beginning the world- catastrophism and bleak house (2009)

8/2/2019 Beginning the World- Catastrophism and Bleak House (2009)

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Beginning the World: Catastrophism and Bleak House

Catastrophism is a transitory and subversive force, underlying far-reaching change in society and its

ideologies during the nineteenth century. Its significance stems from discoveries made within thenewly named field of geology, emerging from natural philosophy, in the first half of the century.

Catastrophism constituted a radical challenge to Biblical authority in proposing an empirically

supported scheme in direct opposition to the, then dominant, traditional view of nature. The natural-

theological position had always seen nature as empirical evidence of intelligent design1 and

special creation. This religious interpretation of nature is still the point of departure for Dickens

writing Bleak House in the 1850s. It is one of Natural Theology; a fixed and static system where

nature's abundance or plenitude is a given. In such a system one in perfect alignment with Biblical

authority there is a direct correspondence between material reality and moral absolutes. But the

material reality of the nineteenth century provided such a multiplicity of new phenomena as to

challenge any essentialist system of stasis and of easy correlations between the nominal and

essential. Cuvier's theory of revolutions - where the world had seen mass extinctions, and been

populated by monstrous creatures - is the relevant point in hand. Gillian Beer (3) argues that: Most

major scientific theories rebuff common sense, underscoring the transitional period before what at

first seems fictive becomes broadly accepted truth. This invites us to draw parallels between

scientific and empirical discoveries about the nature of the world and the human narrative, or

language-based and naturally anthropocentric storytelling process, about that reality.

But further, just as Catastrophism challenged the dominant essentialist system and its

underlying myths, such as the Biblical flood and Mosaic account of creation in Genesis, so did it

support them as a reactionary force in combatting the ascendant doctrine of Uniformitarianism.

Indeed, it is an integration of Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism that underpins evolutionary

schemes argues Levine.2 (119) Catastrophism, in other words, preserves the connection, forcefully

felt in Dickens, between the physical and metaphysical. Its geological meaning may be anti-

Beginning the World: Catastrophism andBleak House

1

1 Anachronistic term used playfully, underlining that this analysis is in itself anachronistic. However, the modernreader should link the idea of William Paley's watchmaker, i.e. the benevolent creator that rests behind all creation,and of whom nature is proof, with modern ideas such as intelligent design, whereby the intricacies of nature point toa higher intelligence.

2 Even his [Dickens'] catastrophism, with its implicit recognition of progressive change rather then Lyellian stasis,

belongs to Darwin's world, for, as I have suggested, Darwin's achievement was in part the absorption intouniformitarianism of catastrophist progression. (Levine, 119)


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essentialist, but, as Mackay3 contended, A remnant of the mythical lurks in the very sanctuary of

science, pointing to Catastrophism's mitigating ability to reinsert the metaphysical into non-

essentialist schemes. It adds a much needed element of dynamism to a Lyellian universe of stasis.

Indeed, Darwin's ideas require the atypical and the aberrant; individuals that drive Dickensian plot

lines toward denouement and, particularly in Bleak House, catastrophe. They are, in short, pivotal

plot devices and agents for renewal in an otherwise static and dying universe. In other words,

Catastrophism both undermines and reinforces adjoining ideologies. It both bankrupts and

bankrolls, in turn, Natural Theology and Uniformitarianism plus Darwin's Development

Hypothesis.

The question regarding catastrophism and Bleak House is one of affinities. We know that

Dickens, a self-proclaimed realist, (Levine, 133) was also undoubtedly a metaphysical writer.4

Moreover, there is an overarching movement through Bleak House, and Dickens' writing as a

whole, towards the metaphysical, towards an order that cannot be explained rationally. In short,

Dickens himself would like to resolve individual plot-lines and character (ontogeny or individual

development) in a reaffirmation of an essentialist and natural-theological world. But this resolution

is never complete. Tellingly in Bleak House, only the past-tense narrative of Esther shows any

success in restoring the world to a sense of order. Esther's marriage to Woodcourt serves to a degree

as a resolution and restoration of benign order. But, as Hillis Miller points out, the world as

presented at the beginning of the book, is unchanged. In terms of society, plot-lines and characters

as a whole (phylogeny or species development), then Dickensian England languishes in

Uniformitarian stasis.

Can Catastrophism then describe the Dickensian project and worldview in Bleak House?

And if so, to what extent? Can there be correlations between Dickens, the realistic-metaphysical

writer - a contradiction in terms - and radical-reactionary5 Catastrophism? In what way can the

themes of connexion, poverty, justice and change be interpreted through Catastrophism? Certainly,

the invitation to read nineteenth-century geological theory into Bleak House rings out loud and


2

3 The Progress of the Intellect, Robert William Mackay. J. Chapman, London: 1850. [Book not yet obtained for pagereference]

4 Levine uses the term in arguing that Dickens is always more than just a flat realist, that in his world supernaturalforces are almost always intimated. This is not to be confused with metaphysical poets; indeed, it is a more literaladaption of the word, meaningthat Dickens writes of a world where there is a beyond nature.

5 See discussion above of how Catastrophism both undermines and reinforces adjoining ideologies.


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clear:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it

would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine

lizard up Holborn Hill. (5: 2-6)

Hillis Miller (160-1) comments, We seem to be in a world near the beginning of time, when the

primal flood, a flood whose context is Victorian geology rather than the Bible, has but newly retired

from the face of the earth. The megalosaurus, a grotesque, places the action both in time and space,

i.e. Crystal Palace circa 1852,6 and out of time and space or simultaneously in all time and space, in

myth. The delicate entwinement of the metaphysical and physical is set; both geology and genesis

are simultaneously factual and fictive. There is an ambiguity of origin written into the story from

the first few lines, calling to mind (if, of course, pre-dating) Darwin's hidden bond of community

of descent7. The physically and empirically realizedsaurus from Crystal Palace merges with the

mythical creature; simultaneously, the mythical flood is merged with the empirically proven

stratigraphic floods from the work of Cuvier. The categories of metaphysical and physical are at

once bound together and rent sunder. There is connection between the ephemeral and the eternal,

between the natural and supernatural, the material and the essential. The connections are neither

entirely complete nor entirely severed. The question of narrative, at once logocentric and

anthropocentric, is whether humans are indeed well placed to understand creation, nature, the

universe. The mythical flood, a part of human narrative, places man at the centre of creation.

Geological floods and catastrophes are unconcerned as to the human story. In this sense, the

elemental symbols that enshroud the book's opening all presage a human narrative's inability to

understand the universe, rendering the connections of the Dickensian universe ambiguous. Whenare we? we ask ourselves. Are we tied in time to a historical moment, or are we released to

transcend that moment? The answer may well be both.

The megalosaurus, a nineteenth-century grotesque, opens up significant channels intoBleak

House. Dickens may well have been aware of the story of discovering the megalosaurus, itself a


3

6 See Marshall (2007) for full details of the Crystal Palace megalosaurus.

7 Darwin, The Origin of Species, XIV. [Give page numbers]


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creature misunderstood and misappropriated.8 The dinosaur was a Victorian grotesque, pieced

together in best crime-fiction fashion, glimpsed in a phantasmagoria, as a mythical past brought into

a material present. In short, a merging of the physical and metaphysical. It is an extremely

challenging exhibit of the multitudinousness of the physical world, a testament to Darwin's tangled

bank9, and an opening inBleak House that continues through the book, in uniting antediluvian and

postdiluvian worlds. Dickens' characters have often been described as grotesques, as if grotesques,

characters whose observable physical traits mirror an internal moral state, were proof of his

essentialism and an affront to ascendant realism. Realism, steeped in the gradualism of Lyellian

uniformitarian time, favours the ordinary over the extraordinary. Grotesques are often quoted as

evidence of Dickens' essentialism in characterization, and therefore reinforcing a natural-

theological worldview. Levine finds affinity in Darwin's search for the atypical instead of types,

for the aberrant that drives change, for the variations that due to chance either flourish or perish:

Darwin's book insisted that one could not understand the development of species unless one

recognized that individual variations were always occurring, and that the world is filled with

developments from variations which might once have been considered aberrant. (Levine, 150)

The human grotesques ofBleak House Smallweed, Krook drive and contrive the greater part of

the plot through their wheelings and dealings. They may be both essentialist types or later/

contemporary Darwinian aberrations. Their grotesque baseness might be considered in terms of

changing and changed cosmologies. Their very caricaturesque puppetry recalls the Bakhtinian

concept of the grotesque body;10 an idea deeply rooted in Ptolemaic cosmology, where the base

earth is the centre of the universe. Aristotelian natural philosophy, upon which the Ptolemaic model

was based, placed heavy things at the centre of the universe, and, earth being heavier than water, airand fire, it naturally left earth motionless at the universes midpoint, with the lighter elements

circling round. Bakhtins concept of the grotesque body plays on this material coarseness of the

earth. Moreover, the idea of carnival and the carnivalesque - an inversion of cosmological and

social order embodied in the Feast of Fools, where kings become beggars, sages become fools, and


4

8 See Cadbury (2007) for the complete story.

9 Darwin, The Origin of Species, XV. [Give page numbers]

10 Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World.


