Abstract
It may not be immediately apparent that Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), should be read within the context of ongoing controversies over the nebular hypothesis. On the face of it, Bleak House is distinguished by a double narrative constituting an experiment in detective fiction that leaves at least one mystery unresolved, the identity of the author of the present-tense narrative that exists in a curious relationship to the illegitimate Esther Summerson’s retrospective account characterized as “A Progress.”1 As readers, we follow both narratives as each pursues a central mystery that will lead to their convergence: through the anonymous present-tense narrative we are present at the arrest of Mademoiselle Hortense for the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn, attorney to Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife, Lady Dedlock; while Esther discovers, reluctantly, the identities of her mother, who proves to be Lady Dedlock, and her father, a Captain Hawdon who, as Nemo the law-writer, dies early on in the novel. However, at the end of Bleak House the writer of the present-tense narrative — so often considered by critics as omniscient — remains unidentified, someone with whom Esther has inexplicably been in correspondence.2
“It is a coincidence,” said Mr. Kenge, with a tinge of melancholy in his smile, “one of those coincidences which may or may not require an explanation beyond our present limited faculties, that I have a cousin in the medical profession.”
Bleak House
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Notes
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Oxford Illustrated Dickens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 15. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
For representative critics who discuss the present-tense narrative in Bleak House, see Harland S. Nelson, “Bleak House,” in Charles Dickens, Twayne’s English Authors Series, no. 314 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), pp. 145–89; Norman Page, “Bleak House”: A Novel of Connections, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, no. 42 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990); and Graham Storey, Charles Dickens: “Bleak House,” Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modem Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).
J[ohn] P[ringle] Nichol, Views of the Architecture of theHeavens.In a Series ofLetters to a Lady, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1839), pp. 142–43. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Constance A. Lubbock, ed., The Herschel Chronicle: The Life-Story of William Herschel and his Sister Caroline Herschel (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 310, emphasis added. Also, see Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pp. 166–75; and Roger Hahn, “Laplace and the Mechanistic Universe,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, eds David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 256–76.
Dickens owned the fifth edition of Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens (1845) and the first edition of Thoughts on Some ImportantPoints Relating to the System of the World (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1846). See J. H. Stonehouse, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Charles Dickens and Catalogue of the Library of W. M. Thackeray (London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935), p. 84. For discussions of the nebular hypothesis and John Pringle Nichol, see Milton Millhauser, Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and “Vestiges” (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959); Simon Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” in History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131–64; James A. Secord, “Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges,” in History, Humanity and Evolution, pp. 165— 94, and his encyclopedic, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Robert Chambers, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 30. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, 2 vols (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1952), II, 702–18; and Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1988), p. 265.
Charles Dickens, “The Poetry of Science,” review of The Poetry of Science, or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature, by Robert Hunt, in Miscellaneous Papers, Plays and Poems, vol. 35 of The Works of Charles Dickens, ed. B. W. Matz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1908), p. 61. See K. J. Fielding and Shu-Fang Lai, “Dickens, Science, and The Poetry of Science,” Dickensian, 93 (spring 1997): 5–10.
Robert Hunt, The Poetry of Science, or Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848), p. 17. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
William Whewell, Indications of the Creator. Extracts, Bearing upon Theology, from the History and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London: John W. Parker, 1845), p. 12. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
See Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, trans. Stillman Drake, in The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, eds Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 183–84. Also, see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
See Ernst Mayr, “The Multiple Meanings of Teleological,” in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 38–66.
For discussions of a new awareness of time, see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the Histoty of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Martin J. S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For a discussion of Bleak House as a “document about the interpretation of documents,” see J. Hillis Miller, °Interpretation in Dickens’ “Bleak House,” in Victorian Subjects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 179–99.
Charles Lyell, Principles of GeoIogy, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols (1830–33; reprint as Principles of Geology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990–91), III, 1–2.
See Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and James A. Secord, Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Adam Sedgwick, preface to A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 5th edn (London: John W. Parker, 1850), pp. cxli, xix. All further references to the preface, the body, and the appendices of the Discourse are to this edition and appear in the text.
See J. Hillis Miller, “Line,” in Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 1–27.
Hugh Miller, Foot-Prints of the Creator: or, The Asterolepis of Stromness (London: Johnstone and Hunter, 1849), pp. 280, 279. There is no evidence that Dickens knew Foot-Prints of the Creator, or Miller’s earlier, widely read, The Old Red Sandstone; or New Walks in an Old Field (Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1841). Dickens did receive a copy of The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1857), from the author’s wife; the book was published posthumously after Miller’s suicide in 1856. For Dickens’s gracious letter to Mrs. Miller, see vol. 8, The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1856–1858, eds Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson, Pilgrim Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 315–16.
For discussions of metonymy and the concept of cause and effect, see David Hume, “Of the idea of necessary connexion,” in A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3 vols in 1 (1888; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 155–72; and J. Hillis Miller, “The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank’s Illustrations,” in Victorian Subjects, pp. 119–77.
Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words: Lectures Addressed (Originally) to the Pupils of the Diocesan Training-School, Winchester, 9th edn (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1863), pp. 12–13, 93.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), I, 23.
For various readings of Esther Summerson’s experiences and of the significance of her illness, see Lawrence Frank, ” ‘Through a Glass Darkly, “’ in Charles Dickens and the Romantic Self(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 97–123; Jasmine Yong Hall, “What’s Troubling about Esther? Narrating, Policing, and Resisting Arrest in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 22 (1993): 171–94; Robert Newsom, Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: “Bleak House” and the Novel Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Michael Ragussis, “The Ghostly Signs of Bleak House,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34 (1979): 253–80; Judith Wilt, “Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens’s Esther,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (1977): 285–309; and Alex Zwerdling, “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated,” in Charles Dickens: New Perspectives, ed. Wendell Stacy Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 94–113.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 585, 581.
For discussions of the Higher Criticism, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge History of Science, ed. George Basalla (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 263–74; Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), pp. 278–98, 315–16; and Basil Willey, “George Eliot: Hennell, Strauss and Feuerbach,” in Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 204–36.
See Richard T. Gaughan, “‘Their Places are a Blank’: The Two Narrators in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 21 (1992): 79–96, for a Bakhtinian reading of the novel.
For a history of the nineteenth-century belief in progress, see Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976).
See Slavoj Zi2ek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 48–66, for a Lacanian discussion of how detective fiction seeks to subvert the conventions of the realistic novel. At one point Ziiek observes: “Teleology is always a retroactive illusion” (p. 78).
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© 2003 Lawrence Frank
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Frank, L. (2003). Bleak House, the Nebular Hypothesis, and a Crisis in Narrative. In: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919328_4
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