ABSTRACT
When Dickens characterizes the legal world in the virtuoso first chapter of Bleak House, and the world of fashion in his second, he chooses as their representative figureheads the Lord Chancellor in his foggy Court of Chancery and Lady Dedlock in her freezing mode. What connection, as the novel keeps asking, can there be? The connection is Honoria Dedlock's illegitimate daughter, who in chapter 3, leads us into the Lord Chancellor's office before her narrative is sixteen pages old, radiating sunlight into the chill and foggy lives of the law's wards and victims. In the symbolic logic of the novel, the cure for legal deadlock and dereliction is the extra-legal relict of Lady Dedlock's passional summer. What could be more polarized, at mid-century, than a fallen woman and her child, on the one hand, and the constitutional majesty of the law? Ifit is a calculated insult to the polite reader, to select a fallen woman as the focus in one narrative, it seems an equally calculated one to have her bastard child given sole narratorial rights (and virtually exclusive rights to correct judgement in matters of morality) in the other. What possessed Dickens to do it?