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the world is, both literally and metaphorically turned upside down - underlines how Dickens and

all grotesques and caricatures are natural critiques of an established system. The satirical function of

these puppet figures, what could be described as grotesque realism, these amplified variants in a

multiplicitous scheme, is highly ambivalent: in representing at once the material baseness of death

and decay, and, at the same time, the regenerative powers of the physical earth in birth and growth,

they root all metaphysical schemes in the natural world, and purely physical ones. Indeed, they

constantly remind of the intertwining of the physical and the social. Krook, as shadow chancellor, is

a carnivalesque inversion of social justice, as physically bloated and innocuous as his counterpart

social institution. His consumption in fire, the spontaneous combustion, mirrors the collapsing of

the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. To this extent, the idea of Dickens' grotesques highlighting his

essentialism must be questioned. Rather, in true catastrophist mode, they invert them: the

metaphorical mode of essentialism and a natural-theological scheme may still be there, but the code

of intelligibility is inverted, not unlike the negative image of a mirror.

The megalosaurus, the book's first grotesque, is a similar such figure, whose significance

should not be downplayed. The first megalosaurus bone, the lower part of the femur, was variously

described as having belonging to the giants of the bible11 and as Scrotum humanum12, its

appearance compared to that of human testicles. When Buckland related the bone to Sauria (lizards)

the genus megalosaurus was born. The beast, like a mythical dragon, was first imagined on all

fours.13 However, the megalosaurus proved to be a biped. This was finally accepted after heated

scientific debate. Thissaurus crossed accepted categories of the animal kingdom. Its fused sacrum

was similar to that of mammals, allowing it to walk upright on land like a mammal. The dinosaur or

terrible lizard was born. (Cadbury, 247-9) So megalosaurus, an elephantine lizard (5: 5-6), is

invoked in the opening paragraph ofBleak House . It is a reconstruction of a past both empirical and

mythical. It is a mixing of the physical and metaphysical. It is both a type and an aberration at once.

If we are to heed the constant call and challenge of the book: What connexion can there be

[...]? (197: 12) then the connexion or the megalosaurus' place in the order of things must be


5

11 Natural History of Oxfordshire, Richard Plot, 1677.

12 Richard Brookes, 1763.

13 See Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' model commissioned for Crystal Palace, 1852. Full details in Marshall (2007).


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addressed. First, it merges the mythical and material, preserving a system of correspondences

between the physical world and any metaphysical order behind it; but, in turn, questioning any

continuity of correspondence. Second, it questions typologies, and genealogical structure as

observed in both physical and metaphysical terms, while simultaneously strengthening those types

and connections. The megalosaurus reinvents the past, both mythical and material. Further, it

provides an unwelcome connection between monsters and man, between reptiles and mammals. It

de-centers human centrality in creation (as framed by human narrative) and provides an alternative

narrative that, as Lyell put it, is insensible to our presence (Beer, 22). However, when realized in

human narrative, it re-centers humanity. Genealogically speaking, it implies monogenetic, or single-

origin, development from reptiles to mammals, whilst leaving open possibilities of complete

polygenesis. Satirically and morally looked at, it asks whether man is a monster or the monster is,

perhaps, man in the bleak house he has built. Consequently, we sense a dialogic over monologic14

mode at work; we sense a text in dialogue with other texts and contemporary ideas.

In terms of Catastrophism, dinosaurs always provide a stark reminder of cosmological

fragility. Their extinction, at this time assumed to be diluvian (though both Neptunist and Vulcanist

theory 15 also turns up in the first chapter ofBH, and that Agazziz's theory of glaciation was

gathering supporters), and a dinosaur's presence in London, is a reminder of imminent destruction, a

symbol of swift decline. The book picks up on the two major symbols of Catastrophism in its third

sentence: the flood(s) (as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth) and

dinosaurs, both conjuring images of former worlds, geological versus religious time, abrupt change,

and mono- or polygenesis.

But in addition to this, Catastrophism's dialogical relationship to competing theories, as

touched on before, allows a putative catastrophist mode to both reflect and invert simultaneously.

Bleak House explores this duality, or doubleness, in several ways. First, its double narrative allows

a duality of perspective on two intertwined, but incompletely complementary, accounts.16 The past-

tense, first-person reconstruction of Esther seeks personal, ontogenetical (individual-level)


6

14 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. (1981)

15 See Levine pp. 122. Neptunism, the idea that rocks are formed from water which initially covered the surface of theearth, and Vulcanism (or Plutonism), the idea that rocks are formed from volcanic activity, are synthesized inmodern geology. Goethe dramatized the debate inFaust(1808), a debate which lasted into the nineteenth centuryuntil LyellsPrinciples of Geology (1830-33) won sway for Huttons uniformitarian ideas.

16 See Serlen (1976).


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resolution in a natural-theological scheme where providence is reaffirmed and the individual

redeemed. By contrast, the present-tense, third-person narrative provides phylogenetical (species-

level) open-endedness. Esther's anthropocentric and logocentric account is challenged. For

example, inJo's Will, Jo's inability to recite the Lord's Prayer on his deathbed - Hallowed bethy

(572: 7) - leads to an authorial/narratorial appeal to royalty, nobility, clergy and laity, all levels

of society, to experience Heavenly compassion and reinstate a natural-theological order of God

manifest in nature. Jo fails to recite the Lord's Prayer. He dies with it on his lips, the light a

comin (572:5), and Dickens' ambivalence is palpable. Moreover, how can that be order and justice

for the poor? Or is Jo simply the Darwinian woodpecker that does not peck;17 the variation

seemingly unadapted to its environment?18 The answer is both and neither. Jo collapses, like the

houses in Tom-all-Alone's, like so many of the characters peopling the universe ofBleak House.

Just as Krook bursts into flame, as Jarndyce and Jarndyce melts away, as Lady Dedlock's demise,

or Nemo's fall. These all occur in the present-tense narrative where both ontogenetical and

phylogenetical catastrophe are played out. In this world - that not subjectively reconstructed in

human language and memory, and therefore decoded into linear causality and attempting plot

resolution the gradual decline, in uniformitarian time, is interspersed with dramatic crashes,

implosions, catastrophes that provide plot and prevent stasis.

Second is the process of doubling, or mirroring, on a character level. If a grotesque like

Krook is an inversion of the Lord Chancellor in Chancery as Lord Chancellor of the rag and bottle

shop (392: 14-5), then the book has an internal system of mirrors reflecting meaning around its

narrative world. The charge of simplistic good and evil essences in character, or caricature, becomes

hard to level when Chancery is held in universal horror, contempt, and indignation (307: 42-3).

The question is which figure is the more grotesque; both are, in some degree , adapted to (or

products of) their environments. If either of the two courts seem spiritually bankrupt it is the

Chancery, though both Chancery and its shadow court are unable to see beyond the material world

and its chattels. Krook can only read through memorizing letters, not whole words. The inability to

see beyond the immediate code of the material, physical world is shared by both courts; if any one


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17 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Barnes & Noble, 2004, pp. 155.

18 Of course, Darwin notes that individuals demonstrating anomalous habits would occasionally give rise to

new species. Jo is not a successful variation, though he does adapt to his environment to a degree.However, he is not an adaption that succeeds in perpetuating itself.


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of them can sense beyond that, then it is the shadow lord chancellor, though that sense is rooted in

personal and material benefit. A similar pattern of character doubling permeatesBleak House.

Hence Richard and Skimpole's doubled childish demeanours, Rosa and Hortense's inverted maids,

Hortense, Esther and Lady Dedlock's veiled lady; Miss Flite and Richard's submission to Chancery.

