement” and that such a novel “entertain[ed]” the jaded reader “by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness the horrors, of Death,” this criticism is offset by Ruskin’s own observation that the number of deaths in Dickens’s fiction is “a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London.” But the point Dickens makes is closer to home. When Jo, the crossing sweeper who figures centrally in Bleak House, succumbs to slum-propagated diseases, he is one of many “dying thus around us every day” (p. 610).


At the same time that Dickens pointed insistently in the novel to the need for reform, he also engaged in a reform of the novel. That is, beyond the subversion of conventional narrative patterns, apart from the introduction of new conventions as well, Bleak House is a radical—and fundamentally unsettling—experiment in story-telling. Marked by its rudimentary difference from any novel written before, Bleak House is equally marked by the acute difference incorporated within, in the rupture that is created by the presence of two narrators and sustained throughout the entirety of the book. To be sure, the play of multiple voices and perspectives in fiction is not unprecedented. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) comes readily to mind as an early nineteenth-century example. What distinguishes Bleak House from other novels that employ a plurality of points of view, however, is how entirely incommensurate Dickens’s two narrators are in persona and perspective.

Speaking in “the voice of the present” (p. 84), the third-person narrator is omnipresent in his portions of Bleak House. Able to move from scene to scene “as the crow flies” (p. 23), covering territory both “National and Domestic” (chapter 40), he guides us through the far-flung reaches of the book and prods us to recognize relationships between its seemingly disparate elements. “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom ... ?” (p. 220), this narrator asks in a famous rhetorical question that re-emphasizes the “connexions” to which Dickens everywhere points.4 Possessed of the ironic consciousness that can assimilate the diffuse and contradictory features of the book and the world, the third-person narrator exemplifies what Dickens termed “a long-sight,” which “perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted person” (preface to Martin Chuzzlewit). He can also see clearly what characters in the novel perceive “only ... by halves in a confused way” (p.