CHAPTER 2 “Shouldering the Wheel” in Bleak House

Stuck in the Idiom of Circularity

The critical consensus regarding Dickens’s longer-term planning that we saw in Dombey and Son (1846–48) intensifies in the novel T. S. Eliot (1927, 525) famously praised as “his finest piece of construction”: Bleak House (1852–53). John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson (1957, 178–79) saw for the first time in Bleak House Dickens’s ability to organize an immense “diversity of detail into a single view of society.” J. Hillis Miller (1971, 15), in his prominent introduction to an early Penguin edition of Bleak House, noted the ways in which Dickens’s planning may be seen in the novel’s “complex fabric of recurrences”—where “scenes, themes and metaphors return in proliferating resemblances.” Similarly but more recently, Kate Flint (2018, 230) has seen Dickens’s heightened planning reflected in the recurring “resonances of the denotative language and the rich proliferation of metaphors” that cycle through the text and “reinforce some of its major tenets, such as the importance of responsibility.”¹ These influential assessments are important for thinking about the refinement of Dickens’s organizational processes as he composed what might very well be his most sophisticated novel. But they do not account for the multiple ways in which crucial developments in his idiomatic imagination inform how Bleak House achieves some of its most salient and thematically cohesive effects. This chapter begins by arguing that in the process of constructing what is undoubtedly the most powerful beginning to any of his novels,² Dickens gradually hits on and then develops this sprawling text’s most central imaginative body idiom in conjunction with of some its deepest themes.

Although it is difficult to pin down decisively, the graduality of this process during the composition of Bleak House is important. Dickens in all likelihood began the novel with little idea of how central a role the idiom would eventually come to play in his developing novel. But what is clear is that his earliest thinking about Bleak House began with an emphasis on circularity in general and on wheels in particular. My sense is that this emphasis on circularity and wheels at the novel’s outset prompts in Dickens himself the very process that Raymond Williams (1973, 155) attributes to those who read him: “as the action develops, unknown and unacknowledged relationships, profound and decisive connections, definite and committing recognitions and avowals are as it were forced into consciousness.” The only difference in my interpretation is that these relationships, connections, and recognitions are also forced into the author’s consciousness by way of another never-used-before-or-again idiom: “shoulder to the wheel.”

Of the several possibilities Dickens considered for prospective titles before settling on Bleak House, four include variations on “The Ruined Mill House” (Stone 1987, 185–285; my emphasis). This is important because wheels of all kinds spin and have great difficulty gaining traction throughout the text. As Steven Connor (2000, 4) has pointed out, the novel begins by “collating different modes of ineffectual motion, of goings-on that never get anywhere.” Amid the fog of Bleak House’s famous opening paragraphs, pedestrians, ploughboys, and horse carts appear “slipping and sliding” through the “spongey fields” and soot-blackened streets, just as the tractionlessness of the High Court of Chancery spins endlessly in a “groping and floundering condition” in “mud and mire too deep”—a condition of endless futility that extends to the members of the bar who appear “tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 14).

This aspect of circular and “miry” futility, once established, pervades the novel in a torrent of literal and figurative associations (20). The name of the main Chancery case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is in itself of course tautologically circular, and we learn early on—via the words of Tom Jarndyce—how perilous it is to be caught up in Chancery’s centripetal force: “it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill” (71). Connor (2000, 4) remarks that “Jarndyce and Jarndyce does not progress, but just continues starting and stopping,” which creates a “strong sense that the suit is more of a mill or roundabout than a conveyance.” As if to hint at the impossibility of gaining traction amid its circular pull, even the generally sunny carriage ride that Esther, Ada, and Richard take to John Jarndyce’s cozy home in the country near Saint Albans has ominous stops and muddy slippages. The group has to get out of the carriage to “wal[k] up all the hills,” and watching the wheels spin into the mud, Esther remarks on how they “cut up the gravel so terribly” that they “sent the road-drift flying about [their] heads like spray from a water-mill” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 81, 115, 82). This rhetoric of tractionlessness also envelops the streetsweeper, Jo, who confronts the “daily spin and whirl” in Tom-all-Alone’s where he perpetually “fights it out, at his crossing, among the mud and wheels” (258, 259). I focus on these early sections of the novel because of what they may be able to reveal about how and when the “shoulder to the [stuck] wheel” idiom eventually emerges as one of the text’s most dynamic imaginative catalysts.

With Bleak House’s sprawling canvas, Dickens no doubt wants not just to critique the failure of Britain’s heaving and wildly ineffectual public institutions at mid-century, but he also wants to celebrate the importance of individual and collective “shoulder to the wheel” effort, earnest duty, and responsibility—the only kind that has any chance of gaining traction amid the muddy bureaucracy, selfishness, and chaos of mid-century London life. This celebration of successful, gritty effort in the face of inert bureaucratic failure is almost certainly a residual effect stemming from the triumph of the hardworking individual displayed in David Copperfield (1849–50), Dickens’s semiautobiographical novel that sits directly between Dombey and Bleak House. In this sense, Bleak House expresses an unmistakable indignance with the evils of the unfeeling state of England it describes, but it also focuses in equal measure on the lives of people who strive to improve themselves and those around them through sheer hard work, personal responsibility, and generous fellow feeling—the traits that eventually make David Copperfield successful and happy. Herein lies the tension at the heart of mid-Victorian debates about liberalism that Kate Flint, Hilary Schor, Lauren Goodlad, Jim Buzard, and others have identified.³ It is no secret that Dickens is far better at diagnosing and critiquing social problems at the granular level than he is at providing larger workable solutions. Bleak House is no exception. Instead of systemic solutions to societal problems in Bleak House, we get a Copperfieldian triumph of those who offer active resistance and subscribe to the Victorian “Gospel of Work.”⁴ The most sanguine (and ultimately triumphant) characters in this bleak novel—Esther Summerson, John Jarndyce, Allan Woodcourt, Charley Neckett, the Rouncewells, and Phil Squod—all exhibit a “shoulder to the wheel” earnestness, industriousness, and sense of responsibility that separates them from both the public systems they run up against and the other characters who represent such countervailing indolent, uncaring, and avaricious values.