Bleak House, the first of its name to appear in the novel, is an example of how Dickens'

universe is replete with meaning, but meaning that constantly inverts, flips, slides and slips. Named

after John Jarndyce's father shot himself there, it signified a new beginning, a moment of

destruction and creation, and a renouncement of all claims in the Jarndyce & Jarndyce case. The

name echoes the past line that converged on catastrophe. And yet Bleak House, with its Growlery, is

a place that becomes filled with love, respect and friendship; its wind not often in the east. Its very

name sends out mixed messages. It has meaning, but that meaning constantly inverts. There is

warmth, humanity, and true companionship among the house that houses the wards of Jarndyce, the

juridically undone. Bleak House, though not torn down in a symbol of hope - is instead rebuilt, re-

territorialized, repositioned or renamed, perhaps all. Woodcourt and Esther move into a new Bleak

House at the behest of Jarndyce, in a move heavy in blurred symbolism and inconclusive allegory.

The multiple creations of Catastrophism are sensed in this line of plot. A hopefulness for the new

pair and their life together is sensed, if a rueful one for Esther's guardian. Korg (13) describes this

superficially romantic resolution to plot as a refuge from society; an oddly irrelevant escape from

the forces at work in the action of the story, not a victory over them.

Third, the symbolic devices of smoke and mirrors, blinds and veils that amplify this

mystery of the ordinary reinforce the dialogic function of text in catastrophist mode where physical

and spiritual, material and metaphysical, are both reflected and inverted (i.e. mirrored), both

collapsed and rebuilt. Dickens builds mystery out of the ordinary through carnival-trickery, hall-of-

mirrors inversions, phantasmagoria-smoke, teasing gothic horror out of the everyday. These popular

Victorian pursuits, suggesting the spiritual in the physical world, constitute a carnivalesque exercise

that fits snugly to the suggested doubleness of a catastrophist mode. The identity confusion

surrounding the veiled lady is one clear example forBleak House. Three female figures merge into

one shared identity as the lady in the veil. In one episode XXII Mr. Bucket the veiled lady

reappears in Tulkinghorn's chambers (281) butJo-who-knows-nothinkis not readily fooled. The veil

is yet another symbol of the masked nature of things, of things-behind. But Jo knows the order of


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things, the signs. He sees the whole, and quickly. He knows that the exterior, the surface is the

same, whereas underneath the lady is not there: It is her and it an't her. (282: 35) This sensitivity

to things-behind-things, of symbolic values, the system of absolutes at play within Dickensian

worlds of Natural Theology and Catastrophism, is part of Jo's character that Dickens uses to expand

and contract the worlds ofBH's universe. Tulkinghorn - who cannot see through the veil, not in any

absolutist sense - is contrasted to Jo's lack of material understanding on the one hand, but

familiarity with Natural Theology's order and chain of being on the other. In cunning, he becomes

Tulkinghorn's equal. Tulkinghorn is the character that, in reality, has least respect for the existing

orders. Jo, in contrast, takes Esther for Lady Dedlock (381: 7-8) in XXXI Nurse and Patient. Again,

he sees connections. Esther is veiled and Jo takes her for her mother, making connections in the

Dickensian world that few characters see. Another example is the image of the blind used twice in

XXVII More Old Soldiers than One; the blind is another veil, another device of obfuscation.

Tulkinghorn's secrecy, his mask, however, hides nothing behind its material front, only death.

There are no things-behind, as we know: from behind the blind which is always down (336: 42)

and watchful behind a blind (336: 29). The blind is reserved for Tulkinghorn, a character without

soul, mechanical almost, like a machine (512: 23).

In sum, the use of obscuring and reflecting/deflecting devices intensifies the theme of

connexion, or perhaps both deep-seated and superficial disconnection, that constitutes BH's major

theme and search. The series of grotesques, doubled characters, worlds and experiences, and finally

symbolic devices that obscure and reveal (dis)connections behind an illegible world, all combine to

enlighten the theme of connexion that leaves the world(s) ofBH astride the residual natural-

theological worldview and an emergent Darwinian paradigm. These devices reoccur as three of

BH's major themes are explored: time, connexion and change.

Time

We seem to be in a world near the beginning of time, when the primal flood, a flood whose context

is Victorian geology rather than the Bible, has but newly retired from the face of the earth (160-1)

writes J. Hillis Miller of the opening chapter ofBleak House. The exposition of time inBleak House

is critical to any reading; the three themes presented here intertwine and defy disentanglement.

Time is critical in exploring how the novel positions itself in relation to change and connexion. In

what sense doesBHpresent a Uniformitarian vision of time? The opening chapter,In Chancery, is


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of critical relevance in this matter. Not only does it introduce the concept of time as imagined and

realized inBH, but it acts as a key unlocking events in the later narratives.

In the opening chapter I In Chancery a meta-setting of anterior worlds is

established. Alternatively, prior and present worlds are collapsed and merged delivering a present in

the past and vice versa. Miller (161) points out that all the later heterogeneity and

multitudinousness has scarcely begun to detach itself from the two primary elements of water and

earth, fog and mud. The motifs of mud and fog are then deployed, two natural phenomena that

enshroud and obfuscate. The Megalosaurus is described as an elephantine lizard, a trope

significantly juxtaposing reptiles and mammals, the world of the dinosaurs and the mightiest of land

mammals of the day. Whilst evoking evolutionary ideas, affinities and natural progression through

Cuvierian animal classes, there also remains in the mix a tone of subversive mismatching. The

saurus upends the progressionist line and subverts Cuvierian animal classes. Darwin (et al) had

established evolution from reptiles to mammals. The motif of mud is introduced that will permeate

this opening chapter and, in turn, the book. It is from the mud that civilization has emerged; literally

in terms of its origin as understood through the natural sciences of the period. Similarly, Adam is

fashioned from mud in the biblical account; the religious story aligning mythical and material

reality.

Dickens/the authorial voice goes on that it is "as if the waters had but newly retired from the

face of the earth". (5: 8-9) This diluvian reference does not seem to stir parallels to the Noachian

Flood. (cf. Miller q.v.) Instead, it seems to hark back to diluvianism, the idea that the earth was once

covered in water, an idea that sits snugly with the biblical deluge. However, here there is no overt

religious under/overtone as beneath the waters we find a megalosaurus, and dinosaurs do not sit

snugly with the Mosaic account of genesis.

The powerful and telling imagery continues throughout the very first paragraph. Smoke sinks

from chimneys turning into black drizzle and the soot (carbon, coal, the strata in which the anterior

worlds of Cuvier are being/have been discovered) flakes pour down on the earth in mourning, the

authorial voice imagines, for "the death of the sun". The world is cloaked and invisible; its origins

and its present beyond vision or comprehension. The sun's death is a powerful image/idea that

evokes catastrophes and an end-time image. If the sun dies then all is extinguished; yet, here, in this

present locked into the past, it is as if the sun has died and all has been put out. None can see clearly


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through such nebulous obfuscation.

The next image again, to the modern reader, conjures up images of both Darwin's tree of

evolution and Natural Theology's Great Chain of Being. The narrator "ascends" from dogs through

horses to mankind, all embroiled in Dickens' primaeval mud, all scrabbling and sliding about but

slipping in "since day broke (if this day ever broke)". (5: 13-14) The theme of time rings out

through the first chapter. Here the beasts and men are collapsed in their chain of being into the

primordial mud-soup of the streets. Time is subverted (or perhaps simply reset) as this day becomes

at once all time and no time at all. The following "adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of

mud" (5: 14-15) feels both literal (yes, creatures have been slipping and sliding all day) and

metaphorical (What is a day? God's seven days of creation had been stretched into seven "days"

lasting some time in order to accommodate geological discoveries in the plundered earth19).

Moreover, it conjures up images of geological excavation and Cuvier's stratigraphy yet again. It

ends with a joke at men's expense; all that separates them from the primordial soup is their tenacity

in clinging to the lip of the abyss, and for every day in the gutter there is the accumulated belief that

human worth is inflated above all other.

The second paragraph introduces the complementary theme of fog, fog and mud, as if they

were two elemental siblings of a distant past; a distant past that seems mysteriously present: "Fog

everywhere." (5: 17) The fog is upriver in a pre-civilization of meadows and islets, it is downriver

in the defiled and polluted city. The fog then covers, and links together, mankind's past and present.

