From terror to terrorism in Bleak House: Writing the event, representing the people

Abstract

This paper argues for strong affinities between Dickens’s handling of political violence in Bleak House (1852–3) and the alteration in meaning of the words ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ in the nineteenth century. Between the French Revolution and the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ shifted from connoting revolutionary violence wielded by the state to criminal political violence committed by clandestine organisations and individuals. I first read two key moments of political violence in the novel via Lyotard’s definition of ‘the Event’ as the occurrence that cannot be represented. I argue that Dickens’s novel responds to this problem of representation in a dual movement: on the one hand revolutionary violence is confined to the criminal discourse of the detective police, on the other, ‘modern’ conspiratorial terrorism is returned to the discourse of the French Revolution.