Marshes and Dreams

Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel, Bleak House, has become a favorite case study for scholars theorizing the Victorian realist novel’s ambition to represent metropolitan life at a comprehensive—or even totalizing—scale. Though the novel’s setting in a sprawling Greater London often serves as a shorthand for the massive scope of Dickens’s representation of social processes, it is seldom observed that Bleak House continually gestures toward the “marshes and dreams” that lie beyond it.Footnote ¹ This novel is, surprisingly, pervaded by the figuration of pastoral imagery and rural scenery, counterintuitively focalized through the perspectives of its most static, minor characters. Dickens’s Londoners indulge in rusticating fantasies about “how countrified” the city’s “sparrows and leaves are” (158) and fancifully reimagine Holborn’s squalid courtyards as verdant gardens (66). Though these are figures who, like many other members of Bleak House’s teeming cast of minor characters, usually remain confined within city limits, they nevertheless play crucial roles in the novel, orienting the reader within a narrative structure that unspools across the competing registers of a hovering, third-person omniscience and intimate first-person testimony. These minor characters dream of a distant countryside more present in imagination or historical memory than in reality, and their dreaming, I argue, enacts an aesthetic sensibility that slips under the radar of twenty-first-century readers: an “urbanized rusticity” associated with Cockneyism and a revitalized picturesque, attached to the genre of the literary sketch.Footnote ²

In Bleak House, Dickens’s renovation of the sketch-as-form brings into view a civic picturesque that reintroduces modes of narration typically associated with late Romantic prose genres whose popularity was already on the wane in the 1850s—essays and periodical sketches of city life that depicted the emergent, unruly social energies of Cockney London at work and at leisure. This essay considers how Dickens’s surprising return to the figuration of urbanized rusticity at midcentury registers the significance of Bleak House’s setting in a topography produced by Greater London’s early nineteenth-century expansion, and shows its narrative structure to be indebted to the aesthetic modes that captured that period of rapid, decentralized growth—modes most notably exemplified, I’ll suggest, by Leigh Hunt’s 1830s sketches of London and its suburbs. The sketch is typically understood as a residual form in relation to the realist novel writ large, and Dickens’s minor characters—even in major works from the 1850s onward—evoke the productions of an earlier stage in his career. They recall the broad spectrum of urban types who populate his sketches of the 1830s and ’40s. The townscape of Sketches by Boz—like that of its antecedents, including sketches by Hunt—is a suburban milieu distinct from Dickens’s novelistic representations of urban life; a world of “types” or flattened sketch-figures at odds with realist conventions of character and characterization; and a historical moment often elided by familiar accounts of both Dickens’s career and the Victorian period’s relationship to the politically tumultuous early years of the nineteenth century.

Critics from D. A. Miller to Audrey Jaffe (and, recently, Amanpal Garcha) discuss the stylistic relationship between Dickens’s novels and Sketches by Boz, and demonstrate how the narrative structure of the sketch plays a role in the development of the omniscient narration that becomes the hallmark of his novelistic style.Footnote ³ However, they overlook the extraordinarily literal ways that the sketch’s deliberately minor form and thematic content make reappearances in Bleak House—exceeding Dickens’s ungenerous and widely recognized caricature of Hunt himself as the faux-naïf Harold Skimpole. Hunt, a fixture of London’s late Romantic literary world and the champion of younger poets and artists (from Keats to painter Benjamin Haydon) associated with the new suburb of Hampstead Heath and the so-called Cockney School, received the portrayal of Skimpole as a painful slight at the close of his career. The Dickens–Hunt controversy is familiar terrain for scholars and biographers alike, but the animus of Dickens’s caricature makes the affair still baffling, after all this time.Footnote ⁴ The registers of Hunt’s prose—enchanting, intimate and expatiating; roving, allusive, and hyperbolic—are corrosively parodied in Skimpole’s entertaining and self-absolving patter. Via Skimpole, Dickens transmits the legacy of an unruly Romantic poetics that surfaces in a deprecated form in Bleak House, unleashing a disquieting version of the sketch-narrator’s persona into the world of the novel.

Dickens and Hunt were personally acquainted, and the older writer’s literary and editorial work provided an important model for Dickens’s own professional trajectory. Hunt’s career, beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, provoked persistent (and often prejudiced) censure throughout his life.Footnote ⁵ In 1813, as the editor of The Examiner, he was imprisoned for libeling the prince regent. Hunt famously transformed his jail cell into a pastoral bower, papering its walls with trellises of roses and screening its barred windows with Venetian blinds.Footnote ⁶ During the 1830s, Dickens joined Hunt as a chronicler of scenes of urban life for the periodical press. The literary milieu they shared (and, indeed, possible textual parallels between Dickens’s and Hunt’s sketches) establish these years as a formative context for understanding the development of Dickens’s authorial persona and for interpreting how and why the form and content of these literary sketches provocatively resurface decades later in Bleak House.Footnote ⁷ What might it mean to read the character, Skimpole, not as a caricature of Leigh Hunt, the person, but of his style—that is, as a parody of the idealizing procedures of the Romantic essay and the formal affordances of the sketch? Such a reading repositions Skimpole as an avatar for Dickens’s own sketch-narrator persona, suggesting that Dickens’s caricature is less a gesture of disaffiliation from Hunt and the stylistic tendencies of the Romantic essay, and more of a continued exploration of the scalar elasticity of its modes of narration and description.