Where the "mud and mire" seems to mark mankind's physical link to the world, to the "body" of the

world and its provenance, fog is what masks man's understanding and knowing. It conceals true

knowledge of our past and present. It is also a cloud of misunderstanding and muddled truths. The

fog itself is "defiled" by the heavy industry and industrial pollution of the capitalist present. The fog

then is also a lasting state of misunderstanding, perhaps human misunderstanding aligned with

animal/mineral non-understanding or lack of a need for understanding. Humans' capacity to

understand and misunderstand leaves them fumbling and seeking in the fog, as opposed to simply

being without a need to seek (mis)understanding. It is also a fog from beneath the earth, in itself a


11

19 There were several responses to Huttonian deep time, and previous intimations about the earths age (e.g.Buffon). William Buckland contended that the word beginning in the bible meant an unspecified amount oftime between the origin of the earth and its current creation, and with it implying multiple creations. Further

ideas were re-interpretations of the days of creation as ages [reference missing] covering various periods tofall in line with the biblical account.


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geological discovery and release; it is a "nether sky of fog". (5: 28-29) Gas is then "looming"

through the fog (it is the "spirit" of coal) and seems unwilling. Again, the spoils of the earth are

being misappropriated by the human project of clinging to the pavement. But all is intensified and

the fog is at its densest at Temple Bar, Lincoln's Inn Hill, where the Lord High Chancellor sits in the

High Court of Chancery, at "the very heart of the fog". (6: 2) At the very heart of the fog is (in)

justice.

Dickens delivers a comprehensive view of time, or views of time, that permeate the work as

a whole. Time is constantly collapsed, questioned, frozen, and the ancient and modern continually

brought together along a time continuum that finds the present in the past and the present present in

all moments. When Judy verbally castigates Charley, in XXI The Smallweed Family, it is an

ancient snap (261: 4-5) that reverberates in past and present time, uniting them in a single

moment, whilst simultaneously reaffirming their chronological distance. Charley's meal, in the

same chapter, is a Druidical ruin of bread-and-butter (263: 14) and Judy Smallweed appears to

attain a perfectly geological age, and to date from the remotest periods (263: 15-17); again an

example of how Dickens shoots back and forth over the time continuum, playing on recent

discoveries and drawing in, then letting out, the expanse of, here, geological time. The play is often

on biblical time-markers, all recently under question. Uniformitarianism, expounded in Charles

Lyell's 1830 publication Principles of Geology, created a chronological time bridge between past

and present, collapsing them into a uniform constant without beginning or end. Chesney Wold

provides a thematic link to biblical and geological past-time; with its antediluvian forest (347: 1)

Dickens stretches the time continuum all the way back to before the flood, something he does on

several occasions inBH.

In XXVIIIThe Ironmaster, Sir Leicester Dedlock is burning wood from before the biblical

flood. Diluvianism, as propounded by Buckland, Connybeare and Sedgwick, was an attempt to find

scientific evidence to support the worldwide flood phenomenon of the biblical account. They drew

on Cuvier's Catastrophism in an effort to stave off the uniform and homogenous time-idea of

Uniformitarianism that underpins, in part, evolutionary thinking. Dickens does not allude directly to

these phenomena, yet he implies ideas akin to them. The antediluvian forests of Chesney Wold

suggest a link and historical continuity in Sir Dedlock's lineage and in the land itself. It both

reaffirms and calls into question the Mosaic account, as it both reaffirms and questions social order


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and hierarchy. Dickens has the fashionable intelligence proclaim to the listening earth (347:

8-9) of Lady Dedlock's return, alluding to Joseph Addison's The Spacious Firmament on High

whose last line, The hand that made us is divine, recapitulates the hymn's singular message of

Natural Theology: that evidence of God may be found in nature, and is therefore its natural order.

NT is clung to here in the damp, antediluvian Chesney Wold in the mouths of sycophants and

simpletons. Chesney Wold, then, provides a duplicitous and dichotomous image of time as felt in

BH. On the one hand, it is living (if dying and decaying) proof of an existing order, an order that, as

imagined in the Natural Theology of works such as Addison's, proves and demonstrates order,

intelligence and divine presence in nature. On the other hand, Chesney Wold is part of the

decomposing, decaying, dying universe imagined inBH. It may point to a Huttonian conception of

time, a slow eternity of decline: around and around the house the leaves fall thick but never fast,

for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow (356: 36-8); a time

without beginning or end, hence bereft of ultimate cause and purpose. Let the gardener sweep and

sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie

ankle-deep. (356: 39-40) Note the slow procession of present-tense verbs, the insertions in

commas fronted with 'and', all inexorable, irreducible, unending. At the end, if end it be, the leaves

still lie ankle-deep. Chesney Wold resonates with Victorian ideas of geological time and the age of

the earth. The leaves echo Cuvier's theory of stratigraphic layers, an earth built up of layer upon

layer. Here the leaves imply such Victorian thinking; indeed, the opening passages of the book

explore ideas that reappear throughout the book of layers, crusts, of a fossil record, and a shared

elemental past. The dead are present in the record of the present that unlocks the past:

Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising

grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell, like the smell of the little church,

though something dryer: suggesting that the dead and the buried Dedlocks walk there, in the

long nights, and leave the flavour of their graves behind them. (357: 2-7)

This gothic passage underscores a worldview that enjoys a confusion of time; the dead literally have

been reassembled and walk the earth again thanks to the fossil hunters of the period. However, the

dead should only walk again on the Day of Judgment in a Christian time-scheme. Moreover,

between science and religion, the ghosts of folklore bridge the two. In this paragraph, the mists,


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synonymous with the fog and mist motif of the book's opening, veil views and understandings;

this veil, or confusion, across the rising grounds which reinforce the inexorable passage of

uniform time, suggests the dead walking, leaving their graves. The suggested experience is sensory

(cold, blank smell, flavour of their graves); it exists therefore in a present moment, while

uniting the past to it.

Time then, and the collapse of it, serves important functions in BH. In terms of the theme of

connexion, it unites all individuality and all of society in a monogenetic, elemental past that seems

to exist in the present. Miller (160) highlights this: Prior to any individual entities are the fog and

the mud. They are everywhere, dissolving all solid form, like the shimmering atmosphere of an

impressionist painter The impressionist shows the process of the artwork, and so does the universe

we encounter in BH. The past is tangible; it is present. Fog and mud are two fundamental motifs

that recur at important moments in the novel. As primal elements that bind us together, we all slip

back into them; they hint at our common nature and monogenetic past. This duality, if not

multiplicity, underlies the world we meet in the novel. As a result, the beginnings and ends are ever

present in what does become a dynamic universe. That said, the timelines of the novel are divided

into the past-tense chronological reconstruction (seven years later) of Esther, and the present-tense

detached time that exists at the beginning (and end) of the book. Miller argues that things exist not

one by one, but simultaneously drawing on the use of infinite particles in never-closing clauses.

He argues that they form a continuous non-progressive present time (165). This sounds like a

form of Lyellian stasis. The other account actually goes in a counter direction against this non-

progressive time, looking to explain how the world came to be in the befogged, mud-soaked,

fragmented and decomposed state presented in the initial paragraphs (Miller, 168). When Miller

contends that all the novel is present in the initial moments (168) it is hard to contradict. The

world, in one timeline, is unchanged. There is no progression or dynamism. Causality seems only to

operate in the chronological account, and is therefore a human addition.

Both Natural Theology and Natural Selection are based on linear timelines; worlds where

progression goes from one point to another. In a religious timeframe of NT there are beginning-time

and end-time frames that give time its linear character. There is ultimate teleological cause in the

universe and therefore a direction. In an evolutionary scheme there still exists a linear time-view

where life on earth (with humans still anthropocentrically centered) progresses from simple to


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complex, undergoing a constant process of refinement and adaption to environment. In contrast to

these, the time-experience of Bleak House offers something radically different. It places two worlds

and time-experiences, one in time and one in space parallel to (or interwoven with) each other.

As a result, the events that drive the plot forward are, indeed, catastrophic; but catastrophic in a

world that, as Miller points out, does not change. Instead, we are left with the sensation of one and

multiple worlds or spaces, and one or multiple timelines. These concepts are inimical to the single-

world concepts of NT and evolutionary theory. It is Catastrophism that glimpses (a) world(s)

without progression and therefore ultimate cause. Moreover, the complex continuum of time

experienced inBHinvites circularity and a cyclical time-experience.

