THE INTERCONNECTED WORLDS IN BLEAK HOUSE

An interview with Dr Charlotte Mathieson, English and Comparative Literary Studies

Charles Dickens’ Bleak House centres on the connections between people of different classes and their mobility, both literally and socially. In a revealing podcast, Dr Charlotte Mathieson teases out the themes of mobility and travel in the novel and shows how they depict social inequality in Victorian Britain.

Listen to the full podcast below:

Dr Mathieson, Associate Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, is passionate about travel in Dickens’ novels, having studied the theme for her PhD. “Ostensibly Bleak House isn’t really about travel in any real sense. The movements of the main characters are restricted between three key locations – London, Bleak House, Chesney Wold and a couple of instances of global travel (such as the Dedlocks go to Paris) but on an initial reading it doesn’t really seem to demonstrate much engagement with wider travel culture. Indeed, critics have often noted that this is one of Dickens’ most restrictively national novels. But what really struck me as fascinating about the novel is as you read it more and more, you notice just how mobile everyone is. It’s a novel in which mobility absolutely permeates the text.”

This discovery sparked her academic interest. The vast number of characters in the novel “are always depicted in an interesting way” in their movements, she says, with characters and travel used to show class difference. “It’s not surprising that there should be such variety of mobility, a vast network of socially diverse characters who are forced into contact with one another.” When researching the subject Dr Mathieson found that “mobility comes from a preoccupation of the novel’s representational strategies. It’s a surface-level concern; it repeatedly draws us to look further into how these different forms of mobility operate”.

The mid 19th century was a period of huge expansion in travel possibilities both on a global and national level. The transport revolution had been taking effect for some time. From the later 18th to the early 19th centuries there was a global increase in travel, but the latter signalled a crucial defining moment in reshaping the travel possibilities. There were huge technological advances. Railway networks spread rapidly across the country, and global travel and transport networks also advanced, especially in Europe.

In Dickens’ novels we repeatedly see characters go to places like India, China and Australia, points out Dr Mathieson. There’s a sense surrounding the novels, she says, that the world is becoming more connected and contracted. Yet with the sense of real possibility comes anxiety – there’s a “constant tension between embracing or resisting the possibility of travel”.

Mobility brings together different networks of characters and spaces of mobility offer places for cross-class encounters or the chance meeting. Take Lady Dedlock and Jo, the poor street boy. “Jo leads her through the city streets and these are the two most extreme ends of the class spectrum converging her in a joint act of mobility. Jo is an interesting example in the novel because he shows that mobility isn’t just incidental to this network… but that the novel is really making use of specific types of mobility to particular effect”.

An interconnected, mobile Victorian Britain couldn’t ignore the world outside its borders.

Jo is mobile as a result of his poverty. He has always been moved on from one place to another. He has nowhere else to go. This mobility makes him instrumental within a number of different networks and positions him as one of the key characters in the novel’s structure.

Tulkinghorn’s mobility contrasts vividly with Jo’s. Whilst Jo’s mobility is enforced, Tulkinghorn has command over his movements. Dickens describes him as slipping and sliding between different places in an effortless manner. Says Dr Mathieson, his “effortless movements between places is often made note of”.

In Bleak House Dickens constructs a vision of British culture which encompasses an array of characters from a variety of different social levels and backgrounds and he shows how they’re all interconnected with one another. Mobility also operates as a crucial motif, in which the novel plays out its critique of contemporary society and social inequality. By depicting every character through a different type of mobility which accords with their social status, mobility becomes a means of contrasting and drawing attention to social inequality. It makes visible that inequality and the effects that it has.

What about global travel for the richer characters? There are some instances of movement beyond Britain: because of their social position, the Dedlocks journey between Paris and London; and Woodcourt travels to India as a ship surgeon for work. These are structurally important journeys but “we don’t actually follow those journeys in the course of the narrative. We don’t see what happens on them”.

Bleak House demonstrates some ambivalence around global travel, particularly near the end of the novel in the scene where Esther visits Deal. She travels to the borders of England and as she walks on the beach “there’s this image of the coast being shrouded with fog, protected from what lies beyond the shore”. Dr Mathieson continues: “then as she walks on there’s this wonderful image of the fog beginning to rise and Dickens describes how it rises like a curtain so great numbers of ships become visible all lined up along the shore waiting to come closer. There’s this real sense in this scene that the global is not only close at hand but also pressing in upon Britain. It’s really only a matter of time before that border, the fog, breaks down.”

An interconnected, mobile Victorian Britain couldn’t ignore the world outside its borders. It’s not until Little Dorrit, which began to be published in serial form two years after the final chapter of Bleak House, that Dickens really began to engage with the possibilities of global travel.

We will be publishing an interview with Dr Charlotte Mathieson about travel in Little Dorrit next Friday (February 3rd). For more indepth interviews and comment, see the University's Celebrating Dickens website.

Dr Charlotte Mathieson is an Associate Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature Studies. Her PhD research looked at 19th-century representations of travel in the novel.

By Penelope Jenkins