The deliberately minor qualities of Hunt’s sketches would appear to put them at odds with Bleak House, which is often characterized as one of Dickens’s most expansive works. But critics of this novel have often found their attention pulled in opposing directions, caught between the centrifugal force of the novel’s sprawling plot and what James Buzard has called its countervailing “energies of limitation.”Footnote ⁸ Can Bleak House, which seems to generate an endlessly proliferating network of spatial and social relations, be understood as a formal model for “scaling up,” to represent cohesion at the scale of nation, empire, and world?Footnote ⁹ Or does its preoccupation with the epistemological problem of limits—who knows what about whom, and the ethical bounds of our responsibility for knowing and caring about ever-widening circles of relationality—suggest a mode of downscaling aimed at drawing boundaries and establishing closure?Footnote ¹⁰ Anna Kornbluh argues that although this novel’s “aesthetic largeness” is usually understood as a determining condition for the totalizing “social largeness” of its representation of urban life, “Bleak House depicts urban space and public orders not directly, but as an extrapolation of domestic spaces in which its action markedly cloisters.”Footnote ¹¹ Might its imagination of urban space and social processes, then, be distilled to a surprisingly minimal institutional universe? As I hope to show, the resurfacing of the sketch’s form and content—especially the theme of rus in urbe—in Bleak House suggests alternative ways to consider the “largeness” of this novel’s realist form.

Though the genre of the sketch might appear to suggest a formal rubric only for understanding Bleak House’s limits, the example of Hunt’s prose supplies a set of unexpected continuities and highlights one of the sketch’s most significant affordances: its capacity to open onto a variety of different scalar modes, including the startlingly expansive. At the beginning of an essay entitled “Ludicrous Exaggeration,” Hunt writes: “Men of wit sometimes like to pamper a joke … into a certain corpulence of facetiousness. Their relish of the thing make them wish it as large as possible.”Footnote ¹² This is nearly a metaliterary comment on prose that frequently pursues vertiginous scale via hyperbole (exploring the potential for “scaling up” to humorously give way to the absurd or the nonsensical), is larded with literary and historical allusion that persistently gestures toward the availability of the temporally elongated vantage, and indulges in intimate downscaling toward the quotidian, the trivial, the domestic, and the familiar. The subtitle of an 1835 collection of Hunt’s writing—“A Miscellany for the Fields and Fireside”—suggests both the familiar register of his style and the essays’ roving ambit, from urban hearth to more rustic subjects. In poetry and prose, Hunt experimented with adapting a Romantic poetics of place, derived from eighteenth-century picturesque aesthetics, for new urban and suburban settings.

What might Hunt’s vision of “fields and fireside” have meant to Dickens around 1850? In the years leading up to Bleak House’s composition, he had embarked on a new editorial venture as the “conductor” of Household Words. He also made continual returns to his early sketches through revision as they were republished in new editions.Footnote ¹³ Essays by Hunt that had first appeared in his journals, The Indicator and The Companion, likewise continued to be anthologized through the final decades of his career and his death in 1859. In 1848 Hunt’s “Streets of London Sketches” (published in the 1830s in the Monthly Supplement to Leigh Hunt’s London Journal) were anthologized by Smith, Elder, and Co. in two illustrated volumes, entitled The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events, that reached new audiences and extended Hunt’s reputation as an elder statesman of the London literary scene. In investigating how Dickens uses the sketch-as-form to extend and exploit the realist novel’s conventions of narrative omniscience, I am pursuing two tightly linked lines of inquiry. On one hand, I’ll show how reading Dickens and Hunt side by side reveals the consequences of Dickens’s participation in the institutionalization of Hunt’s legacy for the development of realist form’s spatial and social parameters in Bleak House and beyond. Meanwhile, as I’ll argue, returning critical attention to Hunt’s Cockneyism brings back into view alternative ways of reading the Dickensian “townscape” that expose the political power of aesthetic forms to model and give shape to social space.

Urbanized Rusticity and Dickens’s Civic Picturesque

In the 1830s, Dickens and Hunt were both engaged in narrativizing the progress of London’s urban sprawl and suburban development. In what follows, I’ll demonstrate how Dickens’s modes of narration (in these early sketches and even in the major, midcentury novel, Bleak House) stylistically incorporate—even as they caricature—Hunt’s prose. In tracking these modes of narration across sketches by both authors, my reexamination of Dickens’s novelistic style suggests a framework for recontextualizing Bleak House’s setting within a topography oriented around the landmarks of Cockney London. This late Romantic genealogy suggests more continuity between Dickens’s realism and the early nineteenth-century periodical sketch than is commonly understood. It also indexes a shift in how metropolitan, middle-class Victorians—the audience Dickens’s midcentury works both construct and address themselves to—viewed themselves and their relation to urban and suburban spaces.

“There is an old prophecy,” wrote Hunt in an introduction to The Town, an 1848 collection of sketches originally published in the London periodical press throughout the 1830s, “that Hampstead Heath is to be in the middle of London; a phenomenon that London would really seem inclined to bring about. But a metropolis must stop somewhere.”Footnote ¹⁴ Hunt’s vision of Hampstead as the city’s epicenter is prescient about the cultural significance of the aesthetics of suburban life as well as its infrastructural incorporation into the ever-expanding metropolis of Greater London.Footnote ¹⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, one-fifth of the population of England and Wales lived within the limits of Greater London.Footnote ¹⁶ As in Britain’s countryside, an ideology of improvement, reified by picturesque aesthetics, naturalized the consequences of London’s rapid, decentralized development. Malcolm Andrews describes the character of the growing city and the ideology that euphemized its market-driven development as a “civic picturesque,” which harmonized an increasingly socially and spatially stratified townscape.Footnote ¹⁷

