The polis's different voices: narrating England's progress in Dickens's Bleak House.(Critical essay)

The first word of Charles Dickens's epic novel Bleak House (1853) is also its first sentence: "LONDON" (13). An agrammatical assemblage of capital letters, "LONDON" is a fragment, caught in verbless stasis, and it is a forceful one. London's streets, Dickens's justly famous opening description tells us, render progress impossible, and dogs and horses are caught in the mud as in the paragraph's grammar. While on first glance, London's foot passengers appear to be in motion, following "tens of thousands of other foot passengers [who] have been slipping and sliding since the day broke," their apparent progress is again impeded by Dickens's refusal to give the sentence a main verb: they are continuously in motion, yet going nowhere in particular. (1) This perpetual human motion, Dickens shows, is as the movement of money through London's banks, "adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest" (13). Mud piling up in its streets like assets in a lucky but mismanaged portfolio, London acts for Dickens as a figure for the considerable economic progress of Victorian England--a progress which was, of course, put on audacious display with the quintessentially modern Great Exhibition of 1851. Read against the hype surrounding this index of England's economic prowess, Dickens's loaded equation of mud with money suggests that the Crystal Palace, that lens through which we see the nation coming of age, distorts our vision--so much so that we read England's history, its national inheritance, not as a muddy, murky tangle of circulated and recirculated cash but as a transparently interpretable narrative of clean financial gain.

But even if the Crystal Palace hangs over Bleak House, it is, of course, not in it. Butt and Tillotson argue that "the Great Exhibition is deliberately, even conspicuously, excluded," (2) an elision which is curious, particularly in light of Dickens's own varied responses to the Crystal Palace. On the one hand, Dickens served on the Central Committee for the Working Classes, which was set up to improve traffic flow and hotel accommodations for the massive crowds attending the exhibition. At the same time, however, he found himself less than enthusiastic about the educative possibilities of the Crystal Palace and admitted privately that he worried that "[the crowds] will come out of it at last, with that feeling of boredom and lassitude." (3) Dickens himself went twice to Hyde Park but found he could not bear to go again when his children requested it. He recounts, "I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it." (4) Later, however, his critique of the Great Exhibition would take on more moral overtones:

 
  I have seen a project carried into execution for a great assemblage of 
  the peaceful glories of the world. I have seen a wonderful structure, 
  reared in glass, by the energy and skill of a great natural genius, 
  self-improved: worthy descendant of my Saxon ancestors: worthy type of 
  ingenuity triumphant! 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 steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all 
  hearts and hands, set right? (5) 

Put another way, Dickens might have been wondering which of his children would read that great assemblage of "sights" and "sins and negligences," Bleak House, the title of which, James Boasberg notes, could be read as a parody of "Crystal Palace." (6)

