"Keep[ing] the Outward Figure Away from the Fact": Reading Harold Skimpole as a Person of Color in Bleak House

Abstract

Despite Charles Dickens's 1859 protestations in "Leigh Hunt: A Remonstrance" (1859), scholars argue that he parodied Hunt as the indolent, selfish Harold Skimpole due to irritation with Hunt's financial issues, uneasy recollections of John Dickens's financial woes, or capitalist idealization. Although Bleak House (1853) contains multiple allusions to African missions and philanthropy, Skimpole has never been critiqued in relation to Hunt's reputed African ancestry, an open secret in literary circles. In a parody intended for mutual literary friends, Dickens may have concealed Hunt's racial heritage in "Phiz's" illustrations of Skimpole, while textual allusions suggest Hunt's moral (and hereditary) similarity to the "idle Black man" of the 1848–1849 British Guiana labor strike denounced by Thomas Carlyle in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849, 1853) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).