Paper Routes: Bleak House, Rubbish Theory, and the Character Economy of Realism

This article argues that in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House there is a deep affiliation between the novel’s management of minor characters and its own mass of discarded and recycled papers--both of which are systems of fluctuating value and visibility. Drawing on Victorian paper and rag recycling practices as well as anthropological theory, I demonstrate how minor characters, including Krook, Nemo, and Jo, embody the dynamic energy of rubbish in their ability to return in newly transformed and figural positions after death. Bleak House thus organizes its character world around a threshold of visibility that, in turn, works to sustain the reader’s experience of surprise and suspense.