On the whole, critics have shied away from what Boasberg merely hints at--reading Bleak House as a critique of Crystal Palace progressivism. There are notable exceptions: Philip Landon, for instance, reads Bleak House as a direct competitor to the Crystal Palace, an attempt to rival the spectacular assemblage of sights in Hyde Park with an equally spectacular collection of narrative pyrotechnics. (7) And Robert Tracy sees Bleak House as an attempt to guide readers through the maze of sights and sounds that was everyday life in London of 1851; it is a sort of guidebook, designed to order the chaos of Hyde Park. (8) While Landon and Tracy read Bleak House as an explicit response to the Crystal Palace, it seems just as reasonable to me to think of Dickens's masterpiece as a comment on and critique of the values of the society which constructed and then flooded the Great Exhibition. Philip Landon reminds us that the Crystal Palace was an attempt to bring together all spheres of Victorian society: it was "distinctly anti-hierarchical ... a permissive populist structure" that displayed "equal respect for tradition and modernity." (9) Prince Albert described the exhibition in similar terms, as "a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived." (10) Yet in Bleak House Dickens betrays a marked skepticism toward such egalitarian narratives or progress. For him, the Victorian devotion toward scientific and industrial progress exhibited in such spectacular form in Hyde Park does not necessarily unite all levels of society in a joint march toward a modern utopia. Rather, these narratives of progress fall prey to the same errors of vision and perspective that have plagued England for centuries. In Bleak House, then, Dickens makes it his project to explore the connections between various spheres of society--classed spheres, political spheres, and ideological spheres--that the Crystal Palace aims to bring together in one giant glass and iron microcosm. Exposing these connections between the disparate groups that the Great Exhibition aimed to unite allows us to see their veiled similarities and shared errors, such that the Crystal Palace society Dickens shows us seems, as it were, to self-deconstruct.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that Dickens had few kind words for many members of the groups the architects of the Great Exhibition hoped to unite. On the one hand, of course, we see in his critique of Crystal Palace-culture an obvious indictment of utilitarianism. For Dickens, the Benthamites were culpable largely because they failed to think of humans as people and instead treated them as experimental subjects whose happiness could be calculated mathematically. Fittingly, then, some critics, following D. A. Miller most recently, have detected anti-Benthamite threads in the novel (a critique which we also see in Dickens's 1837 diatribe against the New Poor Law in Oliver Twist, his indictment of Mr. Dombey's devotion to the principles of political economy, and his 1854 mockery of Gradgrind's coldhearted utilitarian pedagogy in Hard Times). These critics tend to read this anti-utilitarian impulse as an argument for good progress, or compassionate reform; they see the book, that is, as an apology for kindhearted Liberal attempts to preserve and increase the health of the Victorian body politic. On the other hand, some critics have read the novel as a diatribe against England's age-old institutional throwbacks to--or embodiments of--the British constitution--another group for whom Dickens had nursed a long-running animosity. (11) These critics have in general seen the book as an argument for reform--an attempt to spur the British people and government to shake up the out-of-date institutions (Chancery most notably) that bog the country down. To be sure, Bleak House is not kind to England's stuck-in-the-mud traditionalism, as it ridicules Chancery, mocks Mrs. Pardiggle and her ritualist Puseyite cronies, and systematically levels the age-old Dedlock estate; it is as harsh to these nostalgic backward-glancers as Hard Times is to Gradgrind. These two common ways to read Bleak House's politics perform the same ideological work, however, in that they paint Dickens as a proponent of compassionate reform--and thus of social progress. Yet, I would argue, however compelling these complementary readings of Bleak House may be, their focus on Dickens's reformist impulses tends to elide the tensions that drive the novel's first paragraph--tensions that, in large part, suggest that progress is itself the problem.

A thread of an attack on Liberal progressive politicians, who avowedly attempted to cater to "all major economic interests" and "social progress," runs throughout the book, and it is this skepticism toward the Victorian metanarrative of progress, I want to argue, that lies at the heart of Bleak House. (12) In fact, Dickens suggests, these progressive politicians rarely did otherwise than cater to the interests of consumerist bourgeois individualists such as themselves. With the ridiculous Mrs. Jellyby, who cannot care for her own disordered home because she cares so much for Africa, for instance, Dickens critiques popular but ill-advised charitable efforts, the confused, amoral results of which Carlyle in 1850 had referred to as "one vile London fog." (13) Dickens also raises an authorial eyebrow at the single-minded progressiveness of the future manufacturing baron Mr. Rouncewell, who as a boy "took ... to constructing steam engines out of saucepans, and setting birds to draw their own water" (106-07) and who later, making his home amid the bleak smoke of heavy industry, gives his son the strangely elegiac--and just plain strange--name of Watt. The railroads are even grounds for complaint, and the havoc they wreak on the countryside means that "everything looks chaotic, and abandoned in fell hopelessness" (839)--a critique that echoes Dickens's horrific vision of the railroads in Dombey and Son. Most typically, finally, Bleak House, like Oliver Twist before it, questions--with its vivid description of the unsanitary conditions in the destitute orphan Jo's "home" Tom-All-Alone's--just how it is, in an age of such prosperity, that slums could remain uncleared and that orphans could be so mistreated.