Once associated with the squalor and criminality of the city’s periphery, suburban land was increasingly recognized as valuable real estate and, later, a signifier of middle-class prosperity and respectability. Ann Bermingham traces the rise of a Victorian idealization of “rusticity” in these new suburban settings, concomitant with an intensifying urbanization of the surrounding countryside: through the aesthetics of urbanized rusticity, she argues, suburban scenery became transformed into capital.Footnote ¹⁸ But earlier in the century, the figure of the Cockney became a lightning rod for cultural anxieties about how urban development and expanding middle-class mobility was blurring spatial and social boundaries in metropolitan centers. As rural-to-urban migration swelled, London’s density spurred rapid, decentralized urban and suburban development, and its suburbs became sites of cultural contestation between Britain’s burgeoning middle classes and waning aristocracy.

The Cockney—parodied onstage in comic dramas, lampooned in Blackwood’s Magazine, and embodied in the public personae of Hunt and others—represented a way of seeing the country in the city. Applied to such scenic descriptions, “Cockneyism” became, as Gergory Dart suggests, a signifier for “anything that seemed out of scale, significance, or perspective, anything, that is, that seemed to have been disfigured by modern metropolitan conditions.”Footnote ¹⁹ Hunt and the Cockney School poets pictured urban sites of leisure for the working and middle classes, such as public tea-gardens and the homely back gardens of “Hampstead-road or Kilburn-road” that Dickens himself describes in an 1835 sketch, “London Recreations,” as havens of rustic retreat (207). As a provincialized urban type, then, the Cockney (despite the term’s pejorative connotations) emerged as a kind of modern subject as well as an object of consumption—a figure populating the townscape in much the same way rustic figures animated rural landscapes.

Hunt’s sketches celebrate modest, unexpected places of refuge and retreat within the old city limits of “The Town,” encompassing the streets between St. Paul’s and St. James’s.Footnote ²⁰ His allusive, sometimes idealizing prose suggests a stylistic register for imagining site-specific forms of collective meaning-making that often seem out of reach—hovering just beyond the limits of narrative semi-omniscience—in Bleak House, which revisits many of the same neighborhoods Hunt’s sketches depict. The Town is a hybrid work, more tightly focused than the essays collected in his “miscellanies.” Though not comprehensive enough to capture the complete extent of Greater London, The Town still promises an inexhaustible source of interest and entertainment that, its publishers declared, one would “never tire of reading” (v). The publishers’ advertisement declares, “Leigh Hunt has illumined the fog and smoke of London with a halo of glory, and peopled its streets and buildings with the life of past generations” (v). What does it mean to figure the sketches’ author as one who “illumines the fog”? To readers of Dickens’s Bleak House, this particular metaphor will be especially striking, since illuminating London’s smoke and fog—shining a light into its most obscure corners; reaching “the very heart of the fog” (14)—is precisely the task the novel’s narrator seems to assume in its opening pages.

Fog both pervades and limns the city’s limits, and the repetitions of Dickens’s descriptive prose accumulate incantatory power: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river … ; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city” (13). In the next paragraph, a brief clearing draws attention to “[c]hance people on the bridges peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a hot air balloon and hanging over the misty clouds” (13). Over the Thames, the fog produces a curious atmospheric effect—changing city into sky and making widely available the illusion of an expansive point of view, as if from a hot air balloon. This motif first appears in Cruikshank’s illustrated frontispiece for Sketches by Boz, showing Boz and his illustrator peering down from the basket of a balloon at the crowd below as they drift above the work’s title.Footnote ²¹ Cruikshank’s illustration introduces Dickens’s sketches by playfully inviting the reader to imagine contrasting points of view: the spectators’ bird’s-eye perspective and the view from the midst of the crowd hailing them with doffed hats and fluttering handkerchiefs. This invitation is richly suggestive about the Sketches’ contents, which offered middle-class readers the chance to imagine their subjectivities from the perspectives of both the one and the many—and, by anatomizing social types through Boz’s gaze, to narrate their own differentiation from the masses to which they belonged.

From the first, Bleak House establishes its omniscient narrator’s comprehensive, multilateral perspective by staging brief, sketchlike glimpses of urban life through the fog, which quickly finds its institutional analogue in the figuration of Chancery Court and the recondite legal suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce at the heart of the novel’s plot. The law is figured—like the fog—as obscure and omnipresent. But inasmuch as fog naturalizes an all-seeing point of view in the novel’s first pages, it also provides a figure for the limits of that omniscience: paradoxically, fog only brings the metropolis into view as a whole by reducing its visibility. Recalling the way Cruikshank’s illustration for Sketches by Boz implicates the reader in its triangulation of multiple points of view, what’s notable about Bleak House’s opening pages is how rapidly they destabilize the singularity of the narrator’s privileged vantage point. The fog produces visual effects that suggest what dizzying spatial and scalar distortions are required to bring the whole city into view—and insist upon the spectator’s need to become unmoored from fixed, grounded ways of seeing in order to apprehend the connections between London’s umbrella-wielding pedestrians, its streets, slicked with antediluvian mud; its “aits and meadows”; its “wheezing pensioners” and “shivering ‘prentices,” as part of the whole fabric of metropolitan space (13). Dickens seems determined to show the reader that a “halo of glory” would not illumine, but only heighten, the obscurity of this London particular.