Various parts of the book might support this theory. For example, the doubling of Bleak

House and the thereby implied cyclical nature of time; it being reborn twice in the novel. This

without change on a broader level. The critical end-chapter LXV Beginning the Worldinvites a

cyclical conception of time, where the world is undone and redone, begun anew. I will begin the

world! (763: 9) exclaims Richard on his deathbed. This episode is recounted, of course, by Esther

in her chronological reconstruction. She adds: Not this world, O not this! The world that sets this

right. (763: 27-28) Her natural-theological standpoint colours the episode, she invites a double

existence of ephemeral and eternal worlds that make epic sense of Richard (and Ada's) catastrophe.

However, having entered the complex and conflicting universe Dickens has presented us as readers,

we know that this interpretation, or belief, is incomplete. Moreover, Richard does, literally, begin

the world again in the shape of his son in the new Bleak House. This beginning haunts Richard

throughout the book, as John Jarndyce charges both Richard and Ada: [... ] begin afresh! Bygones

shall be bygones, and a new page turned for you to write your lives in. (303: 14-15). He implores

Richard: Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die! (302: 14-15) Better than to rely on the court

case. The theme of what BHmeans chimes in here. John Jarndyce says to Richard, How I hoped

you would begin, (302: 34) and there is Richard's stopping point, in beginning the world. This

thematic weaving of time into BHis critical. Beginnings and ends frame the book, the characters,

the chapters (or numbers). John Jarndyce renounced his claim in Jarndyce & Jarndyce and began

the world in Bleak House, a Bleak House reborn, if still prone to a wind in the east. In contrast,

Mr. Jellyby (368: 39-40) declares himself bankrupt, escapes debtors' prison, and is to begin the

world again.


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Connexion

George Levine writes in Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (119)

that Dickens in his energetic tendencies to multitudinousness and the mysteries of imperceptibleconnection, [...] is close indeed to Darwin's nature, far from the ordered world of Natural

Theology. Bleak House transverses the gap between Natural Theology and Darwinian Natural

Selection, between a religious and secular interpretation of nature, exploring connexions in a diffuse

and inchoate universe. The theme of connexion - What connexion can there be [...]? (197: 12) -

an oft repeated refrain, is arguablyBleak House's most important.

Korg (10) states that: The subject achieves universality through a metaphoric leap; it

becomes associated with generalities belonging to different categories from its own. A

transformation takes place. His original subject matter the injustices of Chancery, poverty,

London slums, pollution, philanthropy et al through his suggestive poetic symbolism (Korg, 11)

imply wider generalities of cosmology, ontology and teleology. Jarndyce & Jarndyce, for example,

is a critique of law, but also of government, human systems, and being (ontology) and human's

place in the universe (cosmology). Is this then allegory? The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines

allegory as a symbolic fictional narrative that conveys a meaning not explicitly set forth in the

narrative. Allegory [...] may have meaning on two or more levels that the reader can only

understand through an interpretive process. In this sense, I would argue that it is symbolic allegory.

Though on one level we have a literal story, the reader is constantly invited into an interpretive

process extending the books meaning beyond the characters presented in it. In the opening

paragraphs the novel presents a corpse of dead society, smothered in fog, immobilized in mud,

paralyzed by the injustices of an outmoded social structure (Miller, 169). In this sense,BH is a

mystery story that investigates not only the Dedlock family mystery, but the mystery surrounding

the dead corpse of society.

There is then symbolic allegory at play inBH, constantly hinting at relationships beyond the

phenomenal world or causality, each detail invited to offer up a greater meaning. One critical

example of this is Allegory (the painting) which seems to reside in both Tulkinghorn's room in

London as well as in Chesney Wold (another example of doubling in BH). Dickens reaffirms the

interconnectedness ofBH's worlds, plus the need/desire/draw to interpret things-as-they-appearas

perhaps things-as-they-are. There is a symbolic correspondence here, if not exact, between physical


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and metaphysical worlds. But the system of allegory is clouded, in fog, just as all else seems to be

from the opening of the book. Whether this then may be seen in light of a move toward an

evolutionary scheme where the symbolic meta-world is collapsed, or simply something else in

between, is not clear. The symbolic allegory, invited yet never fulfilled, or made nebulous through a

new plurality of meaning, harks back to a complete system of Natural Theology where the absolute

and eternal exists unquestionably. In the world ofBH, those systems remain, and the authorial voice

clearly invites symbolic interpretation of motifs and events. Yet, there appears a new plurality of

truth and meaning characteristic of a world reeling in fundamental ideological change. In short, the

things-behind-things - absolutes, fixities, plenitude, stasis remain as legacy; but are yet found

wanting as a system that readily explains a new set of worlds, interconnected, drawn together and

yet strewn apart (or disconnected) in pluralities, mobility, flux, and impermanence. According to

Korg, Dickens presents (20): an inconclusive, kaleidoscopic multiverse of shifting perspectives

that eludes clear definition.

Another example ofBH's rich symbolism is dust, introduced in XXII Mr. Bucket, a summer

counterpart to winter's mud. Dust embodies intransience, the dust whence humankind came and

returns; it collapses life and death, cradle and grave: It lies thick everywhere. (273: 2-3) It is a

great leveller, like the motif of mud (discussed at length in Time), where all are returned to their

primordial state. A quintessence of dust as Shakespeare affirms through Hamlet. Dust is used to

draw together country and town, a lost breeze from one or the other flings dust in the eyes of

Allegory. Similarly, Tulkinghorn scatters dust in the eyes of the laity (here commoners outside the

high priesthood of the law). The dust is then complicit in the obfuscation attributed to the fog in the

book's opening. Indeed, dust is akin to mud in the air like fog; a dust, a cloud, a nebula, an

obfuscation. In this sense, the question raised is ontological/cosmological/teleological, one of being.

Where do we come from (dust), where do we go (dust), what does it mean (dust)? The motifs of fog

and mud sit easily in such a construction. They too describe man's common origin in the grotesque

body - mud and mire - our shared past in the fossil record and geological digs; as fog describes

both a physical (or literal) and metaphysical (or metaphorical) blindness and lack of understanding.

The symbol or motif of dust is linked to Mr. Tulkinghorn: In his lowering magazine of dust,

the universal article into which his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth,

animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits (273: 8-10). Dominion is death, and


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Tulkinghorn is filled with thoughts of death behind his enjoyment (the colleague who finally kicked

against monotony at seventy-five and hanged himself). Is this schadenfreude, or are there always

thoughts of one's own death implicit in joy in the misfortune of others? Tulkinghorn grinds down

the world into dust. His high priesthood is a dominion of death. He has replaced Allegory, that of

Natural Theology and a world order of design and divine purpose, with a worldly, human teleology

that grinds the world into dust, that obfuscates, whose enjoyment encompasses visions of death.

Paley's image of the watch and the watchmaker20 seems here transformed into an hourglass, filled

with hard grains of sand, or rather the universal article (273: 8) dust. All is converted into it, and

this process seems an inexorable ticking of eternal time. By controlling the process, high priest

Tulkinghorn's job which is, in other words, averting catastrophe stretches out time into a

uniformitarian scheme: uniform and endless, a monotony of meaninglessness. Tulkinghorn, in this

respect, may well imply a Huttonian/Lyellian time-scheme of slow, inexorable death and return to

dust. He seeks to uphold the natural order of things akin to a scheme of Natural Theology, each in

its place and time and station, in protecting the old families. Yet he effectively replaces their power-

base with a new secular one. Tulkinghorn tries to steady the ship, as a new humanist power (quite

contrary to the old, country families' source of wealth and power), and introduce a uniformitarian

time-scheme where catastrophe is averted, where processes are uniform, where the peaks and

troughs of existence are smoothed out into a dry existence of dust. This fails, of course, and

Tulkinghorn senses his own demise, his own catastrophe. Moreover, there seems nothing left to

believe in, nothing behind things in the dusty chambers of the lawman. We can only sense a

seemingly arbitrary lust for control and power, their is no new meaning that might replace what was

once a fully-fledged and complete system of order. Instead, their is an emptiness, a cloud of dust, a

quintessence of dust. There is only power and the holding on to it: a countenance as

imperturbable as Death (429: 25) In the episode recalled (of his one friend) by Tulkinghorn in his

melancholy reverie, there is meaninglessness, monotony and death. The powerful symbolism

attached to the uniformitarian Tulkinghorn is a microcosm of Dickens' attack on Chancery, the

human system at the very heart of the fog. Tulkinghorn is the ontogenical example at individual

level that embodies the new system where materialism vanquishes idealism, where life can be

reduced to a uniform process of Lyellian stasis, where Catastrophism, the symbolic and literal