Dickens’s configuration of hard work and responsibility in terms of a strenuous body idiom fits not only his general obsession with physical activity but also his distinctly embodied representations of David Copperfield’s (read his own) path to economic self-sufficiency in the novel immediately preceding Bleak House. Realizing that he would have to make his own way to support himself and Dora after his aunt Betsey’s financial ruin, David makes the decision “to work with a resolute and steady heart” at Dr. Strong’s both before and after his regular occupation as a clerk with Spenlow and Jorkins: “up at five in the morning, and home at nine or ten at night” (Dickens [1849–50] 2004, 526, 532). Despite the fact that he works with nothing heavier than a pen in each of his occupations, David repeatedly describes his “perseverance at this time in [his] life” with the rhetoric of intense physical labor: “What I had to do,” the young Copperfield remarks, “was to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down trees” (526; emphasis mine). If nothing else, it is worth recalling that Dickens had this model—his own model—of embodied self-sufficiency swirling in his head just before he embarked on Bleak House where he would eventually settle on another, more repetitively embodied articulation of self-sufficient labor. Thus, David’s industriousness in forging an independent life for himself and Dora stands in stark contrast to the one he would invent just two years later for Richard Carstone, whose early and sustained reliance on a Chancery decision for himself and Ada is what leads to his demise.

We have seen in the introduction and in the previous chapter how Dickens tends to recycle hundreds of body idioms throughout his novels. In the case of Bleak House, this tendency swells to the point where he uses over one thousand body idioms (in a novel of similar length to Dombey). Partly because of this, Bleak House holds the overall number one position in its usage of unique body idioms (table A) in the 124-novel corpus. As with the Dombey chapter, though, my larger argument here rests on Dickens’s unique use of only one particular idiom amidst all the others that rotate through the text. He invokes the idiomatic phrase “to put one’s shoulder to the wheel” (or its variants) nineteen times in Bleak House and only in Bleak House—never in any of his novels before or after. This level of repetition inevitably raises even more complex questions of intentionality than we encountered in Dombey’s explicit usages of the “right-hand man” idiom. Surely at some point in the composition of Bleak House Dickens must have been aware of his repeated use of the shoulder idiom, but when? And what would that tell us (if such a precise determination were possible) about how the novel generates structure, characterization, and ultimately, meaning? The scale and rarity of the expression in Dickens’s oeuvre suggest that somewhere in the process of using these nineteen invocations, the idiom was—pace Williams—forced into his own consciousness. At some point or points, Dickens realized that the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom worked as a wonderfully germane and imaginatively generative counterweight to the circular flounderings and slippages that literally and figuratively pervade so many of the novel’s themes. My aim, however, is less to identify exactly where this occurs and more to explore how and why it matters for our interpretation of the text—and Dickens’s construction of it—that it happens at all.

Context and Intertext

As with Dombey’s “right-hand man,” it is important to start with a consideration of this new idiom’s context both outside and inside Bleak House. There is no question that the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom was better known to people of all classes by the middle of the nineteenth century than was the case for “the right-hand man.” This is likely because the former idiom originated from one of Aesop’s fables as part of a popular oral tradition dating back to antiquity (around 600 B.C.). People were using it, saying it, understanding it in its literal and figurative contexts long before it ever appeared in print. Even with the arrival of printing, collections of Aesop’s fables were among the earliest books to appear in a variety of languages, and English translations date to the sixteenth century. The opening lines of Aesop’s (1926, 13) myth of “Hercules and the Wagoner” reveal the fable’s apposite connections to the “slipping and sliding” of Bleak House’s opening chapters: “A waggoner [sic] was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank halfway into the mire, and the more the horses pulled, the deeper sank the wheels” (145; emphasis mine). As the fable continues, the wagoner falls to his knees and prays to Hercules for help. The actual idiom is derived from Hercules’s response, which reproaches the wagoner for relying on an interventionist deity rather than on his (the wagoner’s) own efforts: “ ‘Tut, man,’ ” says Hercules, “ ‘don’t sprawl there. Get up and put your shoulder to the wheel’ ” (145). The Oxford English Dictionary also quotes “the mire,” a particular form of heightened muddiness that reappears throughout the opening of Bleak House, in its definition of the idiom: “To put (occasionally lay, set) one’s shoulder to the wheel; (literally) so as to extricate the vehicle from the mire; hence the figurative to set to work vigorously” (emphasis mine).

