Structure and Idea in Bleak House

Abstract

If anything can supply an intelligible principle of Dickens's development as a novelist, it is the constant strengthening and focusing of his protest against social injustice. This pervasive concern with social justice is the link connecting the otherwise light-hearted and high-spirited meanderings of Pickwick in a world of coaching inns and manor farms to the sinister events which are preparing in the dark world of Chancery in Bleak House or of the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit. Speaking of this list novel, Shaw remarked in his often quoted preface to Great Expectations that it is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and speeches which are to Little Dorrit as red pepper to dynamite. Shaw had, like Macaulay, his own heightened and telling way of putting things, but to a world which persisted in regarding Dickens as the great impresario of soap opera, Shaw's comments needed to be made. The indifference of society to the suffering of its members; the venality, brutishness, or sheer ineptitude of its public servants; its perverse substitution of the virtues of the head for those of the heart; the hopeless inadequacy of its political and philanthropic institutions: these are the recurring motifs of Dickens's novels, from the scenes in the Fleet Prison in Pickwick to the symbolic dust heap in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens's aroused social conscience has of course led some of his critics into seeing his work as more doctrinaire, more rigorously ordered than it is. Thus T. A. Jackson and Jack Lindsay have