Oddly enough, the narrative’s diegetic progress from street to courtroom is halted at the very threshold of Chancery by the figuration of transient illumination, via a strikingly pictorial simile that seems remarkably out of place in this urban scene: “Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy” (14). In a picturesque mode, this simile populates an imagined rural landscape with the hypothetical figures of rustic laborers.Footnote ²² The pair, who flash into view for just an instant, are uncannily poised just beyond the limits of Bleak House’s narration: they are not characters; they have no obvious place in the panorama of metropolitan life glimpsed in the novel’s opening passages and will not reappear elsewhere in the narrative. However, these rustic laborers perform crucial ideological work in Bleak House by drawing attention to the contrast between country and city that determines the scalar parameters of the novel’s form and shapes its narrative structure. In subsequent chapters, Dickens’s novel shuttles between a series of spatially proximate but socially distant locales: the Inns of Court and their adjacent slums on one hand; the “world of fashion” (20), wherein the upper classes orbit between opulent townhouses and the lush grounds of country estates “which have never known the ploughshare” (255), on the other.

The nature of the relationship between these spaces will later become the focus of the omniscient narrator’s nearly metaleptic speculation about the topics of proximity and contiguity: “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom?” (256). The spatial and epistemological dimensions of this question ask the reader to consider a project of mapping—first in a literal sense, and next, more abstractly, in terms of what kind of knowledge organizes connections between people and places, or, in other words, the novel’s imagination of social space. In each sense, Bleak House’s imagination of “connexion” is inextricably entangled with the scalar dimensions of the novel’s form and the construction of omniscience and its limits. However momentarily, Dickens’s simile makes concrete a social order that the novel is elsewhere at pains to depict as obscure and amorphous.

Since the panoramic gaze of Dickens’s omniscient narrator, which conducts us through the fog, opens onto the potentially volatile adjacency of sites of leisure and sights of ruin, Bleak House’s dual structure of narration is designed to keep the fact of interconnectedness between country and city at bay: the temporary suspension of this connection is both ideological and essential to the narrative suspense that propels the novel’s plot. If hypothetical figures of rural labor flicker into view just outside the doors of Chancery Court, it is because the courtroom is one place where the ideological separation between rural exploitation and the urban acquisition of social and economic processes is registered.Footnote ²³ Instead of being realized within that narrative structure, the actuality of those connections is realized in another register—in the novel’s enchantment with urbanized rusticity, an aesthetic mode that calls upon readers to envision the country in the city. In finding that Bleak House’s depictions of both urban streets and suburban hearths are pervaded by the imagery of an idealized rusticity, transplanted or relocated to a new urban setting, it may be that the novel’s paradoxes of spatial confinement offer new ways to think in scalar terms, beyond city limits. In this respect, as I’ll demonstrate, the sketch’s formal affordances resurface as an important resource for this novel’s imagination of urban space ordered by the conventions of a civic picturesque.

“Pastoral simplicity is not understood by the police”

To illustrate how Dickens renovates the sketch-as-form to produce and organize a civic picturesque that draws upon, but also parodically distinguishes itself from, Hunt’s ways of seeing the early nineteenth-century townscape, I’ll make a brief digression from Bleak House to bring nearly contemporaneous 1830s sketches by these two authors into dialogue. Hunt’s essay “May Day” is anthologized in the 1835 Miscellany for the Fields and Fireside, and Dickens sketch “The First of May” (originally titled “A Little Talk on Spring, and the Sweeps”) appeared in 1836. The irony with which Dickens distances himself from Hunt’s approach to their shared theme presages Bleak House’s caricature of Hunt and his style, and suggests how the narratorial persona Dickens had begun to construct for himself in sketches, like this one, both witnessed and helped shape a marked shift in the cultural meaning of the Cockneyism and the townscape of Cockney London. Gregory Dart localizes this shift as an effect of the 1832 Reform Act—an expansion of the franchise that, he argues, rather than deepening the lower middle class’s consciousness of itself as a class, institutionalized it, “consecrating this class as one that would always be … in transit, caught between two worlds.”Footnote ²⁴ Dart’s claim is nuanced but consequential, since he demonstrates how the institutionalization of “Cockneyism” as characteristically mobile and ambiguous effectively shaped a metropolitan lower middle class that “did not and could not think of themselves as a class … with a class interest, at all.”Footnote ²⁵ As a form of subjectivity—a way of seeing, and being, in the city—what kind of vantage point could the increasingly reified class ambiguity of the Cockney offer the sketch-narrator?

For both authors, May Day becomes an occasion for historical retrospection, as a shorthand for a quasifeudal past, hearkening back to rustic sports, village greens, and pastoral merriment. In “A Little Talk on Spring, and the Sweeps,” we see Dickens upending Hunt’s allusive, intimate tone and buoyant idealism to insinuate that, within city limits, a rustic Maypole dance might be more legible as a potentially riotous insurrection. Both writers, however, begin by expatiating on themes of disillusionment and renewal, suggesting that May Day traditions risk becoming tarnished in their relocation from country to city. Narrating the familiar story of a golden age, decayed, Hunt’s essay begins with literary allusions that evoke May Day as the long-held celebration of “the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other” (Miscellany 278)—until, of course, “debauchery identified all pleasures with the town” and, ever since, “we have been mistaking the means for the end” (279). But he rushes to assure his reader that these ancient traditions are recuperable: the wellspring of idealism inherently associated with spring’s return, he insists, remains continually accessible through great works of literature and the works of great men, from Chaucer to Epicurus. This is a sentiment echoed by Hunt’s more site-specific celebration, in The Town, of urban “trees and green spots” that provide unexpected sources of refuge and renewal (28). Much like the literary allusions that surface in “May Day” and throughout Hunt’s essays, this foliage “refresh[es] the common-places of life” (28), recalling the simple pleasures and easily forgotten truths that continue, he seems to suggest, to proffer resources for the setting to rights of our modern confusion of means for ends.

