The Polis's Different Voices: Narrating England's Progress in Dickens's Bleak House

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...