From terror to terrorism in Bleak House: Writing the event, representing the people

Abstract

This paper argues for strong affinities between Dickens’s handling of political violence in Bleak House (1852–3) and the alteration in meaning of the words ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ in the nineteenth century. Between the French Revolution and the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ shifted from connoting revolutionary violence wielded by the state to criminal political violence committed by clandestine organisations and individuals. I first read two key moments of political violence in the novel via Lyotard’s definition of ‘the Event’ as the occurrence that cannot be represented. I argue that Dickens’s novel responds to this problem of representation in a dual movement: on the one hand revolutionary violence is confined to the criminal discourse of the detective police, on the other, ‘modern’ conspiratorial terrorism is returned to the discourse of the French Revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Dickens
• Terrorism
• Detective
• Violence
• French Revolution
• Event

Notes on contributor

Tristan Donal Burke is Teaching Fellow in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at the University of Leeds. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 2017 with a thesis entitled ‘Mutations of Heroism in Ninteenth-Century Modernity’ and is currently working on a project on terrorism, aesthetics and political community in the long nineteenth century.

ORCID

Tristan Donal Burke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7602-125X

Notes

1 There have been a number of general histories of terrorism, both scholarly and popular, published in the past few years. See M. Burleigh, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (London: Harper Perennial, 2008); G. Chaliand and Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Quaeda (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007); W. Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1971); R.D. Law, Terrorism: A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). Dickens is absent from survey studies of literature and terrorism, for example, P.C. Herman (ed.), Terrorism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

2 F. Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2015), 211.

3 Ibid. 211.

4 Ibid. 215.

5 Ibid. 212–13.

6 Ibid. 213.

7 C. Dickens, Bleak House, Nicola Bradbury (ed.) (London: Penguin, 2003), 49. Further references to this work are given in the text.

8 Mrs Jellyby ends the novel turning her attention to the rights of women to sit in parliament.

9 Jameson, Antinomies, 214.

10 At the level of content rather than form, Dickens’s critique of Mrs Jellyby’s colonial politics is far more defensible.

11 Jameson, Antinomies, 221.

12 While Jameson seems happy to accept the ending as happy, there is extensive critical commentary on the ambiguity of the novel’s ending, including its final unfinished sentence, which seems to chime with the representational uncertainty I read in other moments in the novel. Indeed commentary on the ending has become a veritable critical tradition, encapsulated by John O. Jordan’s observation that ‘Bleak House has many endings. It is also a novel that refuses to end’ (85). Jordan sees the novel ending with a bifurcation of Esther into a conventional gender stereotyped Victorian wife and a disruptive ghost haunting the text in J.O. Jordan, Supposing Bleak House (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 67–86. To offer a sample of other responses: J. Kucich, ‘Action in the Dickens Ending: Bleak House and Great Expectations’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1978), 88–109, sees the ending as an unconvincing moral imposition on unresolvable sexual contradictions in the novel; J. Sawicki, ‘“The Mere Truth Won’t Do”: Esther as Narrator in Bleak House’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 17 (1987), 209–24, sees the ambiguity of the ending as representative of the narrative instability of the novel as a whole; H. Michie, ‘“Who Is This in Pain?”: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 22 (1989), 199–212 argues that the ending both traps Esther in motherhood and liberates her from identity; and J. Gribble, ‘Borrioboola-Gha: Dickens, John Jarndyce and the Heart of Darkness’, in Anny Sadrin (ed.), Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 90–99, suggests that the ending supresses the colonial exploitation on which Esther’s new home is based.

13 Jameson, Antinomies, 221–22. The reference to revolution and enthusiasm in Kant is to The Contest of Faculties (1798), now a key focus of discussion in critical theory. For a particularly insightful discussion on Kant's essay in relation to the Event, see A. Zupančič, ‘Enthusiasm, Anxiety and the Event’, Parallax, 11 (2005), 31–45.

14 G. Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, ‘The Invention of Modern Terror’, in The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Quaeda, 95–122, 95.

15 Law, Terrorism, 54.

16 Marilyn Butler, ‘Godwin, Buke, and Caleb Williams’, Essays in Criticism, 32 (1982), 237–57 offers an excellent summary of this episode in relation to Godwin’s Caleb Williams, itself a novel deeply concerned with the Terror and terrorism, and a significant influence on Dickens according to Edgar Allan Poe in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846). Poe tells us that Dickens drew his attention to Godwin plotting the novel backwards, and it thus is an important milestone in the development of the detective story, alongside Bleak House; E.A. Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in David Galloway (ed.), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), 430–42.