The opening lines of Dickens’s sketch appear to borrow a great deal from Hunt’s: “The first of May! There is a merry freshness in the sound…. What man is there, over whose mind a bright spring morning does not exercise a magic influence? carrying him back to the days of his childish sports, and conjuring up before him the old green field, with its gently-waving trees” (427). But he swiftly inverts Hunt’s optimistic conclusions about the renewability of May’s poetic pleasures. Dickens’s version ironically compresses the tissue of literary allusions shaping Hunt’s meditation on springtime traditions into a dense pastiche of clichés. This sketch inhabits the turning point of Hunt’s meditation on the same topic—the moment when Hunt briefly allows literary allusion and the material conditions of modern life to confront one another. Dickens connects the falling away of these “magic scenes” of childhood to a more thoroughgoing process of disillusionment, which is treated as by-product of the sketch’s metropolitan setting. Disillusionment offers the sketch-narrator—who persistently appeals to the reader with a pluralistic but impersonal “we”—a new mode for apprehending London’s expanding geography as a civic picturesque, composed of landmarks that index the overwriting of civic development onto histories of civil unrest.

At first it looks like parody: Dickens appears to stage the contradictions that Hunt elides, literalizing them to the point of absurdity. “Think of the immorality!” abjures Dickens’s sketch-narrator, while calling upon the reader to envision the following scenes: “What would your sabbath enthusiasts say, to an aristocratic ring encircling the Duke of York’s column in Carlton-terrace—a grand poussette of the middle classes, round Alderman Waithman’s monument in Fleet-Street—or a general hands-four-round of ten-pound householders, at the foot of the Obelisk at St. George’s-fields” (428). Though this prospect of class-stratified May Day dances throughout the city is humorous, Dickens’s vision of civic celebrations around such recently dedicated monuments is not too far-fetched. After all, the Duke of York’s column in Carlton Terrace, part of John Nash’s extensive redevelopment of Regent Street, had been erected by public subscription in 1834, and the monument to reform MP Robert Waithman only the year before Dickens’s sketch was written. By enjoining the reader to imagine “ten-pound householders” dancing an impassioned reel around a much older and humbler landmark, the obelisk in St. George’s-Fields, Dickens transforms the scene from an absurd spectacle into an actually menacing one: “Alas! Romance can make no head against the riot act; and pastoral simplicity is not understood by the police” (428).

This historical allusion is consequential, since St. George’s-Fields had been the site of a violent protest in May 1768, when troops fired on supporters of the politician John Wilkes, who had been ordered to disperse after a reading of the Riot Act. Wilkes was imprisoned for libel against the king (much as Leigh Hunt would later, in 1813, be imprisoned for libeling the prince regent). Though erected less than a decade later, in 1771, the obelisk does not commemorate the site of the St. George’s-Fields Massacre. Nominally constructed as a traffic light, it marks the completion of new roads through Southwark and London’s first purpose-built four-way intersection. By situating the obelisk in St. George’s-Fields among the monuments that have replaced “the rustic pillars” of bygone May Days, Dickens’s sketch-narrator obliquely alludes to the submerged, but still recent, history of political unrest in the 1770s and ’80s, and suggests how the memory of those events has been both inscribed in and obscured by London’s rapid urban development throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁶ An entry on St. George’s-Fields in a late nineteenth-century London guidebook describes the rapid development of Southwark in the wake of the Gordon Riots in the 1780s: what had formerly been an open, undeveloped field—a common space used by working-class Londoners for recreation and political gatherings—was quickly built up as a site for liberal institutions of reform, like the Magdalen Hospital, orphanages, and an industrial school intended for “the rescue of young children from a career of crime.”Footnote ²⁷ The relationship between the obelisk and the St. George’s-Fields Massacre of 1768 illustrates how civil unrest was overwritten by civic development.

As we see in this passage’s deeply ironized figuration of urbanized rusticity, Dickens’s sketch locates a mode of narration that momentarily brings the present and the recent past into one view—but the picture that surfaces is a strange spectacle, absurd and disquieting; unrelieved by the faintest air of either “romance” or “mystery” (428). The sketch closes with a report of what the narrator has actually witnessed on a May Day stroll through Islington: the sweeps clumsily parade in tawdry costumes of gilt paper, bedsheets, and artificial flowers, banging their drums, begging for money, and stepping on each other’s toes (433). “We passed the same group, accidentally, in the evening,” the sketch concludes, reverting to an admonitory, editorial first-person plural: “We never saw a ‘green’ so drunk, a lord so quarrelsome (no: not even in the house of peers after dinner), a pair of clowns so melancholy, a lady so muddy, or a party so miserable” (434). The late Romantic genealogy that links the later Dickens’s narratorial persona to the modes of narration we observe here, in periodical sketches by both Dickens and Hunt, clarifies the way Dickens uses (however ambivalently) these genres and the aesthetics of urbanized rusticity to find a scale and vantage point for narrating the processes of urban social life in novels like Bleak House.

