Reading ‘Bleak House’

Abstract

In this part of the book I want to try to get much closer to the actual reading-experience, closer to what the reader undergoes as he or she reads Bleak House. A far more explicit concern with the reading-experience has characterised much recent novel criticism; critics have come more and more to realise that something essential is lost if one forgets what it is actually like to be reading a novel. But we must start with a rather important point: there is no single, common ‘reading-experience’ of a novel such as Bleak House. We can ask, ‘Which reader?’ — does a present-day reader read the novel in the same way as one of Dickens’s contemporaries? Then we can ask, ‘Which reading?’ — for clearly the first time one reads the novel one has a rather different experience of it from on second and subsequent reading-occasions. And we can also ask ‘Which experience?’ — in other words, at which point of the reading is one making one’s investigation: during the reading, or after the novel has been completed?