The Two Worlds of Bleak House

Abstract

We speak of the or the universe of a novel meaning the coherent order a writer imposes upon the fictional raw materials of character, setting, and event. He takes facts of reality, transfonns them into facts of fiction and presents us with a finished product which is (usually) a recognizable whole, now as in its own context as our world outside of it. It is once-removed reality. We enter this fictional world basically with its workings. We expect happy and sad incidents to occur, people to be born and die, and generally, life to be carried on in much the same way that experience has taught us it is. As for the specific shape of the fiction, exactly how reality is seen, that depends on how the author chooses to see it. He provides point of view, thereby controlling our response. We are not manipulated, just gently and artistically nudged in a certain moral direction. When, however, as in Charles Dickens' Bleak the moral direction, or the narrative impetus, is split into two directions, we are confronted with a critical dilemma. If reality is shaped by the novelist, and we are here given two shapes within a single book, which is the one? And if we can indeed call one real, in what way do we define the other? How do we read the book? The two worlds, the first-person, past-tense one of Esther Summerson, and the third-person, present-tense one of the omniscient narrator, believe are intended to be two totally separate entities rather than two halves of a whole fictional world. The clue to this reading is given by Dickens himself in his Preface to the novel: In Bleak House, he wrote, I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of things (p. xxxii).1 take familiar to refer to the omniscient narrative. It is, as have briefly described above, and as all novelistic fiction is, an abstraction from reality. We recognize in it our world, modified only by the filter of the imagination. What we experience in the first few brilliant paragraphs is a strong and sensuous evocation of historical continuity, of a past reality that has plodded its way slowly, slowly into the present, as slowly as a Megalosaurus might have moved. From the beginning we are in a present-tense world, one palpably real and