Foreign Bodies: Acceptance and Rejection of the Alien in the Dickensian Text

Abstract

The study of the notion of foreignness in the Dickensian text seemed to me to require a novel in which references to the foreign are rare and whose effects are isolated and therefore discernible. I was therefore attracted to a text that seems to deny the influence, or even the existence, of the cultural Other, a hermetically sealed universe, closed in upon London with only brief trips to another quintessentially English country house. The bleak circularity and insularity of Bleak House was my choice. We see foreign worlds only in controlled spaces and as brief interludes in the otherwise relentless pursuits of the narrow, choked streets of London. London is the first word and sentence of the novel. The jarring full stop immediately after the word indicates a huis clos: one word, one world into which we are abruptly pushed but from which we are not released, for movement, let alone travel is difficult, and visibility is poor. We are taken as far as Greenwich and even onto the ships and barges in the Thames estuary, but the fog affords no view of the Channel, let alone the continent, and we are quickly turned back inland to the ‘spongey fields’,¹ which like everything else in the novel are saturated, overfull, unhealthy.