Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Grahame Smith (University of Stirling)
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In a recent critical book,

Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times

, Alexander Welsh refers to

Bleak House

as being “an impressive work of montage, which ought by now to have earned Dickens the reputation of composing in 1852-53 a distinctly modernist text” (125). This is part of a fairly recent shift in the interpretation of Dickens's work which sees it anticipating the novels of Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad and other major figures in literary modernism. One aspect of this daring originality is the invention by Dickens of what might be called the fictional institution, major examples being

Bleak House

's Court of Chancery and the Circumlocution Office of

Little Dorrit

. But what Welsh has particularly in mind is the double narrative structure of

Bleak House

in which the…

1996 words

Citation: Smith, Grahame. "Bleak House". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6297, accessed 19 March 2024.]

6297 Bleak House 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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