2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my first term at Oxford. Looking at that again, when I came upon it a few weeks ago, I experienced one of those odd time-slip moments when you meet your younger self coming back.
I wrote, then, about ‘angles of perception’ in the novel, which was a fancy way of saying I looked at the double narrative structure, one in the voice of Esther Summerson, and one in the third person, which we’re led to believe is Dickens himself — giving us information we wouldn’t otherwise have, making us laugh, and sermonising at us about the desperate need for social change.
Needless to say, Bleak House has survived rather better than my 18-year-old self’s attempt to analyse it, but the sheer exhilaration I felt on first reading the book has remained with me — in fact not just remained but enriched and evolved over time, and emerged, finally, into Tom-All-Alone’s,
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