Jeanette Samyn

Deferring a “New London” in Dickens’s Bleak House

When critics consider ethics in Bleak House, they tend to assume that the novel is pessimistic about the systemic change that it seems to call for, that it holds up the suburban, individualized sympathy represented by Esther Summerson as meager defense against the social ills it attempts to document. My paper jettisons the idea that Dickens settles for Esther as a small-town (and always already insufficient) answer to big-city problems; presenting the novel’s third-person narrator as the collective-minded counterpoint to Esther’s suburban individualism, my paper destabilizes Esther’s position as Bleak House’s moral voice as well as the suburbs’ position as the novel’s ideal ethical arena. My study of the dialectical relationship between the two narrators-as well as between the suburbs and the city-allows for a reading of the novel in which London becomes ground zero for efforts to dissolve boundaries between the individual and the collective.

Against critics who argue that Bleak House cannot speculate on a new, utopian London because of his political pessimism, I draw on the work of Fredric Jameson and David Harvey to argue that this refusal stems not from cynicism, but from a view of the city’s problems as overdetermined and changing. Rather than saving ethics or desire for an unimaginable future point or a projected utopia, I argue, Dickens applies desire for the future toward the radical potential of the metropolis itself, presenting London as an ideal ethical arena, if not an ideal space.

Jeanette Samyn is a graduate student in the English Department at Indiana University. Her primary interests involve literature and collective politics in Victorian London and nineteenth-century Paris.