Although the British public’s general awareness of the Aesopian “shoulder to the wheel” was more widespread than what we saw with the previous chapter’s “right-hand man,” it was still rare to encounter it in print until well into the nineteenth century. Here again, we see the accuracy of Manfred Görlach’s (1999, 13) findings that journalism, combined with the exponential rise of literacy after 1840, had immediate effects on the spread of vernacular expression in standard English. Similarly modeled searches through the British Library Newspapers (figure 10) and British Periodicals (figure 11) archives give an indication of when the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom became more prominent in contemporary printed usage.

Figure 10 shows that the idiom makes its first substantial spike in the years immediately preceding Bleak House; from 1849 to 1850, the expression jumps by 40 percent (38–95 appearances). The data from figure 11 show the idiom spiking in 1844 and then again in 1852—the year Bleak House began its serialization (March 1852). I will attempt to make no grand causal claims here beyond the fact that according to data pertaining to millions of words in hundreds of newspapers and journals, the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom was becoming increasingly popular around the middle of the nineteenth century. Sally Ledger (2011, 3) has connected Dickens’s cultural positioning in Victorian England, for better or for worse, with “what some regarded as his vulgar embrace of the popular” precisely because of his association with everyday newspaper rhetoric. “An anonymous reviewer for the Saturday Review derided Dickens’s determined engagement with contemporary social and political concerns, remarking that ‘Mr Dickens’s writings are the apotheosis of what has been called newspaper English’ ” (quoted in Ledger 2011, 3). Dickens was close to this kind of writing. Not only was he a one-time editor of the Daily News, his closest friend, confidant, and future biographer, John Forster, was an editor of The Examiner, which used the idiom on multiple occasions in the years just before Dickens began writing Bleak House. Forster’s publication, for instance, reported on Sir Robert Peel’s failure “to set his shoulder to the wheel” in the Carlew Bill (Hunt 1846, 257), landlords “with no great aptitude” for “putting the shoulder to the wheel” in Lord George Bentinck’s Irish Railway Bill (“The Bentinck Bubble” 1847, 97), MP Daniel O’Connell’s inability “to pu[t] his shoulder to the wheel” for Catholic emancipation (“O’Connell” 1847, 337), and Dr. Thomas Thomson’s “shoulder to the wheel” effort to bring new medical knowledge to the Bengal Army (“Western Himalaya” 1852, 548). Beyond these instances, Dickens, in his role as editor of Household Words, himself oversaw contributors who used the expression prominently in their articles. Perhaps most interesting in terms of its timing just one day before the first installment of Bleak House’s miry opening, Richard Horne (1852, 538) wrote an article for Household Words titled “Strings of Proverbs” wherein the first entry (of thirty-six) is “ ‘Goad your oxen, set your shoulder to the wheel, and Heaven will help you!’ ” Then, in an eerie echo of Bleak House, George Sala (1853a, 253) wrote an article for Household Words called “Legal Houses of Call” in which a hotel owner “manfully put[s] his shoulder to the wheel” in saving his establishment from the ruins of a Chancery suit.

There are still yet other reasons to believe that the moral of Aesop’s fable, that “the gods help them who help themselves,” occupied a prominent place in Dickens’s world as he began planning Bleak House in November 1851. By this time, Dickens was an eager disciple and dutiful reader of the secular high priest of the Victorian “Gospel of Work,” Thomas Carlyle (1919, 147), who had famously declared eight years earlier in Past and Present that “work alone is noble.”⁵ Interestingly, this nobility for Carlyle was also a matter of explicitly Aesopian individual and physical triumph: “Show me a People energetically busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel; their heart pulsing, every muscle swelling, with man’s energy and will;—I show you a People of whom great good is already predictable; to whom all manner of good is certain, if their energy endure” (200; emphasis mine).

One other instance involving the idiom from Dickens’s own life is noteworthy for its timing as well as its content. Dickens had long been scheduled to serve as the chair at the sixth annual dinner of the General Theatrical Fund, which was to take place on April 14, 1851. We know, too, that several events earlier in that year had stretched Dickens quite thin. His ailing wife, Catherine, had been recuperating at the spa at Malvern, and Dickens was spending much of his time with her there. But he was also deeply involved in the rehearsals of his amateur acting company for the first performance of Not So Bad as We Seem, which carried the enormous additional pressure of its scheduled performance before the queen. At the same time, he was in the middle of publishing David Copperfield in book form and helping Angela Burdett Coutts with the administration of her Home for Fallen Women. Then Dickens’s father died on March 31. Consequently, he and others went to great lengths to release him from his promise to chair the General Theatrical Fund dinner when it rolled around in April. But when no one else of similar stature could be found on such short notice, Dickens consented to preside at the event anyway (Fielding 1858, 118). What is interesting for the purposes of this chapter is how Dickens rhetorically channels his personal resolve in agreeing to honor his engagement into his actual speech. “If you help this Fund,” Dickens declared in the keynote toast, “you will not be performing an act of charity, but you will be helping those who help themselves, and you will be coming to the aid of men who put their own shoulders to the wheel of their sunken carriage, and do not stand idly by while it sank deeper in the mire” (122; emphasis mine).

