Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies

Abstract

Dickens is not known as a political economist. He is the critic of workhouse abuses (made topical by Benthamite Poor Law reform) inOliver Twistand the caricaturist of the father of Adam Smith and Malthus Gradgrind inHard Times. Students of Victorian literature familiarly takeHard Timesas F. R. Leavis does as a condemnation of “The World of Bentham,” of utilitarianism, philosophic radicalism, political economy. It is what we expect whenDickens, The Critical Heritagegives us John Stuart Mill complaining aboutBleak Houseand that “creature” Dickens for a portrait of Mrs. Jellyby that he finds antifeminist (to Harriet Taylor, March 20, 1854, qtd. in Collins, 297–98). But consider: inBleak Housethere is a passage where Mr. Skimpole declares his family to be “all wrong in point of political economy” (454). His “Beauty daughter” marries young, takes a husband who is another child; they are improvident, have two children, bring them home to Skimpole's, as he expects his other daughters to do as well, though they none of them know how they will get on. Skimpole is exposed in the course of the novel as one of its worst characters. For a bribe and to save himself from infection he turns the smallpox-stricken Jo out into the night. He cadges loans from those who can't afford to make them. He encourages Richard in his fatal false hopes of a Chancery settlement for a payback to himself for helping the lawyer Mr. Vholes to a client. Esther Summerson ultimately condemns him, and Mr. Jarndyce breaks with him. If Skimpole is all wrong in point of political economy, can there be something all right with political economy for Dickens?