Nicholas Henke

Urban Secrecy in Dickens’ Bleak House: Making the Impenetrable City

Fog does not obscure London but is London, Charles Dickens suggests in the opening passage of Bleak House. As a detached narrative voice glides over the capital and its environs, it remarks, “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river…Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights…” (5). By the time Dickens introduces his London and his century, such haze has become part of the city’s infrastructure. One can no longer wait for fog to lift in order to describe the city because London has become a metropolis defined by its obscurity.

Dickens is not the first 19th-century novelist to paint the city as a place containing secrets. Yet in Bleak House, he succeeds in remaking Victorian London not just as an urban landscape in which secrets might be discovered, but as a vast network of impenetrable secrecy. With its plots and subplots, hidden identities, missing persons, and tautological legal battle, Bleak House reimagines the urban scene as infinitely elusive. While nonetheless containing moments of revelation, the novel does not depict London as a city with a handful of choice secrets to be unearthed, but rather as a social world in which degrees of secrecy are the currency with which even the most pedestrian exchanges are brokered.

By analyzing Bleak House’s treatment of secrecy, this talk will show how Dickens remakes the city as an impenetrable site of information networks. Understanding London’s entrenched secrecy in Dickens’ novel will not only reveal how urban space existed within the literary imagination but will also reflect the shifting social landscape of the Victorian world’s rapidly-expanding center. It will expose London’s practices of concealment, practices that led the sociologist George Simmel to declare, “secrecy…is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity” (462).