I do not cite these scenarios from Dickens’s life because I seek to endorse a facile “smoking gun” sense of one-directional artistic causality in the composition of Bleak House. Instead, I wish to follow such critics as Lillian Nayder, John Bowen, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and John O. Jordan in considering Dickens’s “life” as a series of texts to be interpreted themselves rather than a “real” that precedes, and so dictates, the grounds of his fiction.⁶ For this reason, my central claim that Dickens’s mature fictional imagination is idiomatically oriented does not mean that he approached the composition of each mature novel in the same way. The idiomatic orientation of a “right-hand man” in Dombey has similar but also different connections to what it means to “put a shoulder to the wheel” in Bleak House. Dickens grows into his own unconscious and conscious imaginative relationship with a given idiomatic expression as the novel itself develops—in a manner I suggest we see from the end of the previous chapter where Dickens chooses to put the hook-handed right-hand man, Captain Cuttle, on Dombey’s vignette title page in the Bradbury and Evans book edition.

Not only is it interesting that Dickens, despite the idiom’s relative popularity and his multiple associations with it, uses the expression only in Bleak House in all of his fiction, but its extreme rarity among other contemporary novelists is also noteworthy. For example, in my corpus of 3,719 nineteenth-century novels, the idiom appears a single time in only 82 novels, appears on two occasions in only 7 novels, and it never occurs three or more times.⁷ Although I stand by my guiding methodological premise that numerical instantiation does not matter much for literary analysis without careful and rigorous textual interpretation, these data nonetheless give some indication of how anomalous it was for Dickens to employ variations of “shoulder to the wheel” idiom nineteen times even in a novel as lengthy as Bleak House.

Given Bleak House’s status as one of Dickens’s most critically acclaimed works, it is surprising that critics have yet to detect any relationship between the multiple occurrences of “shoulder to the wheel” idiom and the novel’s larger imaginative and thematic concerns. Simon Joyce (2002, 130) has fittingly described this novel’s particular lure for Victorian literary scholars: “[Bleak House] is perhaps best seen as the Victorianists’ white whale, the one text that we are all destined to take a shot at.” Part of my shot at interpreting this novel involves an assessment of some major critics who have overlooked Aesop’s “shoulder to the wheel” idiom in favor of other fable-based interpretations. For example, Butt and Tillotson (1957, 176–200) refer to Bleak House several times as a “fable” of contemporary London topicality.⁸ Alice Benston (2002), and more recently, Robert Lougy (2018) have made compelling cases for the strains of Oedipus Rex that run through the novel. Barry Qualls (1992) has compared Bleak House’s characters’ preoccupation with inheritance with Christian’s quest in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. George Ford (1958, 98), more than sixty years ago, came so close as to note “the almost Aesopian scheme of the novel,” not in terms of the wagoner’s tale, but where characters like Skimpole are likened to insects in a way that echoes Aesop’s ant and the grasshopper fable. Indeed, these formidable critics and many others who have “taken a shot at” interpreting the forces (and intertextual sources) that possibly lie behind Bleak House have done so with a methodology more recently articulated by Patricia Yaeger in the editor’s column of a PMLA issue dedicated to “Polyphony.” Yaeger (2007, 436; emphasis mine) emphasizes the discovery of “new categories for thinking about mixed-up works of art and intermingled texts,” encouraging critics to “investigate polyphonies that are almost not there: the creased, corner-hugging rubrics of ghostly and unread citation.”

Although I acknowledge the power and efficacy of tracing such fleeting intertextual components in any work of art, my interest in how the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom operates in Bleak House is most certainly not an interest in “almost not there … ghostly and unread citation[s].” Quite the contrary, in fact. I contend that it is voiced almost everywhere in the text—in a Bakhtinian polyphonic manner—and yet generations of critics have read right over it or past it. But this may not be so surprising if we think, as Garrett Stewart (1974, 21) has, that “as verbal adventure [Dickens’s] style has left its context behind.” Assuming a twentieth- or twenty-first-century orientation, we are all relatively far away from the time when wagon or carriage wheels needed actual shouldering. Additionally, without computational search methods, one would be hard-pressed to notice Dickens’s isolated use of this particular idiom, among the thousands of others, only in Bleak House of all his works. Even using traditional methods—that is, reading analogically—as we saw in Dombey, we are likely to miss important dimensions Dickens’s idiomatic imagination precisely because of how seemingly organic its suffusion is within a given novel’s thematic architecture. This process, which I have termed idiom absorption, soaks into the novel’s imaginative atmosphere so fully that it paradoxically becomes a condition of its own invisibility. As proof of concept, I want to note an example par excellence of how the idiom has become unwittingly absorbed, beyond the text, into a scholar of the highest caliber’s critical vocabulary. Terry Eagleton (2003, ix), a critic who by my lights does not miss very much, writes in his preface to Bleak House that this is a novel about survival and persistence. Fair enough. He then notes that one of Bleak House’s main focal points rests on “prematurely aged children who have been forced to shoulder the responsibility that their elders have selfishly disowned” (x; emphasis mine). Such wording represents a process of rhetorical mimesis wherein the critic’s language partakes of the larger themes of the text that the Geneva school adherent Georges Poulet (1969, 61) called “transposition.” “On the level of indistinct thought, of sensations, emotions, images, and obsessions of preconscious life, it is possible for the critic to repeat, within himself, that life of which the work affords a first version, inexhaustibly revealing and suggestive,” writes Poulet. As we shall see, Eagleton is not the only critic whose rhetoric absorbs and transposes Bleak House’s guiding idiom.