Landmarks and Vanishing Points

Bleak House’s peculiar aesthetics of urbanized rusticity become most apparent when the novel’s omniscient narration is partially focalized through the perspectives of its minor characters. These figures, who mostly remain confined to the novel’s urban spaces, make visible and legible how this novel’s figuration of pastoral and rustic imagery specifically evokes the sketch-as-form—and, in particular, the explicit ways this mode of rus in urbe recalls Leigh Hunt’s literary style. The ambivalence and even hostility that Dickens expresses, in Bleak House, toward Hunt’s vision of the way social processes are inscribed in the expansion of metropolitan space points to its enduring significance: Hunt’s prescient thesis about Hampstead Heath as destined to become the city’s cultural (if not geographic) epicenter suggests a way of thinking about the scalar parameters of this midcentury realist novel in relation to a different model of expansion—in historicized and infrastructural terms, from the proliferation of property claims, to the extension of municipal limits toward urban and rural peripheries via roads and transit systems, and to the urbanization of the countryside.

For many scholars, what differentiates Bleak House from Dickens’s other works is its sheer scale; its apparent aesthetic and social expansiveness. Whereas Dickens’s sketches limit themselves to observations on individual neighborhoods or figure representative social types, his other social problem novels scale up to visit a discrete series of carceral institutions, one by one—the prison, the workhouse, the school—to explore and expose the inner workings of their disciplinary power. But, as D. A. Miller has suggested, in this novel, Dickens’s investigation of the condition of England operates on another order.Footnote ²⁸ In striving to represent the legal system—from the lord high chancellor in Chancery Court and my Lords Boodle, Coodle, Noodle, Quoodle, et al., his ancillaries in Parliament (190), all the way down to Inspector Bucket and his quarry—Bleak House represents the law itself as an obscure, pervasive force, seeping like fog across every conceivable architectural threshold: “What Chancery produces, or threatens to produce, is an organization of power that, ceasing entirely to become a topic, has become topography itself,” Miller writes.Footnote ²⁹ In the face of this totalizing organization of power, he argues, the novel’s omniscience must simplify and contain an all-encompassing system. Topography, or metropolitan space itself, has become cognate with a matrix of disciplinary power in Bleak House’s townscape.

Meanwhile, Bleak House’s return to the aesthetics of urbanized rusticity, along with the late Romantic genealogy that specifically connects this novel, specifically, to the style and content of Leigh Hunt’s sketches, provides a counterpoint to readings of Dickens’s novel that follow Miller’s lead in theorizing the scalar parameters of its realist form by emphasizing modes of narration that seem to strive for a comprehensive, omniscient vantage point. In The Town, Hunt’s depiction of the Inns of Court attends with precision to the relationship between the built environment and the abstract, diffusive operations of disciplinary power. The streets of Chancery Lane, Hunt writes, are flooded with traces of a world of “vice and virtue,” and the very walls of Lincoln’s Inn are “saturated with London smoke” (255)—imagery that proleptically resonates with Bleak House’s figuration of Chancery as situated at “the very heart of the fog” surrounding the whole city (14). But, by adopting a perspective deeply inflected by the idealization of rus in urbe, Hunt is able to sketch both the architectural spaces that instantiate and house the law and the unexpectedly pastoral eddies of calm and silence these lanes produce in the heart of the metropolis.

In Hunt’s London, the experience of rounding a corner can offer a moment of respite from urban tumult. Remarking on the “sudden and pleasant quiet” of the garden of Clifford’s Inn, where the “Rolls,” or records of the court, have been stored since the medieval period, he writes: “It is curious to consider what a small remove from the street produces it. But even the back room of a shop in the main street, or the sounds of carts and carriages becomes wonderfully deadened to the ear; and a remove, like Clifford’s Inn, makes it remote or nothing” (157). Elsewhere, the mere presence of foliage taking root in a side street, or a flower growing in a window box, can offer a sense of refuge or, as he suggests in a long digression on the city’s trees, even help passersby to collectively envision another possible world—a place where we might find “a portion of the tranquility we think we are laboring for” (28). As experiments in retooling a Romantic poetics of place for city life, Hunt’s antiquarian, digressive modes of narrating urban social processes deliberately historicize the increasingly stark differentiation of urban and suburban spaces produced by London’s rapid development. Bleak House’s minor characters are intimately connected with these “small removes” from the noise, the crowds, and indeed the disciplinary matrices of city life. We rarely encounter minor characters like Mr. Snagsby or Miss Flite in contexts other than the Inns of Court, but they connect Bleak House’s people and places in crucial ways. It is paradoxically through these characters’ local, site-specific perspectives that Bleak House focalizes the aesthetics of urbanized rusticity. They embody ways of seeing that, introjecting the form and content of the sketch into this novel, expand both the temporal and spatial scale of its representation of urban space.

To Esther Summerson’s eyes, Chancery Lane is a bustling townscape. She notes “the quantity of people already going to and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse” (66). Miss Flite, by contrast, observes that Lincoln’s Inn is “quite a bower in the summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously” (66). When the narrator focalizes the Inns of Court through Mr. Snagsby’s perspective, his “meditative and poetical cast of mind” likewise figures these surroundings as a quasirustic site of contemplation.