18

20 Lovejoy, A. O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard: Harvard University Press,1936. [Wrong]


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destructive power of nature, can be averted, managed or used to material advantage. Tulkinghorn's

world has no secret, hidden meaning or order: He is indifferent to everything but his calling. His

calling is the acquisition of secrets, and the holding possession of such power as they give him, with

no sharer or opponent in it. (45: 11-14)

Miller (166-7) discusses chaos versus order where a) any attempt to find an intelligible

order in the universe is doomed to failure and yet b) where characters are trying to vanquish the

chaos of a merely phenomenal world. In this sense BH is an attempt to rediscover an

intelligible order, an authentic relationship between events (167) in a universe where the most

sane characters admit that we were all bewildered (762: 7); itself marking a thorough-going

return to the wild, away from civilization. Miller concludes: the assumption is that the world in

itself has a secret order or meaning, an order independent of the patterning spirit of the inquiring

spectator. Within the merely perceptual, momentary, and fragmented world is hidden a historical

continuity, a story, a human significance (167). This hidden significance, perhaps Darwin's hidden

bond of common descent, is quantified and commodified by Tulkinghorn into material wealth and

gain. The mystery is materialistic for the great and mechanical materialist: More impenetrable than

ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were, in secrecy; pondering, at that twilight hour, on all

the mysteries he knows, associated with darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up

houses in town: and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his family history, and his

money, and his will all a mystery to every one [... ] (273: 25-31)

The second motif to associate with him, above dust, is secrecy (or perhaps mystery). But this

passage makes clear that mysteries for the high priest of the law have no essential meaning beyond

their worldly appearance and how they may benefit him in terms of wealth and power. There is

nothing but a surface, a mask, in what Tulkinghorn imagines and reflects over; the darkening

woods and vast blank shut-up houses (country and town, note two of our worlds) hold no

mystery beyond what they might mean for material gain. The mystery is the law, a human and

humanist system that, in Dickens' world has neither purpose nor design. It is pure material power.

When it acts on behalf of the interests of the old, traditional power structures, it does so only to

maintain and cultivate power and its hierarchies. It is not radical nor evolutionary in its ken, no. It is

rather reactionary and regressionist. The peerage may have warmer worshippers and faithfuller

believers than Mr. Tulkinghorn, after all, if everything were known. (336: 30-2) Dickens makes


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clear that Tulkinghorn's quest for power has nothing to do with his actual belief in the nobility, far

from it: in his heart despises the splendour of which he is a distant beam (357: 43-4). He is rather

absorbed in love of power (357: 41) believing in nothing but power, secrets and self-

advancement.

Of course, uniformitarian, inflexible (357: 39) Tulkinghorn, part of the new power-base, a

middle-class which can later embrace Social Darwinism and bring the theme of poverty to crisis-

point, does experience his end in terms of plot catastrophe. There are elements of divine retribution

in Tulkinghorn's demise, of a world that perhaps does have the missing intelligible order. But, at the

same time, his death seems the result of a build-up of actions, of insults and intrigues, that have

sucked in peripheral characters; indeed, the catastrophic results from the very ordinary. In other

words, his death fits a pattern of Catastrophism, in combination with his uniformitarian character

where the present is the key to the past.21 Another point to consider is that Tulkinghorn, despite

his uniformitarian levelling out of process, or perhaps through it, turns the theme of connexion into

material advantage. In some respects, his attempts at connexion fall back into disconnection, the

disconnection of faltering between residual and emergent ideologies, Natural Theology and Natural

Selection. The theme of connexion implies disconnection, and this disconnection may well align

with the destructive symbolic and physical power of Catastrophism.

A critical number or chapter in the book is undoubtedlyXVI Tom-All-Alone's. It is a pivotal

part of the book where the theme of connexion erupts in a confrontation of worlds and ends of the

chain of being. Initially the pendulous and capricious movements of Lady Dedlock are contrasted

with Sir Leicesters hereditary gout. Her restlessness implies her unwillingness to accept the order

and state of affairs. In contrast, Sir Leicester submits himself to his illustrious family infirmity. The

narrator beds the chapter for events to come. As Sir Leicester is drawn back through time into death

and ancestry, Lady Dedlock flits like a shadowy wight from country to town, town to country.

The narrator implies and explores connections. There is movement and disorder in the social

order. There are unseemly connections and ties between top and bottom. Dickens confirms said

social order, our chain of being.22 But death and appearances question and subvert it. The residual/


20

21 Common summary of Uniformitarianism. Source unknown.

22

Lovejoy, A. O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard: Harvard University Press,1936.


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dominant ideology or worldview is palpable. But whether it really is the natural order and natural

law as imagined in a scheme of Natural Theology remains to be seen. If so, then all beginning and

end-times must be sublimated to the greater beginnings and ends. Within these cosmological

bookends there is little room for a shift. The stench of gout and of death, a Bakhtinian sense of the

grotesque body, pervades the rotten borough of the country seat and the shambolic underbelly of the

shanty-city.

As we switch to Jo, sweeping his crossing, the ends of the social order are retied and restated

in the motifs that opened the book. First there was the fog of ignorance, the fog of London and of

what we cannot know; the mists of time as we journeyed back up river to meadows and springs and

bubbling becks are linked to this - what does time tell us? Plus the mud and mire that is the

Bakhtinian grotesque body (q.v.), that inverts society and links us all in death and burial, in a return

to the earth and fossilization.

Jo is both of these as we are drawn to his crossing, where the ends of the order will meet. His

mantra of dont know nothink resonates through the mud and mire. The images are not given

clearly, they are rather nebulous and unfathomable. But there seems much meaning in the following

lines:

He knows its hard to keep mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to live by

doing it. Nobody taught him, even that much, he found it out. (197: 21-24)

Jo knows things. We have met the mud and mire (6: 4-5) into which we all are sucked. There is

no clear one-for-one symbolism in these words, and yet they are thoroughly loaded. This invertible

duality is Dickens call and challenge to us. To read the voices that are always there. The dirty

weather recalls the fog and mist that sends us back to an elemental time (In Chancery I); a link, acrossing, a tie or bond that at once affirms and collapses human learning, the what-you-know and

what-you-do-not-know. Jo seems strangely freed from the chain of human learning, left to fend for

himself. The quote clings to, and lets loose, mortality in one grasp - Jo lives - that is to say, Jo has

not yet died (197: 25). [Miller?]

But Jo recognizes the chain of being, natures social order writ large in London. There is no


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progression or progressionism here.23 There is no betterment. There is only degradation and perhaps

degeneration.24 Dickens language is unforgiving: maggot numbers (197: 34), vermin

parasites (197: 32), these are not creatures of the Great Chain of Being. These are debased human

beings: the ruined human wretch (197: 31-32). But not degenerated to some Romantic

Rousseauvian savage state; instead, to a swarm of misery (ibid.). There is little doubt that design,

in terms of Natural Theology, could only be seen as malignant, as sowing more evil in its every

footprint. (197: 36) But while the residual/dominant paradigm fails and rots from within, there is

no hope of betterment, of human intervention, of a doctrine of evolution where humanist

progression may succeed. No, there is only the folly of the fine gentlemen, born to their stations,

but incompetent of setting it right in five hundred years. So where then is the dominant

worldview as portrayed in Dickens universe?

Tom-All-Alones, a forsaken area of tumbling tenements (197: 30-31) in Chancery, is snap-

and-heel next to the law courts and the jaundice, and jaunice (Fr. Jealousy), of Jarndyce and

Jarndyce. Here the landslides, a crash and a cloud of dust, the houses falling, sporadically

punctuate the everyday life amongst the rubbish. Here at the breaking points, at the tipping points,

the weak are caught in the quotidian catastrophe caused by the micro-variations and changes in their

fragile, house-of-cards universe. The tremors sent through the entire aching and groaning chain

cause daily disaster in these forsaken flash-points. The metamorphosis results in anatexis;25 the

catastrophe, the extraordinary that results out of the ordinary, the minute changes.

