Bleak House, the great English novel
The Dickens Chronological Reading Club has reached Bleak House, the great English novel. I will never forget the first time I read the opening page of this book. The skulking atmosphere; the brisk, contorted prose; the perpetual sense of someone lurking. People often talk about the second paragraph, with all the fog. I was gripped from the first. A megalosaurus on Holborn Hill. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. This is London, but not as we know it. We are in a semi-real world, a place where it seems as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. Dickens writes on the edge of fantasy.
When Bleak House appeared, critics disliked it. So dark, suddenly. So gloomy. Where was the Dickens of old? The rolling, rollicking Hogarthian Dickens? But this new dark mode became Dickens’ most enduring legacy—he is the novelist of London’s fog, grime, squalor, and despair. Bleak House, of course, is about more than fog. It sometimes feels like it is trying to be about everything. Smallpox, the courts, aristocracy, murder, economics, altruism, secrecy, blackmail, homelessness, marriage, patriarchy, class, money, power. There are decaying law courts, weird and mysterious houses, cluttered shops, haunted mansions, an old lady who keeps birds, and a crooked shopkeeper who spontaneously combusts. People are constantly investigating and being investigated. And the names! Skimpole, Krook, Bucket, Tulkinghorn.
Still, the usual criticisms do apply, such as that Dickens was sexist—partly a reaction against Jane Eyre. More damningly for literary scholars, he was not a novelist of ideas, not like George Eliot. Bleak House is a part of a supposedly anti-utilitarian, anti-economic outlook, which would peak in his next novel, Hard Times. When he’s not seen as unphilosophical or inconsistent or shallow, Dickens is put in Carlyle’s tribe, believing economics was “the dismal science,” opposed to laissez faire industrialisation and selfishness.
I think that is wrong. Not only was Dickens more of a novelist of ideas than he seems, he was more of a utilitarian, too. Today I’m going to show you that Bleak House is more utilitarian than it seems and use Raymond Williams’ 1970 essay ‘Dickens and Social Ideas’ to outline six ways of using ideas in fiction—and that will show us how Dickens uses idea.
Why this matters
As I wrote in my essay on the role of the humanities in progress, imagination breaks the path that reason follows and Plato’s separation of analytic and narrative thinking is too strict. We are everywhere surrounded by ideas in the fiction we consume.
The social criticism of Charles Dickens was worth as much as all the nineteenth century’s poverty data. Statistics alone cannot make you feel the truth of what it is like to be in jail, school, or an orphanage. Think too about the role of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the debate about slavery and the way it affected the whole of society. More prosaically, it’s absurd the extent to which The West Wing preoccupied (preoccupies?) the imaginations of a whole generation of political types. That is not a good thing, but it is undeniably real.
Art is the closest thing to life. I don’t like this silly little instance of what amounts to quite a big truth, but many people will think more about politics and power when they watch Succession than at any other time. We all know that ideas in fiction matter when we say that children’s books and television should have girls as well as boys in prominent roles. But beyond that, the important role that ideas play in our fiction seems to fade away. Explicating the different ways ideas work in fiction, specifically Dickens, will hopefully demonstrate the way that fiction of all sorts is part of the ongoing battle of ideas in society, for better for worse.
Dickens the utilitarian?
Based on the usual reading of Hard Times and other books, the idea that Dickens could be considered a Benthamite seems laughable. The counterpoint to this goes all the way back to Dickens’ own time. In ‘“Bleak House,” Political Economy,’ Kathleen Blake quotes Dickens’ contemporary Sir Henry Maine:
Dickens, who spent his early manhood among the politicians of 1832 trained in Bentham’s school, hardly ever wrote a novel without attacking an abuse. The procedures of the Court of Chancery and of the Ecclesiastical Courts, the delays of the Public Offices, the costliness of divorce, the state of the dwellings of the poor, and the condition of the cheap schools in the North of England, furnished him with… the true moral of a series of fictions
Seen like this, Dickens was remarkably aligned to and perhaps sympathetic with Bentham’s sort of radical utilitarianism. And Bleak House is more sympathetic to the ideas of economists than we might think. Think of Skimpole, chastised for being uneconomical, and the emphasis Dickens puts again and again on the value of pleasure or happiness. Legal reform, impatience with history-worship that blocked rational improvement, and a dislike of social pretension, are all concerns he shares with utilitarians.
He was also connected to J.S. Mill: they both wrote for the Morning Chronicle. So we can start to see Dickens as part of the radical tradition leading back to Bentham. He might even be more like Mill in feminist terms. Gender inequality was most essential to the aristocracy, where property and title could only go to sons. As Blake says,
Dickens doesn’t show this subordination stopping with the upper class. Likewise Mill associates gender tyranny with royal and aristocratic tyranny but also shows it extending down the social hierarchy. This is a feminist line of thought not typically looked for in Dickens, but he is closer to the political economists than we might expect.
What about Esther? Was she submissive, concerned with her looks because of Victorian patriarchy, or was she an independent minded Benthamite?
Bentham himself declares the interest for the self of other people's good regard. As I read the last page of the novel, Esther has won love and a capital-letter, twice-repeated sense of Me.
