5 - Taking the Roof Off

Summary

BLEAK HOUSE, ‘ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD’, LITTLE DORRIT

So many of Dickens's texts of the 1840s are built around a tension between two opposing positions: of advantage and disadvantage, control and helplessness. This kind of tension provides the basis of the much more complicated relations of power and knowledge in Bleak House (1853). The division of the novel into two narratives leads the reader to anticipate the presentation of two very different ways of apprehending the world and of ordering experience, perhaps along the lines of determining greater or lesser degrees of vantage. One way of approaching these textual relations is by way of two articles written for Household Words during the period immediately preceding the composition of the novel: ‘Detective Police’ (July– August 1850) and ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’ (June 1851).

The second of these two articles is essentially a piece of reportage, describing the work of the recently formed Detective Police. The most curious and striking aspect of this account is that it barely, and only incidentally, touches on the criminal aspects of their work, presenting them rather as superconstables on the beat, patrolling certain areas of the city, checking up on the inhabitants of the dosshouses around Newgate and St Giles's, the ‘tumbling houses’ that are no better than infected ‘heaps of filth’.The spectacle offered by this text is that of the police as agents of social discipline rather than as catchers of criminals. It is not inappropriate that, in a journal entitled Household Words, the police are shown to be engaged in the regulation of households.

The other conspicuous element of this text is its organization into opposing points of view, turning it almost into a miniaturized prototype of Bleak House. The narrative point of view follows the police into a variety of buildings in order to see their hidden interiors with the all-powerful eyes of a detective. Once inside, once exposed to the defencelessness of most of the inhabitants, the point of view switches in order to try to imagine the demoralized lives of the inmates of these squalid tenements.