Jo's ignorance, his illiteracy, dehumanizes him in a world ruled by human words and human

law. His place is not assured in permanence as in the old paradigm, the great chain. Instead, Jos lot

is cast with the cattle and lifes livestock I belong to them (198: 33) as unwanted property.

This, in itself, is a stone-shot against the old order, where human and non-human were separate in

the fixity of species. There should be no movement from human to non-human in its perfect

plenitude. Nor is this animalization of Jo akin to evolutionary thinking. It is not the animal that

hides in man, his origin, and his descent. This is degeneration and regression. The very idea of

human intervention for the betterment of a fellow being is lampooned and reserved for the spiritual


22

23Progressionism belief in progression.

24Degeneration Buffon's idea that species may weaken and degenerate due to harsh climates.

25

Metamorphosis and Anatexis metamorphic rock results from other rock changing form, metamorphosism, and thenfinally melting, anatexis.


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destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific. (199: 2) Those who recently had no soul, now have one.

And those that had a soul, now have none.

Jo is a lower animal, a soulless beast, without hope of redemption. Jo and his order (199:

12) are compared to the oxen on market-day who often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely

hurt themselves. As Jo listens to music, so does a dog with much the same amount of animal

satisfaction (199: 25-6); in fact, the dog is deemed worthy of greater esteem: how far above the

human listener is the brute! (199: 29) And so the chain is thoroughly inverted, upset, upended, and

collapsed. Jo is wild, without knowledge and place or station in life. This carnivalesque inversion of

the natural order has much akin with Catastrophism. The old order of Natural Theology is

undermined, but no new humanist hope of an evolutionary scheme is put in its place.

Then, as a figure breaks the dusk, the chain is reaffirmed. There is something incongruous,

something that does not sit well between costume and conduct. It is a lady. Those around know the

chain well enough to sense a break in its conventions. Even Jo, who dont know nothink, gets

wind of her duplicity, of her fooling the chain, the natural order. The lady/servant is asking after the

young man who died an ignominious death, but also bore the markings of a different standing in

life, a different place in the chain. Death, again, unites all. The lady/servant finds Jo abhorrent, even

fails to understand his words. She follows him through mud and mire to a scene of horror. (202:

10)

There arise ideas of purity/contamination in her abhorrence at physical touch or relation to the

loathsome Jo. These are the ends of the chain, the natural order, meeting and seeing one another. An

inversion in itself, where extremities are integrated. There is also the idea of sacred/profane in his

resting place. The intrusion of such religious sensibilities seem almost banal when we know or

suspect how things may have got this far. The very phrase blest (202: 29-31) sticks in Jos mouth;

it seems inappropriate or irrelevant. One wonders how things have escalated thus far. The

denouement of this installment or episode is a confrontation with the damaged, if not inverted,

social chain of being; a crossing, where the pure and the contaminated, the human and non-human,

the blessed and the abhorrent meet. Moreover, it is characteristic of a Dickensian worldview that

embraces Catastrophism. The residual ideology of Natural Theology permeates the ideas and

conventions of the universe and story. There is yet to show through any evolutionary strands or

strings. Instead, there is the broken natural order, contracting and expanding, and the imminent


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promise of incomprehensible catastrophe, drawing all and sundry into the mud and mire, into the

fog and the mist. The human subject is animalized, completely naturalized, and yet this process is

one of degeneration and disgust: he lies up against the hoarding so like a growth of fungus (556:

41-2).

The complexity of plot demonstrated masterfully in Bleak House underscores the

ontological turbulence of pre-evolutionary times. Social dissolution has been experienced;

dissolution of a pre-ordered society where the physical and the spiritual worlds were apparently in

phase, in an exact correspondence of meaning and time. Instead, Dickens constructs a reality where

essential values, positions in the greater scheme of things, have been eroded, and cannot be

restored. There are a plurality of tales running concurrently through the fabric of the novel (time).

Most tend toward catastrophe (cf. Forster). There is little justice or reward for the good-hearted, for

instance unsettled Rick in an unfinished house (462: 5), whose faults allow him to be torn down

into a world that defeats him. But Rick is a good guy. Whereas Skimpole, his spiritual counterpart

in light-hearted whimsy and abandon, in unworldliness (459: 40), is never punished in similar

terms. This may refute any metaphysical element to the book; it may point to the chance universe of

the uniformitarian opportunist Tulkinghorn, Mr. Carstone's good heart being an unnecessary

evolutionary drawback. However, Dickens lets us know that there are correspondences between the

metaphysical and this world. There are symbols, incomplete allegory, perhaps too many

correspondences, that imply more meaning, greater meaning, and the supernatural or transcendent.

Names and words, signs, mean things in Dickens. It is an absolutist world, but fragmented and

broken. The signs are still there. The absolute categories of good and evil still abound. But they can

be deceiving, the good can be deceived. There is a correspondence here with Catastrophism's heart:

the signs and meanings remain, but certitude is withered. This sensed correspondence at once both

refutes the world of design and reaffirms it. Similarly, it invites the randomness of evolutionary

thinking while still challenging it. If it offers certitude it is that of catastrophe, destruction; the

bookends of Christian cosmology spiral in centripetally.

InBHthe double narrative of Catastrophism can be found. In the bleak and decaying world of

uniformitarian time, there are attempts to make the universe intelligible on the part of all its

characters. Resolving these attempts, the world(s), and events therein, to a coherent system of NT

seems impossible and doomed to fail. Is then what is left, in its multiplicity, a form of


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Catastrophism, radical or reactionary? There seems to be two forms of continuity in the residual

Natural Theology and the emergent Natural Selection. However, the book never resolves in one

direction or the other; the double narrative in different times assures this. Instead, the dominant idea

left in the book may well be one of temporary discontinuity, just as the narrative unfolds. This then

lends emphasis to the inverse theme of disconnection as the dominant phenomenal experience in

Dickens' and BH's universe. If the multitudinousness mentioned at the beginning of this section

fails to resolve itself as part of a scheme of evolutionary Darwinism, then it can only promote and

preserve a fractured and fragmented, discontinuous scheme of Catastrophism. Friedman (1957)

describes Tom-all-Alone's as a secular inferno; a physical hell where all are punished without

Judgment, in a world(s) where traditional cosmology is stood on its end. Those trapped there

seemingly have no hope of progression or evolution, perhaps only hope of apocalypse and

judgment, of eternal life. But the idea that hell is on earth defies this notion. Instead, disconnection,

a necessary byproduct of any theme of connexion holds sway. These are not binary opposites but

rather part of a whole that never resolves itself.

Change

Dickens saw that the ordinary world was full of the extraordinary; he saw, too, that the extraordinarywas the inevitable consequence of what seemed merely trivial, as an earthquake is caused by minute,

almost undetectable movements over long periods of time. The argument between uniformitarians

and catastrophists was, thus, double-edged, and we can feel analogous ambivalence in Dickens. If all

extremes are merely accumulations of the ordinary, all the ordinary is potentially extreme.

Levine (135) writes of change in a Dickensian universe driven by tiny, minute micro-movements.

The picture of change in the universe is, at first, Lyellian in its being uniform and gradual. But the

end result is catastrophe, massive and sudden change where systems come crashing down with a

crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine (197: 40-41) The image of an earthquake in

Levine recalls catastrophe theory and resonates when consideringBleak House. Change is effected

through catastrophic events inBH. They may be built up through gradual observation and attention

to detail in the everyday and the ordinary, but the resulting plot events are dramatic and of world-

changing breadth for the characters embedded in the plot. Gridley, for example, is ground down:

But I am worn out. How long I have been wearing out, I don't know; I seemed to break down in an

hour. (314: 9-11) Gridley 's demise after years of struggle is catastrophic; he collapses, landslides


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into defeat in an hour after a lifetime's struggle.

It may be argued that plot contrivances, on Dickens' part, are used to try and resolve the

story inBleak House. Indeed, as Forster (Storey, 17) points out nothing is random in a Dickensian

universe. Dickens, in turn, thought himself a realist, (q.v.) and events that transpire in the world(s)

of Bleak House are certainly not beyond the ordinary, more the ordinary that is potentially

extreme. Dickens defends the spontaneous combustion in the preface as scientifically correct and

well documented. Indeed, Krook's death, if anything, demonstrates Dickens interest and use of

scientific material.

