A Novel of Displacement: Seeking Spatial Justice in Bleak House's Consequential Ground

Abstract

Taking the microspatial fog in Charles Dickens's Bleak House as a top-down perspective and the London streets as a bottom-up perspective creates compelling arguments for seeing this novel spatially. Drawing on principles from Edward W. Soja's Seeking Spatial Justice, this article contends that Bleak House uses numerous telescoping perspectives alongside these two narrators to explore the impacts of spatial injustice and critique social institutions that displace and threaten the lives of those they should be benefiting and assisting. Soja's proposition of exogenous (top-down), endogenous (bottom-up) and mesogeographical (middle or regional) geographical distributions helps show how Bleak House represents London to show disparity across social spaces and the lives of those who inhabit them through the unequal distribution of material and abstract resources. In doing so, Bleak House challenges its readers to look beyond one's own space and consider the social, political, and economic factors that contribute to our spaces and how these spaces extend outwards, thereby displacing its reader from an isolated perspective to one attentive to their situatedness in a broad, complex social space, and the implications of social space and geography.