Dickens

Abstract

This chapter explores Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Dickens brings to a head the Romantic intuition about urban life developed by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo in their novels of Paris: the world-city, the total human habitat, is where human nature comes undone. Monsters belong here, as modern cinema confirms. For all both novels' shared vision of a scale of natural history overwhelming human life, Dickens's leviathan affords an insight the reverse of Melville's. Where the whale is a living creature, the embodiment of a planetary ecosystem, Dickens's dinosaur is a phantasmatic emanation of the Victorian metropolis—an allegorical figure for the “Dickens World.” Against Moby-Dick's sublime vision of the world as a nonhuman natural order, upon which humanity imprints its violent signature of epic striving, the world of Bleak House is unnatural, man-made, an “artificial nature,” which reconstitutes its human origins in the aesthetic mode of the grotesque, according to a genetic logic of monstrosity, and is legible through the techniques of allegory.