Dickens’s Supernumeraries

Abstract

This chapter begins with the exploration of how the Dickensian city novel works toward forging alternative modes of sociality out of the human surplus. It studies the political stakes of Charles Dickens's refusal to solve the problem his narratives so spectacularly create: the incapacity of all existing institutions — the state, the factory, the workhouse, the prison, and above all the family — to sustain the quantity of life they produce. Such sprawling serial novels as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend can consequently be read as intentionally failed experiments in population management. The chapter resists the new historicist tendency to equate Dickens's narrative techniques with surveillance and preventive policing, emphasizing instead how his fiction reveals power operating primarily through neglect rather than active intervention or the omnipresent gaze of the law. Ultimately, the chapter details how Dickens extends Bleak House's scope beyond the parameters set by British society. Rather than try to represent the unrepresented or count the uncounted, Bleak House reconstitutes its social world as a total always in excess of itself.