Dickens' Corrective Method in Bleak House

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           The modern reader frequently charges nineteenth-century fiction—and Dickens' longer novels in particular—with a penalty for excess baggage. Orwell, writing in 1939, complains: 


In the end the original story has been buried under the details. 

And in all of Dickens's most characteristic passages it is the

same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed.1


Orwell has chiefly in mind the exuberance with which Dickens floods the immediate fictional moment, but later critics—including Leavis, Garis, and Frye—broaden the attack. They find the tangled subplots of the longer books especially off-putting: to them, squads of satellite figures divert the novel's thrust; they clutter or simply complicate argument and form, giving us a busier book but not a better or a subtler one. 

          In recent years one rarely hears such carping. The current generation of critics, caring less for concision and theories of 

“pure" fiction, generally defends the propriety of narrative designs as broad as they are long. At least in the novels after Martin Chuzzlewit, many are now prepared to accept the Dickensian universe entire. Armed with phrases such as "parodicechoic structure," "analogical method," and "inclusive social vision," they have justified materials once thought extraneous or worse.2 


1 "Charles Dickens," in Collected Essays (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1961), P. 77. Of Dickens's detractors, Garis, in The Dickens Theater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) , is easily the most disparaging. Leavis, of course, has reconsidered the disdain with which he treated the major novels in The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and W'indus, 1948). 
2 I have in mind particularly John Lucas, The Melancholy Man (London: Methuen and Co., 1970); H. M. Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (New York: Schocken Books, 1970); and Edwin Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel in England and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Their recent work owes a good deal to standard studies by Edmund Wilson, Q. D. Leavis, and Hillis Miller. 

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