Eagleton also writes in his preface to Bleak House that “artists can reveal forces and processes invisible to the naked eye” and that these forces can have “an autonomous existence beyond the control of any one individual” (x). The forces and processes behind this element of creativity may be ironically invisible even to the artist him- or herself, as Dickens marveled about his unconscious “seeing” in a letter to Forster while composing Barnaby Rudge (1841). “When I sit down to my book,” Dickens writes, “some beneficent power shows it all to me, & tempts me to be interested, & I don’t invent it—I really do not—but see it, and write it down” (House et al. 1965–2002, ii, 411; emphasis original). He responded similarly to a question from George Henry Lewes, who had inquired about how Dickens thought up an episode in Oliver Twist (1837–39): “how it came, I can’t tell. It came, like all my other ideas … readymade to the point of the pen—and down it went” (House et al. 1965–2002, ii, 403; emphasis original). In terms of Dickens’s obliviousness to seemingly obvious (conscious) intentions, we should also again recall how he was apparently “much startled” when Forster pointed out that the initials of his eponymous character in David Copperfield (were “but his own reversed.” “Why else,” Dickens mused about his semiautobiographical novel, “should I so obstinately have kept to that name once it turned up”? (v, 518). I do not entirely mistrust Dickens’s depiction of his unconscious creative process—especially in his early fiction—but I would like my analysis of the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom in Bleak House to demonstrate that there is something of a chiastic both/and rather than either/or dimension to his more mature, “planned” fiction. Dickens could have both had the idea of “shoulder to the wheel idiom” on his mind (from its appearances in journalism he was close to, Aesop, Carlyle, his Theatrical Fund speech) and not yet been conscious of how well it would fit the overarching atmosphere of Bleak House’s mud and mire until the novel was under way.

A Class-Defining Idiom

Goodlad and Flint have noted how Bleak House’s strong emphasis on what I contend is a “shoulder to the wheel” need for personal responsibility locates a tension that lies at the heart of mid-Victorian debates about liberalism. On the one hand, Dickens implicitly suggests the necessity for the state to act in ways that will improve the lives of individuals—especially those living in the noxious conditions of such appalling slums as Tom-all-Alone’s. On the other hand, there is a conspicuous demand for personal responsibility of a kind that is aligned, in Flint’s (2018, 224) relevant articulation, with useful social activity and caregiving that begins at home. As in so many of his novels, Dickens does not so much as present an answer to these ideological conflicts as he points the way to a multiplicity of behaviors and actions that make living in a world with such conflicts more bearable. What makes such imperfect Dickensian worlds bearable, though, is often a matter of bearing down. Nicola Bradbury (2003, xxi), following Eagleton’s preface, maintains in her Penguin introduction that “the real issue in [Bleak House] emerges as survival, the value of going on.” And as we shall see, those who “keep their shoulders to the wheel” (in every sense of the idiom) not only survive but also flourish in the world of Bleak House. This, after all, is Carlyle’s (1919, 200) prediction from Past and Present: for “People energetically busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders to the wheel … great good is already predictable … if their energy endure.”

Despite the fact that Dickens’s plans for Bleak House reveal a “precise imaginative command,” critics correctly assert that such precision is sometimes hidden or misleading at the outset (Bradbury 2003, xix, xxiii). This is how the first explicit instantiation of Bleak House’s controlling idiom appears—as kind of non sequitur that will make more sense later. As we have seen, the “miry” environment that opens the novel is replete with a sense of circularity and immobility that restricts movement of all kinds: pedestrian, carriage, legal, and so forth. In the second number (chapter 6), however, Dickens sets up a scene where the entrenched aristocratic immobilization of the Dedlock family is briefly compared to their housekeeper Mrs. Rouncewell’s son’s desire to alter his life’s circumstances—to move beyond the inertia and fixity built into the aristocratic social order. The narrator reports that “her second son would have been provided for at Chesney Wold, and would have made steward in due season; but he took, when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam engines with saucepans, and setting birds to draw their own water … so assisting them with artful contrivance of hydraulic pressure, that a thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to the wheel, and the job was done” (106–7; emphasis mine). The handwritten manuscript from the Victoria & Albert Museum reveals that Dickens was quite certain in his decision to use the idiom at this point in the text; there are no cross-outs or other insertions in or around the phrase here. I raise this point not to suggest that Dickens was entirely conscious of his reliance on the idiom from this relatively early stage in the novel on. He still may not have registered how well the idiom fit with the novel’s famously slippery and mud-laden opening, despite the fact that he had used it in a speech at the General Theatrical Fund only months before composing those sections of the novel. All the state of the original manuscript in this section tells us with certainty is that Dickens used the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom without hesitation at this relatively early point in Bleak House’s composition. The fact that he does so here will help later on in the assessment of some critical junctures where the idiom appears in altered states in the manuscript.

Nonetheless, this first explicit instantiation of the idiom in Bleak House is unmistakably Aesopian in its association with hard work and dependence on the self—even if it is the canary’s shoulder that is put to the wheel. It still captures the early inklings of the young Rouncewell’s individual determination to free himself from a life of aristocratic servitude. His “very persevering” efforts as he grows older lead to “constructing a model of a power-loom” and eventually to forging his own life in “the iron country father north” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 107). Interestingly, Sir Leicester’s assessment of this perseverance reduces Rouncewell’s individual determination to nothing more than a set of inborn “tendencies” (107). But we learn in later chapters of the hard individual work involved in making the “the Ironmaster’s” career successful. For example, when Mr. Rouncewell returns to Chesney Wold to inform the Dedlocks of his own son’s desire to marry Mrs. Rouncewell’s maid, Rosa, he is unequivocal about the individual effort he has exerted to reach his position of professional distinction.

