Charles Dickens, Victorian Gothic and Bleak House - The British Library
Charles Dickens, Victorian Gothic and Bleak House - The British Library
Charles Dickens, Victorian Gothic and Bleak House - The British Library
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Focussing on Bleak House, Charles Dickens's ninth and longest novel, Greg Buzwell explores how the novelist
incorporates and evolves Gothic imagery, settings and plot devices.
The early Victorian era is often regarded as marking a lull in the development of Gothic literature. The first golden age of
Gothic, inspired by authors such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis had passed, while the second
golden age of Gothic which would include works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker lay in the
future. Between these two periods the emphasis in fiction was firmly on domestic realism, social issues and the role of
Britain within a rapidly changing world. The melodramatic flights of excess associated with Gothic tended to be pushed
into the margins, the preserve of sensational penny dreadfuls such as Varney the Vampire (1845–47) and The String of
Pearls (1846–47), which featured Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Gothic fiction and the mainstream,
so it would appear, parted company. Crucially, however, Gothic was not so much banished as repressed. From time to
time it would emerge through the cracks to highlight those quintessentially Gothic themes of sexuality, transgression,
violence and death. The more you look at the work of authors such as the Brontës, Wilkie Collins and, in particular,
Charles Dickens the more Gothic motifs and elements you begin to see.
John McLenan's illustration of the dramatic moment the fire breaks out in Satis House, from the American edition of
Great Expectations, 1861.
Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist, certainly had ambitions beyond the simple desire to provoke fear in his readers, but his
use of disturbing imagery to emphasise important concerns about contemporary Britain added intensity to his arguments.
In Oliver Twist the orphan Oliver’s innocence is contrasted throughout with the greed of the workhouse administrators; the
grisly practices of Mr Sowerberry’s undertaker’s shop and with Fagin’s gang of amoral thieves. Grotesque comedy and
macabre imagery combine to make the serious issues raised by the book all the more disturbing and memorable.
George Cruikshank’s illustration of Fagin and the group of children under his ‘care’, from a 1911 colour edition of
Oliver Twist. Note the execution broadside depicting three hanged men pinned to the wall, left.
Usage terms Public Domain
The opening paragraphs of Bleak House describe London with surreal, nightmarish intensity. The streets are awash with
mud – so much so that ‘it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’; soot from the chimney-pots falls as a black rain; and everything from the London
docks to the Essex marshes, the Kentish heights and the eyes and throats of Greenwich pensioners is cloaked in fog.
However, this obscuring of the landscape in and around London is as nothing in comparison with the ‘groping and
floundering condition’ of the High Court of Chancery, where the seemingly interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce
drags slowly on. The literal fog outside the court mirrors the fog of stagnation generated by the processes of the law
within.
Dickens uses this method of comparison throughout Bleak House: time and again one location, institution or character is
compared with another. Just as the literal fog is contrasted with the mental obfuscation of the law courts so Chesney
Wold, the traditional Gothic country mansion of the aristocratic Lord and Lady Dedlock, is compared with the Gothic
London slum of Tom-All-Alone’s. Indeed, as Dickens shows, the desiccated nature of the former actually results in the
creation of the latter. In a sense, as we will see, the traditional Gothic landscape serves to shape its modern Gothic
counterpart.
In this illustration of Chesney Wold - the Dedlocks' stately home - Hablot Knight Browne draws out the setting's
Gothic elements. From the original monthly instalments of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, 1852-53.
Sir Leicester Dedlock’s stately home in Lincolnshire, Chesney Wold, is a traditional Gothic edifice. The labyrinthine
passages inside the building are lined with gloomy portraits; the river which the building overlooks is stagnant, and there
is even a hint of the supernatural in the form of the Ghost’s Walk, the flagged pavement running outside the house upon
which ghostly footsteps, if heard, are believed to herald disaster. Chesney Wold is emblematic of the dead weight of the
aristocracy, and the prevailing status quo that hinders any possibility of change. The stagnant river and the lengthy
succession of portraits depicting the previous generations of Dedlocks reflect the resistance to progress of the occupants
within. Chesney Wold’s true Gothic significance resides not so much in its appearance as in its anachronistic quality,
obsolescence and isolation from the modern world.
Tom-All-Alone’s, meanwhile, is a London slum that provides a modern Gothic equivalent to the moribund horrors of
Chesney Wold. The main street past Tom-All-Alone’s is ‘a stagnant channel of mud’ lined with ‘crazy houses, shut up and
silent’ (chapter 46). Tom-All-Alone’s provides a refuge, of sorts, for London’s poorest citizens, those on the extreme
margins of society. Due to its insanitary conditions, however, it is also a breeding ground for crime and disease. In the
illustration of Tom-All-Alone’s by Halbot Knight Browne, the buildings encroach on either side while the shadows
potentially hide all manner of threats and horrors. What links Chesney Wold to Tom-All-Alone’s is Chancery, and the
labyrinthine legal complexities of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Tom-All-Alone’s is the main location whose fate is
caught up in the interminable court case, a case that involves Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. The aristocratic Gothic
edifice of Chesney Wold, and the squalid slum of Tom-All-Alone’s are connected by the political inertia and self-interest
displayed by the interminable processes of the law – processes that the ruling elite have no desire to change because, of
course, it suits their interests by maintaining the status quo.
Hablot Knight Browne, the illustrator for Charles Dickens's Bleak House, depicts the slum of Tom-All-Alone's as a
decaying, gloomy and claustrophobic labyrinth. From the first edition, 1853.
Greg Buzwell is Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives at the British Library. He has co-curated three major exhibitions for
the Library – Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination; Shakespeare in Ten Acts and Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty. His
research focuses primarily on the Gothic literature of the Victorian fin de siècle. He has also edited and introduced collections of
supernatural tales by authors including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edgar Allan Poe and Walter de la Mare.