Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform

This essay explores the conflicted aesthetic modes of Victorian social purpose literature at mid-century, especially in its protests against both American slavery and British wage slavery. Centering on Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House, I argue that the novel critiques other art forms for their commodified status or sensationalist tactics, proposing instead a cold realism as the best technique to rouse a complacent British audience. The essay concludes with a reading of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, a slave narrative that rewrites Bleak House as a novel of the American South, and a work that also foregrounds aesthetics in adopting the Dickensian reformist sensibility.