This is where the idiom begins to make sense (Williams’s [1975, 155] “profound and decisive connections”) in its transference from the young boy’s construction of his mechanical canary to his professional ambitions. “I made my way,” says Rouncewell, “I have been an apprentice, and a workman. I have lived on workman’s wages, years and years, and beyond a certain point have had to educate myself” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 452–53). What is more, Rouncewell’s “shoulder to the wheel” determination—evident in his boyhood experiments with hydraulic engineering and then later in his professional life—appears in great relief compared to Dedlock’s self-centered wallowing in his own aristocratic inertia. The narrator sarcastically reports just pages after the description of the persevering, “shoulder to the wheel” young Rouncewell that the Dedlock “family greatness” consists “in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves, for seven hundred years” (110). The sarcasm only deepens when we learn that Sir Leicester is “rarely bored” because “when he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness” and “generally revie[w] his importance to society” (183).

The extended idiomatic contrast between the rising middle classes who “put their shoulders to the wheel” and the aristocrats who (proudly) do not culminates in chapter 28, titled “The Ironmaster.” Here, the idiomatic and the ideological appear—according to Sir Leicester’s formulation, “diametrically opposed”—in body as well as belief (455). Reminiscent of the novel’s mud-laden opening paragraphs, “the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds” of Chesney Wold, but it does not matter because Sir Leicester could not gain a “foothold” even if he tried, immobilized as he is by “the family gout” (446, 445). The chapter’s first sentence informs us that he is “in a literal no less than figurative point of view, upon his legs” (445). Mr. Rouncewell, in comparison, enters as a “responsible-looking gentleman … of a good figure … strong and active” (451). This bodily contrast between Sir Leicester’s immobility and Mr. Rouncewell’s exertive mobility neatly reflects the growing frustration Dedlock harbors toward the alteration of rigid social frameworks in existence from “time out of mind” (17). Learning that his housekeeper’s son has been invited to become an MP (because of the success of his individual efforts) sends Sir Leicester into an anxious meditation on the economic change and social movement where such a previously unthinkable scenario could occur: “From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute, to the whole framework of society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in consequence of people (ironmasters, lead-mistresses, and what not) not minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which they are called … the first station in which they happen to find themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of their stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the floodgates, and all the rest of it” (455; emphasis original). The contrast between aristocratic inertia and middle-class mobility also extends to the treatment of time in this important chapter. Although the two men are “diametrically opposed” in “all [their] views,” Sir Leicester invites (and even expects) Rouncewell to stay the night at Chesney Wold “where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded [time] for centuries” (455, 451; emphasis original). Rouncewell declines the offer on account of professional (temporal) necessity: “I am much obliged to you, but I have to travel all night, in order to reach a distant part of the country, punctually at an appointed hour in the morning” (456). The diametric opposition manifested by Mr. Rouncewell’s visit in this chapter makes Sir Leicester “actually sti[r] with indignation” as the baronet contemplates “his repose and that of Chesney Wold to the restless flights of ironmasters” (452, 451). The young Rouncewell’s is not a capricious or “restless flight,” though. He has exhibited this desire (and its required work ethic) to transcend his lower-class upbringing from his earliest days putting the canary’s shoulder to the wheel in his hydraulic experimentation.

Relatively early in the novel, Dickens also establishes a series of more equitable comparisons (i.e., not servants turned ironmasters) between those who industriously “put their shoulder to the wheel” and those who do not by focusing principally on the “vocationlessness,” as Goodlad (2003, 527) euphemistically terms it, of Richard Carstone. One of the wards in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Richard starts life in a distinctly different class position from Mr. Rouncewell, but because of the perpetually stalled nature of the case, it is clear (at least to those around him) that, in the words of his guardian, John Jarndyce, he “must have a profession; he must make some choice for himself” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 121). Unlike the case with the young ironmaster, Richard never settles on a profession for himself despite the fact that Jarndyce calls in a series of favors to help him get started in at least three prospective vocations.⁹ The first of these, a nautical profession aided by Sir Leicester, is meant to align with Richard’s childhood inclination for the sea. Perhaps more importantly for Richard’s eventual fate, he exhibits an early aversion for the kind of earnest work and industry required to advance in any profession, whether he possesses Sir Leicester’s sense of inborn tendencies or not. Richard’s description of “harum-scarum” days “grinding away at those [nautical] books and instruments” reveals his disappointment that he does not enter the profession by starting out as a commander of a ship at sea (138). The insouciant tone of Richard’s discussion with Esther regarding this professional foray could not be further from what we know of Rouncewell’s earnest willingness to “make [his] way” by first working as an apprentice “for years and years” in pursuit of professional advancement: “ ‘So I apprehend it’s pretty clear … that I shall have to work my own way. Never mind! Plenty of people have had to do that before now, and have done it. I only wish I had the command of a clipping privateer, to begin with, and could carry off the Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave judgment in our cause’ ” (138). Esther presciently gleans from Richard’s quixotic wish to enter his nautical work as the captain of a swift armed vessel that he “had a carelessness in his character” which is perilous because of the way he mistakes “buoyancy and hopefulness and gaiety … for prudence” (138). We see her concern extended shortly hereafter when Richard and Ada announce their love for each other. Although she is clearly happy for them, Esther’s immediate reaction is to advise the couple that their “early love could [only] come to anything” if they maintained “a steady resolution” to “duty … constancy … fortitude, and perseverance” (211).

