4 - The Homeless of Empire: Imperial Outcasts in Bleak House

Summary

The publication of Bleak House in early 1852 followed closely on the heels of the phenomenally successful anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dickens’s view of Stowe’s novel, seemingly flavoured by jealousy, was in public warmly admiring, yet in private took issue with her picture of ‘ebony perfection’. In this chapter I compare the two novels’ opposing emotional strategies, and the affective power of Charles Dickens’s character Jo the crossing-sweep. Like some contemporaries, I argue that Bleak House was a direct retort to Stowe’s anti-slavery novel. By establishing an affective and moral opposition between the satirically drawn ‘humanitarian’ Mrs Jellyby, whose ‘telescopic philanthropy’ represents the improper expenditure of empathy for those in distant lands, and the white waif Jo as the novel’s ‘proper’ and most powerful object of compassion, Dickens’s explicit contrast of imperial evangelization and local urban reform directed audiences to care about white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jo’s touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century, Jo’s colonial re-making effectively consolidated racial exclusions.