Bleak House: ‘Looking on Darkness which the Blind Do See’

Abstract

According to the time-hallowed anecdote, Edouard Manet, being asked which was the principal figure in a group he had painted, memorably replied, ‘The principal personage in a picture is the light.’¹ Dickens, as the intimations of Bleak House began to cluster and cohere in his mind, wrote of ‘the first shadows of a new story hovering in a ghostly way about me’.² The protagonist is light in one case and shadow in the other. But, like Manet, Dickens in Bleak House seems to be less interested in the people and objects in themselves than in them as seen — in the light that makes them lurid, or in the thickened atmosphere and many shadows and impediments to vision that insert themselves between the eye that sees and the object seen. The subject of Bleak House becomes, to an astonishing degree, less the physical slum of Tom-all-Alone’s, or the history of Esther’s quest for identity, or Richard Carstone’s degeneration, or the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, than the mode of perceiving these things. What Dickens is looking at is the space between.