John Jarndyce also notices the carelessness in Richard’s character early on, but as Richard’s elder (male) ward and distant kinsman, he is in a more favorable position than Esther to voice such concerns. Initially, Jarndyce expresses his reservations as a practical matter that could apply to any young couple declaring their love for the first time: “you don’t know your own minds yet; that a thousand things may happen to divert you from one another” (212). But then he specifically focuses his admonition on Richard and particularly on the exigency of the young man’s comprehension of the crucial relationship between dedication (“constancy”) in romance and in other (professional) aspects of life. Jarndyce’s advice, connecting as it does individual effort and Aesop’s wagoner, appears in this instance as a not-so-subtle directive for Richard to “put his shoulder to the wheel” on the final page of the fourth monthly installment of Bleak House:

Trust in nothing but Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen wagoner. Constancy in love is a good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every other kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well, without sincerely meaning it, and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here, or leave your cousin Ada here. (213)

So although Richard is still very early in his pursuit of his first professional path, this solemn advice simultaneously predicts the “fits and starts” that will imperil Richard’s life and idiomatically invokes its corrective of keeping his “shoulder to the wheel.” Even though Richard is quick to promise his guardian that he “will work [his] way on,” he fails to comprehend the importance of the Aesopian edict to take personal responsibility and to rely on his own efforts rather than on divine intervention—which, in this novel, is tantamount to “being provided for” through a seemingly miraculous judgment in Chancery’s Jarndyce suit.¹⁰ It is Richard’s conspicuous inability to keep his shoulder to the wheel, his inconstancy in every kind of effort, that ultimately leads to his failing health and premature death.

Indeed, it is because Jarndyce’s advice, here, so appositely and presciently pinpoints Richard’s flaw in contrast to the earnest efforts of the thriving young Rouncewell that we may see Dickens relatively early in the text consciously alighting on what will become the novel’s most generative idiom. His handwriting from this section of the original manuscript may be helpful in determining the level of his conscious intention. Dickens’s writes out clearly and without corrections Jarndyce’s injunction to “Trust in nothing but Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two.” But then there are several undecipherable cross-outs before he extends the sentence after a comma to include “like the heathen waggoner.” Although we will never know definitively what was going through Dickens’s mind as he added this additional clause after crossing out several other possibilities, it seems reasonable to surmise that he began to register how well the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom fit the crucial (and ultimately fatal) flaw in Richard’s character. Moreover, it should not be underestimated (or, better put, left unconsidered) that Dickens chose to end a relatively early monthly serial number with this scene. Throughout his career, and especially after he began maintaining number plans for his novels, Dickens often ended serial numbers with punctuated developments that he meant to leave his readers thinking about for the month until the next number arrived. As Anna Gibson and Adam Grener (2022a) have most recently articulated in their Digital Dickens Notes Project, it is “difficult for [contemporary readers] to imagine how seriality shaped Dickens’s creative practice, as he conceived, composed, and published his novels in these installments.” Just as Gibson and Grener (2022b, emphasis original) have set as the goal for their project a better understanding of “the iterative development of a serial novel’s form over time” by “foregrounding process in reading and analyzing Dickens’s novels,” I am interested in the process by which certain idiomatic expressions enter Dickens’s imagination over the course of a novel’s composition.

With this in mind, it is worth noting that Richard Carstone’s inability to persevere in the novel’s early numbers is rendered in a manner that we have seen previously spur Dickens’s idiomatic imagination. That is, the concept develops thematically—at least at the start of Bleak House—as both a confirmation and a violation of the idiom: the young Rouncewell’s drive to put his shoulder to the wheel in his profession appears in contradistinction to Richard’s unwillingness or inability to do the same. This is similar to what we witnessed in Captain Cuttle’s ability to be a right-hand man amid Carker’s spectacular failure to live up to his own explicit idiomatic label in Dombey.

Bleak House’s Idiomatic Humor

Dickens’s violation of the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom as a guiding principle in Bleak House is not all doom and despondency, though. After all, we are dealing with an author whose stock in trade is humor of nearly every stripe. Dickensian humor has been the subject of admiring critics from U. C. Knoepflmacher to James Kincaid, John Cary to Deborah Vlock, Malcom Andrews to Claire Tomalin.¹¹ Even George Henry Lewes (1872b, 146), a contemporary critic long skeptical of Dickens’s craft, had to acknowledge that his “popular” success was directly connected to a sense of “overflowing fun” where “laughter is irresistible.” This is surely the case in Dickens’s portrayal of the elder Turveydrop in Bleak House, to whom the narrator introduces us in the chapter immediately following the one in which Jarndyce implicitly urges Richard to keep his shoulder to the wheel through his explicit invocation of “the heathen wagoner” (the first chapter of serial number five). Here, we quickly learn that a significant part of what makes the comical Turveydrop “a model of Deportment” is his absurdly affected physical demeanor (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 225). This is how Caddy Jellyby, now engaged to the son, Prince Turveydrop, introduces Esther to her future father-in-law “in the full lustre of his Deportment”: “He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig.… He had, under his arm, a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown to the brim; and in his hand a pair of white gloves, with which he flapped it, as he stood poised on one leg, in a high-shouldered round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed.… He was like nothing in the world but a model of Deportment” (225; emphasis mine). Caddy matter-of-factly recounts how the “high shouldered” Mr. Turveydrop does “nothing whatever, but stand before the fire, a model of Deportment” at the Dancing Academy while the younger (Prince) Turveydrop “work[s] for his father twelve hours a-day” (226–27). Furthermore, we learn, as Esther does, of Mr. Turveydrop’s long and tragicomical history of foisting the labor of the dancing school off on others: “He had married a meek little dancing-mistress … and had worked her to death, or had, at best, suffered her to work herself to death, to maintain him in those expenses which were indispensable to his position” (226). His blind and appallingly blatant hypocrisy culminates in his edict to his son to “work, be industrious, earn money” (379). The kind of blunt, unmitigated hypocrisy we see in Mr. Turveydrop creates a comic dimension that in Kincaid’s (1971, 1) words, can “cement our involvement in the novel’s themes and events.”