Mr. Snagsby, whose relish for his neighborhood’s medieval history characterizes him as a kind of Cockney antiquarian, loves

This description distinctly recalls Hunt’s description of the Rolls Yard in The Town, where he, too, contemplates the “many Chancellors, and Vices, and Masters” who may be buried there. “There is fine monument in the chapel to a Dr. Young, one of the Masters, which, according to Vertue, was executed by Torregiano,” he notes: “Sir John Trevor, infamous for bribery and corruption, also lies here” (158). The passage above, which focalizes Snagsby’s thoughts in a manner approaching free indirect discourse, could indeed be characterized as a faint ventriloquization of Hunt’s sketch of the Rolls Yard. Mr. Snagsby’s digressive, essayistic meditations on the Inns of Court and the Rolls Yard evoke both the style and content of Huntian representations of the Inns of Court in The Town. Further, I argue, they momentarily introduce, precisely in the manner of Hunt’s sketches, a new, historical vantage point into the world of Bleak House, expanding the temporal limits of the novel’s scope. This temporally expanded vantage is allied with, but qualitatively different from, that of Dickens’s omniscient narratorial persona in Bleak House. It is a viewpoint that becomes only fleetingly available within Bleak House’s narrative structure, but the moments when it does surface are consequential for the novel’s plot and setting alike.

As focalized characters,Footnote ³⁰ Miss Flite and Mr. Snagsby approach idiosyncratic and partially discerned versions of omniscience in a way that supports Bleak House’s narrative structure in mapping out this novel’s depiction of Greater London’s scalar amplitude and spatial limits. For instance, when Miss Flite conducts Esther and her companions to her lodgings above Mr. Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop in chapter 5 (“A Morning Adventure”), she unwittingly assembles nearly all the novel’s major characters in the same place: unaware of the shared history that binds them all, Richard and Ada, Esther, and Nemo/Captain Hawdon are joined together under the twin headings (traced by Mr. Krook’s illiterate hand) JARNDYCE and BLEAK HOUSE (76). And, earlier in the novel, she makes a cryptic prophecy that suggests a dénouement—for a plot just barely underway—that will be as inevitable as the pastoral changing of seasons in the “garden” of Lincoln’s Inn: “When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more flowers to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor’s court … the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth seal, mentioned in Revelations, again prevails” (67). Mr. Snagsby, too, experiences a kind of proximate omniscience later in the novel, though he is more cognizant of (and more unsettled by) it than Miss Flite. Discovering that he has accidentally become party to a “dangerous secret,” the burden of knowing something is almost too much to bear: “[He] cannot make out what he has had to do with. Something is wrong somewhere, but what something, what may come of it, to whom, when, and from which unthought or unheard corner is the puzzle of his life” (406). Like the novel’s third-person narrator, Mr. Snagsby must ask himself, “What connexion could there be … ?” but he cannot pose this question with the metaleptic aplomb of an omniscient narrator, who flourishes, as an open secret, the entanglement of Bleak House’s many characters and disparate settings.

What better describes the omniscient narrator of Bleak House’s “knowingness” about the hidden logics of adjacency and contiguity structuring its plot than the novel’s consciousness of history itself? Esther’s unknown past and parentage are, of course, the novel’s central mystery. Very few of Dickens’s characters are privileged with access to the temporally extended viewpoint a historical consciousness would provide; indeed, many do not even know themselves. Dickens seems to offer readers a fantasy of omniscience as a substitute for real historical consciousness. This makes the way that Bleak House puts the character of Skimpole to work toward the possibility of representing “the general cohesion of things” especially striking. It is Skimpole, after all, who ultimately discloses, to the faithfully ethical Esther, what kind of world she (and we) inhabit. A secondary dénouement arrives near the novel’s close—after the police detective has led Esther to the threshold of the churchyard where her mother lies, dead—when Skimpole confirms that it was he who drove the pitifully ailing street sweeper, Jo, away from Bleak House and he who accepted a bribe from the police detective, Inspector Bucket. Skimpole airily explains,

Whereas the burden of knowing something plunges Mr. Snagsby into a torment of suspense, Skimpole’s steadfast refusal to be “the knowing man” passes an epistemological burden along to Dickens’s readers, if we are prepared to receive it. He discloses connections between apparently unrelated circumstances in a way that expands and intensifies our knowledge of how social space is structured. These revelations come at a kind of ethical cost: a flattening out of his character that entails the withdrawal of our sympathy from Skimpole and lends a callous edge to Dickens’s caricature of Hunt.

Audrey Jaffe suggests that Dickens’s focalized characters function as “vanishing points,” marking places where the novel’s omniscient narrator—that roving, disembodied, authoritative consciousness—withdraws from the text and from the narrator’s responsibility for representation. The blithely irresponsible Skimpole appears to be a unique example of this delegation of narratorial authority. He is, I suggest, a figure akin to Dickens’s “uncommercial traveler,” whose business, as Jaffe writes of “Boz”—is pleasure.Footnote ³¹ Skimpole, in his parasitic social mobility, becomes a somewhat more rounded character than Snagsby or Miss Flite, but he is just as “marked” as any of the novel’s other minor characters—if not more so, because of his referentiality. In their flatness and site-specificity, the novel’s focalized characters resemble the array of social types Dickens represents in Sketches by Boz, whose relative stasis or mobility fixes them in place, as Amanpal Garcha has argued, within a class hierarchy that characterizes the socially marginal as ontologically excluded.Footnote ³² Like the sketch figures “Boz” depicts, Bleak House’s minor characters are thoroughly marked with fixed characteristics that cannot fade into the background: Mr. Snagsby is a “mild, bald, and timid man with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking up in the back” (150), and Miss Flite’s littleness embodies the cramped conditions of her life. Skimpole shares with Miss Flite and Mr. Snagsby, the other two characters in Bleak House who bring into view what I’ve identified as a Huntian aesthetics of urbanized rusticity, what could be called an “essayistic” mode of expression. However, recalling the Dickens–Hunt controversy, it becomes apparent that Skimpole’s referentiality as the parodic transformation of a real person and public figure into a “type”—underscored by how obvious the target of Dickens’s caricature was to contemporary readers—makes another reading of Dickens’s minor characters available. They are not vanishing points but landmarks.