Blake shows that the utilitarian idea of a panopticon, a radically transparent prison system, is crucial to the idea of Chancery in the novel.
Chancery is as far as possible from panoptical. It is at the heart of the fog, to the nth degree inefficient, uneconomical, uncomprehensive in view, closed to inspection, monopolistic, and self-serving at the expense of those it serves.
It is difficult to fit Dickens into an easy pro- or anti-utilitarian frame.
Six ways of using ideas in a novel
What makes all of this difficult to see is that Dickens is more concerned with the consequences of an idea, rather than the idea itself. Thus, he does not have to be a coherent, systematic thinker for ideas to be a major part of his work. He is writing about social movements and conditions downstream of the philosophical formulations. He is concerned, as Raymond Williams says, not with an idea, but with the system that uses the idea.
Whether he is or is not a utilitarian is therefore almost the wrong question, certainly a boring and not very useful aesthetic criteria. (Yes, F.R. Leavis was wrong.) (Also, why Quentin Skinner isn’t an essential part of Eng. Lit. reading lists, I’ll never know.)
Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Dickens and Social Ideas’ is good at delineating the different ways in which ideas are expressed through Dickens’ fiction. Williams sets criteria for the way ideas are used in novels.
First, as stories that are propaganda for an idea, which often appeared in nineteenth century magazines. In this mode, ideas are plainly stated in partisan terms. The novels sermonises and proselytises. Williams lists The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist in this category and some late H.G. Wells.
Second, novels that want to persuade us with ideas that are embodied not expressed. These novels are organised around, or directed by, an idea. Think D.H. Lawrence or War and Peace. The third sort is when ideas are discussed or debated in the novel, such as Aldous Huxley. (Think G.B. Shaw, too.)
Fourth, Williams makes the important point that when a novel uses familiar ideas, they go unnoticed—
Jane Austen, for example, is full of ideas, for the most part directly and plainly expressed, but most of them are so taken for granted as common standards or conventions… that they operate, as ideas, more passively than actively, although the final weight of the ideas in the fiction is no less.
It is in this way that Sally Rooney is a novelist of ideas, though she doesn’t always get recognised as such by the highbrows.
Fifth, ideas can be embodied as characters: the characters embody principles and the action tests those principles. He gives Anna Karenina as an example. Sixth, are the Kafka and Joyce types, where the ideas are “dissolved” in the world of the novel, so strongly is the world of the novel informed by these ideas it becomes almost a free-standing reality. (Williams doesn’t say this, but this must be the category of much fantasy writing.)
These are not especially stable categories. For example, Dinah in Adam Bede is a propagandist character in a more-or-less embodied novel.
Dickens, novelist of ideas
So, how do ideas work in Dickens?1 No arguments or Austen-style conventions are present. But the other four types—propaganda, embodiment, character, and free-standing reality are all there. (I recently wrote for subscribers about the way Carlyle’s idea of the hero is present in David Copperfield. Many of Williams’s categories are identifiable: the propaganda of Aunt Betsie, the embodiment of David, the discussion by Agnes.)
Dickens’ propaganda is widely known (and terribly dull). More pertinent are embodied ideas. Not just in Hard Times, but Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and Dombey, ideas are essential to the aim and structure of the novel. Obviously, too, many characters represent ideas: Pecksniff, Micawber, Skimpole. Williams distinguishes these sorts of characters who are “individual realities” that represent a “meaning or emphasis” in life, from the more literal examples of organised ideas in a character: Gradgrind, Dombey, Merdle. And of course, the dissolved ideas, the free-standing worlds are everywhere: Tulkinghorn, the Clenhams, Miss Havisham.
Because Dickens is concerned with inhumanity, pretensions, and deformity, his characters are often grotesques. As Williams says, Dickens works more finely than anyone else the tension between orthodox ideas “and the tearing, dislocating, haunting experience” the ideas were meant to control. The more fantastic, in all senses, a novel is, the easier it can be for the pantomime to distract us from the use of ideas.
Creative disturbance
Williams sees Dickens not as inconsistent but disturbed. It is this disturbance which is the creative source of his work. He writes about ideas and systems, but is interested in them as they are expressed in tensions, experiences, things he could actually show and understand, things he could organise and make sense of. He is not an abstract thinker. He likes to place and describe. He makes a world of mud, fog, shadow, pale light and darkness visible, a world of semi-mythical people, who might almost be mistaken for the creatures splattered with mire at the start. Welcome, then, to Bleak House, a world of ideas, or as Williams calls it, an obscuring and shadow filled world.
What obscuring, shadow-filled worlds are manipulating your ideas?
Leavis appreciated the second of Williams’ categories—novels organised around, and embodying, an idea, which is why he praised Hard Times, but he didn’t see the other categories and thus misses so much of importance in Dickens. At his best, Dickens uses ideas as part of a whole vision of life or society, not just a novelistic version of a particular line of argument.
Dear Henry, don't you think that Wilkie Collins is worth being, at least, mentioned ?
After reading Hannah Crafts's reworking, I have even more praise for Dickens's universality.