17 Law, Terrorism, 70

18 Ibid. 66.

19 Chaliand and Blin, ‘The Invention of Modern Terror’, 101, 103.

20 Chaliand and Blin, ‘The Invention of Modern Terror’, 111; Law, Terrorism, 98.

21 Law, Terrorism, 144.

22 C. Jones, J. McDonagh and J. Mee, ‘Introduction’, in Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and John Mee (eds.), Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–23, 3. For a compelling account of political violence in Barnaby Rudge, see S. Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge’, in Steve Connor (ed.), Charles Dickens (London: Longman, 1996), 211–29.

23 Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot’, 227.

24 J. Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 97.

25 Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 45.

26 G.S. Jones, ‘The Redemptive Power of Violence? Carlyle, Marx and Dickens’, in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution, 40–63, 57.

27 Tambling, Going Astray,156.

28 See, for example, J. Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979) and D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

29 For example, S. Daly, ‘Belligerent Instruments: The Documentary Violence of Bleak House’, Studies in the Novel, 47 (2015), 20–42, and the material on Dickens in A.S. Wisnicki, Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

30 J. Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 71.

31 This is the literary history offered by Herman’s comprehensive collection of essays which jumps from the 1790s to 1880s, and a similar collection of essays, M.C. Frank and Eva Gruber (eds.), Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2012), which begins with Dostoevsky’s responses to Russian terrorism in the 1870s. Three important recent studies of terrorism and literature have associated nineteenth-century responses to the emergence of literary modernism rather than longer, evolving nineteenth-century mutations, these are, S. Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); D.Ó. Donghaile, Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); and A. Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

32 Tambling, Going Astray, 97.

33 Ibid. 1.

34 In a strongly historicist mode, Isobel Armstrong sets out how this dialectic of control and resistance can be read through the theories of Henri Lefebvre in I. Armstrong, ‘Theories of Space and the Nineteenth-Century Novel’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 17 (2013), 1–21.

35 Bleak House is only the third full length novel in the second phase of Dickens’s career, defined by systematic satire of political institutions, as suggested by S. Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971).

36 J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend, Georges Van den Abbeele (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 79.

37 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 78.

38 J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (trans.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 92.

39 The appointed time could also imply the running down of the clock ahead of an explosion, here spontaneous combustion, occurring at a designated time. The time bomb did not come into widespread use until a little later in the nineteenth century, but Dickens already seems to be imagining it here. The Secret Agent, particularly, takes up the strange experiences of time that are associated with the Event of the explosion.

40 A. Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ [1826], in E.J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds.), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 163–72, 169.

41 D.P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Barker, 1957), 130. The distinction between terror and horror remains a vexed issue for critics of the Gothic novel, but here the contrast between the unknowable, terrible moment of the Event, and the visceral, recognisable moment of horror is strong, and borne out in Dickens’s language.

42 C. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Richard Maxwell (ed.) (London: Penguin, 2003), 32.

43 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zorn (trans), Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 245–55, 253.

44 J.A. Netto, ‘Dickens with Kant and Sade’, Style, 29 (1995), 441–58, 442.

45 Ibid. 442.

46 Ibid. 442.

47 Ibid. 442.

48 P. Collins, Dickens and Crime, 3rd ed. (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), 235.

49 Ibid. 280.

50 Wisnicki, Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism, 33.

51 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 69.

52 I. Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 106, 110.

53 Wisnicki, Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism, 35; see 162–73 for James and Conrad.

54 S. Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty of Death in the French Revolution, David Fernbach (trans.) (London: Verso, 2015), 2–3; 100–01. The original French title translates more literally and rather less luridly as Liberty or Death: An Essay on the Terror and Terrorism.

55 D. LaCapra, ‘Ideology and Critique in Dickens’s Bleak House’, Representations, 6 (1994), 116–23, 122.

56 Ibid. 120–21.

57 J. Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, in Steve Corcoran (ed. and trans.), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 35–52, 42.

58 Ibid. 41.

59 Ibid. 44.

60 Miller, The Novel and the Police, 83.

61 Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror, 83.

62 Ibid. 20.

63 Ibid. 90.

64 The fantasy of destroying the Chancery buildings echoes other crypto-terrorist fantasies of destroying buildings which represent power in Dickens, including the burning down of Newgate in Barnaby Rudge, the burning down of the Monseigneur’s chateau in A Tale of Two Cities, and the collapse of the Clennam house in Little Dorrit (1855–7).

65 Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, 39.

66 Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror, 23, 27.

67 C. Dickens, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), vol. 4, 612.

68 I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §25, James Creed Meredith (trans.), Nicholas Walker (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2007), 80.

69 See, for example, A. Thurschwell, ‘Writing and Terror: Don Delillo on the Task of Literature after 9/11’, Law & Literature, 19 (2007), 277–302.