Recognizing these characters as landmarks makes it possible to interpret Dickens’s recourse to the sketch-as-form in Bleak House as both a renovation and an institutionalization of the stylistic strategies of the periodical sketch and the Romantic essay, both of which aim to establish an intimate relationship between author and subject via an autobiographical register that is allied to the novel’s third-person narration. In Bleak House, I argue, this register does not merely belong to Esther’s side of the novel’s bifurcated narrative structure—it resurfaces in the stylistics of Dickensian omniscience. Miller has suggested that, in the context of Dickens’s stylistic development, narrative omniscience overcomes the narratological and epistemological problems created by the formal limitations of the sketch—and, he argues, Dickens achieves the synthesis of narrator and character through the “all-embracing subjectivity of autobiographical retrospection.”Footnote ³³ Through the story of a character who becomes the narrator of his own story in David Copperfield (1850), published just before Bleak House, Miller argues, “the phenomenology that (in the Sketches) locates the social outside the subject is not ever abandoned, but instead of being taken for granted, it now has to be produced.”Footnote ³⁴ Why, then, would Dickens undo this synthesis of character and narrator in his next work? What does the thematic and formal presence of the sketch—surfacing, as I’ve shown, alongside the incongruous aesthetics of urbanized rusticity—add to Bleak House’s project that the storytelling of its narrator-protagonist cannot account for?

Bleak House, in its aspiration to move beyond a narrative of individual Bildung and find a scale for representing metropolitan space and the social processes of a geographically expanding city, must both metabolize and move beyond David Copperfield’s autobiographical structure. In his portrayal of the relentless triviality, hyperbolic irresponsibility, and knowing naïveté of Skimpole, Dickens admits an avatar of the sketch-narrator’s almost threatening powers of omniscience back into the realist novel’s ambit. Skimpole, as Esther notices, “speak[s] of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if Skimpole were a third person” (90). After Esther has brought Skimpole’s history to a close in recounting their final conversation, she broaches the disturbing suggestion that there could be another version of the entire foregoing narrative, buried within her own telling of the story—that is, Skimpole’s memoirs: “He died some five years afterwards and left a diary behind him, with letters and other materials towards his life, which was published and showed him to have been the victim of a combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child. It was considered very pleasant reading” (935). This possibility is almost immediately neutralized, with characteristically gentle but cutting irony. Esther will not read Skimpole’s diaries and letters; they will not alter her retrospection, and, she intimates, their differences from and distortions of her own account would be as unpleasant for her as they would be for the reader who is nearing the conclusion of this novel. Esther’s determined suppression of the counternarrative Skimpole’s memoirs might contain should recall our attention to the counterintuitive centrality of Hunt’s sketches for grasping Bleak House’s narrative structure. As Dickens’s caricature of Leigh Hunt, Skimpole transmits a Romantic poetics that surfaces in deprecated form in Bleak House—in explicit, parodic terms (as when Esther recognizes him as a type of “romantic youth who had undergone a unique process of depreciation” [90]) and also implicitly, via the resurfacing of the form and content of the sketch itself. Having observed how Dickens’s broader engagement with Hunt’s prose runs the gamut from imitation to revision, we can now see how Bleak House becomes a venue for Dickens to reassess his relationship with Hunt as a literary model and predecessor. The Skimpole caricature both personifies and denegates the intimate and personal register of the sketch.Footnote ³⁵ Bleak House also institutionalizes it, giving the sketch a new context and a new cultural meaning in relation to the realist novel.

By inhabiting the idealizing, egotistical gestures of Hunt’s prose to their fullest extent, distorting them—and, in the process, fixing them into place, Dickens conveys something beyond their limits. Recovering the Dickens–Hunt connection shows Bleak House’s participation in a much broader story of how the idealization of suburban space contributed to the neutralization and containment of the urban middle class’s disruptive political energies, which threatened the social order of early nineteenth-century British society—and historicizes how the consolidation of disciplinary authority and market power in urban spaces continued to disguise the interconnectedness of country and city. As Raymond Williams writes, “All the ‘country’ will become ‘city’: that is the logic of its development: a simple linear scale along which degrees of ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ can be marked. But the reality is quite different.”Footnote ³⁶ By drawing on the late Romantic sensibility of urbanized rusticity and by making use of the sketch’s unique formal affordances, Dickens’s modes of narration enlarge nineteenth-century literature’s imagination of social space. But Hunt’s sketches also mark out the “reality” Williams points toward in startlingly prescient—and presentist—ways.Footnote ³⁷ “The past is the heir-loom of the world,” he writes: “Now in no shape is any part of this treasure more visible to us, or more striking, than in that of a great metropolis. The present is nowhere so present: we see the marks of its hand. The past is nowhere so traceable: we discover, step by step, the successive abodes of its generations…. The links that are wanting are supplied by history” (Hunt 4). History, for Hunt, becomes not just an important political tool but also a phenomenological experience that can be lived out in a quotidian register. In prose that indexes legible traces of the past, Hunt models for his reader how to recover histories that modern civic development and the narratives that naturalize it threaten to overwrite. Retracing the genealogy that links Dickensian omniscience to late Romantic prose forms, and especially to the Cockneyism of Hunt’s style, returns to view consequential ways of rereading and rehistoricizing the mid-Victorian townscape.