City Limits: Cockney Aesthetics and Omniscience in <i>Bleak House</i>

Bleak House is a central case study for theorists of the realist novel’s ambition to represent metropolitan life at a comprehensive scale. But Dickens’s London is also characterized by the pervasive figuration of pastoral imagery, counterintuitively focalized by this novel’s static minor characters. Through their rusticating flights of fancy, Dickens brings into view a “civic picturesque” that reintroduces modes of narration associated with late Romantic genres like the periodical sketch. Dickens’s return to the figuration of urbanized rusticity at midcentury registers the significance of Bleak House ’s setting (within Greater London’s expanding geography) and how its dual structure of narration is shaped by the aesthetic modes that captured that Cockney London’s unruly energies—exemplified by Leigh Hunt’s 1830s sketches of London and its suburbs. I show how Dickens’s modes of narration stylistically incorporate (though they caricature) Hunt’s writing by examining the sketch’s startlingly literal reappearance in this major novel. Its centrality reveals the consequences of Dickens’s participation in the institutionalization of Hunt’s legacy for the development of the realist form’s social and spatial parameters in Bleak House and beyond. Meanwhile, I argue, Hunt’s Cockneyism persistently suggests new ways to read the Dickensian “townscape” that expose the power of aesthetic forms to shape social space.