Descriptively, the world(s) of Bleak House demonstrate(s) catastrophic events, such as the

pivotal spontaneous combustion episode, as revolutionary, cyclical elements enforcing change in an

otherwise static universe. The universe of NT being one of stasis, with no room for movement or

change. The universe of emergent evolutionary thinking being critically underpinned by a

Uniformitarian time-scheme that is gradualist and inexorable. Korg (8) describes this phenomenon

as the principle that within a social context even the most ordinary incidents can acquire

overwhelming power and significance. This must be seen in light of what he identifies as one of

BH's major themes: tradition, the meaning of the past, and escaping the past. This relation to the

past takes on differing aspects in the separate and non-complementary narratives. Esther's

chronological sequencing in the past simple unfolds the story in time and shows how characters

transform or change; the objective author in his use of the present and participles explores the

characters in space. Muir describes such differences as two distinct modes of seeing life; in Time,

personally, and in Space, socially (Muir, 63). This is akin to the above ontogenetical-

phylogenetical division: the individual in time, the species in space.

Forster states: Nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the

various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre. (Storey, 17) For example, Esther sees her

role as a harbinger of catastrophe to the house of Dedlock, there was a dreadful truth in the legend

of the Ghost's Walk; that it was I, who was to bring calamity upon the stately house (545: 17-19).

Conversely, Woodcourts shipwreck, a meeting with natural catastrophe, is the making of him,

Death in all shapes. Hundreds of dead and dying. Fire, storm, and darkness. (442: 9-10) Even

those not directly involved are suspected of complicity. Mrs. Snagsby suspects Mr. Snagsby of

involvement or complicity in the Spontaneous Combustion. That he may be responsible for some


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inconceivable part in the catastrophe (407: 34-5) suggests that, in some respect, we may all be

complicit in variables/events that lead to the extraordinary/catastrophe. Equally, Richard follows

his plot-line to catastrophe. Weevle says there's combustion going on there! It's not a case of

Spontaneous, but it's smouldering combustion it is. (489: 43-5) Of course, Nemo/Captain Hawdon,

Lady Dedlock, Krook and Jo all follow there lines to catastrophe too.

The very observation that 'nothing is random' conflicts with the coming evolutionary

worldview, where, it appears, everything is random. Instead, it is a world more akin to that of

Natural Theology, a world of design (the meaning sought after by novel and characters therein), a

world of beginnings and ends, collapsing Huttonian time-schemes no vestige of a beginning, no

prospect of an end. Dickens' narrative expatiates the dual worldview of Catastrophism's heyday; a

broken and fragmented reflection perhaps even parody of the very singular world of design that

once had hegemony. Dickens' design tends toward catastrophe, Cuvierian revolutions, self-

destruction and rebirth: beginning the world. In the one narrative, that of the omniscient narrator,

we find nothing but doubt and insufficient evidence. There is plenty that points to meaning, but very

little that pins it down. We feel like Jo shuffling through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes,

and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant (198: 14-16). Or

perhaps like Krook - writing one letter at a time, never seeing a whole word - we see but one letter,

symbol, fragment or sign at a time.

Storey (19) equates the omnipresent symbol of the fog with Chancery. But its meaning feels

broader and finally converges in John's mantra to the dying Rick: we were all bewildered. ( 762:

7) The law and Chancery, the great system, (740: 24) is a fog that bewilders humanity. The law

and Chancery in turn are a symbol for the progress of capitalist society away from the absolutism of

the past and into a new absolutism of the present and future. But this time its high priest,

Tulkinghorn, both sacrificer and eventually sacrificed, operates without absolute morality, or a

twisted version thereof. In terms of Catastrophism the fog is a busy motif implying many readings.

First, it is the thematically suggested bewilderment. Bewilderment at not only our genesis, but also

our purpose, morality, time and understanding. The entire novel is wrapped in fog, in mist. Second,

it allows movement in space and in time, in the chain it allows connectivity. The opening chapter's

regression of time that links the present to its genesis, but also physically the country and town, the

aristocracy and the poor, is made possible by the fog, the fog and bewilderment: if Man is not part


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of a special creation, a creation gilded by an all-powerful deity that ordained Man at the pinnacle of

that creation, then what is there but fog and bewilderment? At the heart of this conundrum is law.

The breakdown of natural law in a scheme of Natural Theology, where all of nature, and all of

creation (singular) are infused with a single a-priori purpose within a logically attendant beginning

and end (singulars). Instead law, as here imposed by Man, is self-consumed and melts away (760:

16). There is no reason or rhyme, sense or sensibility, there is only fog. Bewilderment. This self-

implosion is thematically bound in with Krook (of the shadow counter-Chancery) and his own self-

destruction, his burning from within not from without. This is a world seen through Catastrophism.

Within these counter-parts there are the seeds of their own destruction. It is not through justice,

worldly or otherworldly, that they are consumed. But nor is it entirely random as the propensity, the

predisposition, the seed was already there. The imbibing of spirits naturally, not randomly, leads to

self-consumption. Just as the law haemorrhages and melts away (760: 16) consumed by its own

costs. There is both the newly blooming scientific worldview of cause and effect evident here,

alongside, parallel to, and in contradistinction to a, world of symbol and hidden meaning. Is there a

descent into end-time? There are distinct apocalyptic strains in Dickens, if limited redemptive balm.

It has been noted that Catastrophism itself constitutes a double narrative implied by the

duality of function: as both radical and reactionary. First, scientifically radical advance in thinking

based on Cuvier's theory of revolutions; itself allied and tied to the revolutionary thought of the late

eighteenth century. Second, it became a source of reaction in shoring up the tide against

Uniformitarianism, harbinger of Darwin's evolutionary theory. In Dickens it might be noted that

both past and present/future are powerfully refuted in a double action of bewilderment: we were all

bewildered (762: 7) Jarndyce intones to the dying Rick.

Levine has picked up on this to stress the Darwinian strain of Dickens' writing. But the

centering of plot is around catastrophe and at its heart is our shared position to that. No special

creation, no special order, no chain of being, all can fall. Esther is Lady Dedlock's cataclysm;

Captain Hawdon becomes Nemo or no-one; Sergeant George is divorced from his home and

mother, the wards of Jarndyce are thrown on the mercy of others, Esther's mother is a lady and she

is confused for one, but is a humble housekeeper. There is always both a questioning and a

reaffirming of the natural social order. There is both mobility and rigidity in that order, stasis and

flux. This then is neither NT nor Darwinism, but something in between.


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Natural Theology implied a complete interconnectedness, a closed system where each being had its

place and position, its station and role, pushing catastrophe out to the ends of the time-scheme: its

singular beginning and end. The interconnectedness of Uniformitarianism and in turn evolutionary

thinking begets randomness and chance (if not entirely ruling out teleology and therefore design).

The interconnectedness of BH implies a system that swells and contracts centripetally and

centrifugally, inverts and re-inverts. But it is not a complete interconnectedness as in one of design.

Nor is it a web affinities, at once random and yet bent to a singular teleological purpose of

betterment, advancement, progress as Darwinian strains would become. Only Caddy Jellyby creates

her own purpose and order; she is transformed and can be said to triumph over her circumstances;

otherwise there is little progress per se in a world that remains the same. Indeed, the inner and outer,

higher and lower parts of the great system are (re-)united through catastrophe.

Tom-all-Alone's is an otherworld, Friedman's secular inferno. Is it an interior world? A

world within a world? There is connectedness and separation, connexion and disconnection. In the

episode with the brick-makers and the dead child Bucket restores humanity to them in his tough-

love treatment. The scene is a phantasmagoria, a projected world of monsters, spooks, spectres and

ghouls. Catastrophism's tale of other worlds, anterior worlds, worlds of monsters, resonates here.

This is not a world of the dead in a Christian scheme, that otherworld is passed into only through

death and risen from at the end of time. These are rather the living dead. But how can this world be

part a divine scheme, a purpose and design. It makes sense to despair, to wish your own child dead,

better than live to see this world. Christian values are upturned and collapsed. But there is still a

strong sense of abstract morality in both policeman and underclass. They have ended up here, in

this world at world's end; a part of a fast-growing underclass that knows no end. There is no

question of their having done wrong; there is a clear acceptance of position and station in life. Their

world, of the country, is still aligned to the natural order of Natural Theology. Each to its place and

station: plenitude, stasis, permanence. But they are lost in flux and mobility; no station left to cling

to any more. No hope of betterment in this new social mire; instead, their tale tends toward

catastrophe. Events build and thresholds are passed;

beginning the world- catastrophism and bleak house (2009)

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