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  • “Sublimation strange”: Allegory and Authority in Bleak House
  • Daniel Hack

[A]s Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic imagination):

  . . . she turns Bodies to spirit, by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1

In the Household Words sketch “Mr. Booley’s View of the Last Lord Mayor’s Show,” Charles Dickens describes a civic parade through the eyes of an observer who believes that the spectacle is “an Allegory, . . . a kind of practical riddle for all beholders to make guesses at.”2 The reader is informed that “the real intent and meaning of the Allegory has been entirely missed, except by [Mr. Booley’s] sagacious and original mind” (M, 234). “When the clue is once found,” however, the meaning of each part of the procession becomes “obvious and simple”: an elephant, for example, serves as “a touching symbol of the great English people” (M, 235, 238). As the show passes before him, Mr. Booley succeeds in finding his “discovery” of the parade’s “latent meaning . . . confirmed by every succeeding object” (M, 235).

The piece’s humor derives in the first instance from Mr. Booley’s displays of sagacity and originality in the pursuit of latent meaning. Yet as the piece unfolds, another layer of irony quickly emerges, and the satire on interpretation generates or becomes political commentary. For Mr. Booley provides an alternative reading of an event that is indeed meant to be symbolic, as Dickens makes clear: the Lord Mayor has brought together representatives of various regions of the world in a putative show of harmony. The “general idea” Mr. Booley discovers in the parade, however, is a commitment on the part of the authorities to the improvement of the living conditions of the city’s inhabitants (M, 237). Thus, while a woman in “a spotless dress” is “called Peace in the programme,” this is only in order that “the Allegory might not be too [End Page 129] obvious”; actually, Mr. Booley explains, she represents “The Goddess Hygeia” (M, 236).

Mr. Booley’s “mistake” consists in determinedly reading the exotica on display in terms of the most local and material of considerations, rather than as referring back to or embodying their ostensible places of origin. The supposed “camel of Asia,” for example, alludes through its “inexpensive Water Works” to “the impossibility of people being healthy and clean without a good and cheap supply of water” (M, 237). Similarly, after consulting a work by the French naturalist Buffon to learn that “a horse naturally morose, gloomy, or stubborn, produces foals of the same disposition,” Mr. Booley confidently infers that the horse in the parade represents a pledge by the City “to extend, by all possible means, among the poor, the blessings of light, air, cleanliness, and instruction, and no longer to enforce filth, squalor, ill-health, and ignorance, upon thousands of God’s creatures” (M, 236–37). The Horse of Europe and the Deer of America receive similar treatment.

The joke, of course, is that Mr. Booley’s wildly inventive interpretive flights and arbitrary application of random bits of information consistently identify what the intentions of the civic authorities ought to be, but are not. Indeed, these interpretations, however comical as interpretations, approximate Dickens’s own comments and speeches on such issues as sanitary reform. 3 At the same time, since Mr. Booley’s interpretive ingenuity serves in this way to correct for the government’s failings, its very extravagance functions as an index of those failings: his distance from a proper understanding of the parade corresponds to the authorities’ distance from a proper understanding of their responsibilities.

Yet the sketch, so concerned with the proper establishment of priorities, both invites and stymies efforts to determine its own. For while the satire on interpretation and the commentary on social issues feed off each other, these agendas also work at cross purposes. To understand the piece’s literary satire, the reader need only perceive that Mr. Booley’s interpretation is incorrect. To understand or even register the political criticism, the reader must then recognize the strength of...

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