One of the ways that the novel cements our involvement in its themes is by the comically (but physically) failed application of the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom in Mr. Turveydrop. We have seen in Dombey how Dickens began to exploit the malleability of idiomatic expressions by analogically stretching and reversing their accepted meanings (physiologically with Cuttle, figuratively with Carker, femininely with Edith and Florence) in ways that opened new paths for thematic innovation. Perhaps because of an increased level of consciousness, he becomes even better at manipulating this dimension of the failed idiom application in Bleak House—both in the nuance of the idiomatic failures and in the multiplicity of characters enlisted to perform the idiom’s reversals and violations. Dickens’s characterization of the elder Turveydrop is exemplary in this regard. With him, we have a character who has a long and perilously distinguished history of putting no shoulder to any kind of professional wheel whatsoever, and yet the single most defining feature of his ridiculous “Deportment” is his “high-shouldered bow” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 228)! In the two pages immediately following the story of Mr. Turveydrop’s appalling professional negligence, for instance, Esther describes how he uses his “high shoulders” five times in tandem with what he says: “ ‘To polish—polish—polish!’ he repeated … with the high-shouldered bow”; “ ‘Where what is left among us of Deportment,’ he added … with the high-shouldered bow”; “ ‘You are very good,’ he smiled, with the high-shouldered bow again”; “he took another pinch of snuff and made the [high-shouldered] bow again”; “ ‘Yes, my dear …’ said Mr Turveydrop … lifting up his shoulders” (228–29).¹²

Malcolm Andrews (2013, 149) has commented recently that “when Dickens sniffed comic prey his nose wrinkled up and his eyes glittered with anticipation.” This sense of comic anticipation is, I think, what occurs in the closing moments of Mr. Turveydrop’s first introduction to the reader. As if the presentation of a “high-shouldered” character who shirks individual responsibility in the chapter directly following Jarndyce’s Aesopian admonishment were not enough satiric humor for one section, Dickens presents us with one more shoulder-oriented pun to round out our comic introduction to the master of deportment. In the midst of all of his high-shouldered bowing, Mr. Turveydrop not so subtly reminds his son that he (Prince) barely has time to eat during his twelve-hour days working for the Dancing Academy:

“My son,” said he, “it’s two o’clock. Recollect your school at Kensington at three.”

“That’s time enough for me, father,” said Prince. “I can take a morsel of dinner, standing, and be off.”

“My dear boy,” returned his father, “you must be very quick. You will find the cold mutton on the table.”

“Thank you, father. Are you off now, father?”

“Yes, my dear. I suppose,” said Mr Turveydrop, shutting his eyes and lifting up his shoulders, with modest consciousness, “that I must show myself, as usual, about town.” (229; emphasis mine)

This seemingly quotidian interaction between father and son during a normal “work” day (at least for the younger Turveydrop) contains something quite extraordinary: a “high-shouldered” father who refuses to put his own shoulder to the wheel gives his hardworking son “the cold shoulder”—both literally and figuratively. The multiplicity of the punning here is as dizzying as it is brilliant. But it has almost certainly been lost on contemporary readers because most people today assume “the cold shoulder” idiom derives its meaning from the act of physically turning one’s shoulder away from another in an act of social repudiation. In fact, though, it emerged from a second-rate culinary option like the one Turveydrop offers to his son in between his work as a dancing master. The Oxford English Dictionary lists serving a leftover “cold shoulder of mutton” (as opposed to the warm dish first served to the original diners) as the origin for “the cold shoulder” idiom which expresses “intentional and marked coldness, or studied indifference” toward another. This interpolation of the two shoulder idioms here confirms Jenny Hartley’s (2016, 42–43) recent observation that “Dickens never does just one thing” with his comic “suggestiveness from heaviest to lightest.” And perhaps only Dickens could incorporate such elaborately and grotesquely punning humor by fathoming a father whose “absorbing selfishness” makes him utterly indifferent to working his own family to death (first wife) and physical incapacitation (Prince) (Dickens [1952–53] 2003, 227). Because these descriptions appear at the start of Bleak House’s fifth installment, just after John Jarndyce sternly exhorts Richard Carstone to learn from the heathen wagoner’s misguided reliance on others, it is probably not wrong to surmise that Dickens was aware—at some level—of the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom’s capacity for sustained, humorous, and generative thematic potentiality—where it becomes both an object of parody and preoccupation. But exactly what that level might be remains to be seen as it continues to surface throughout the novel.

Idiomatic Seriousness

The only other character who can match Mr. Turveydrop for deleteriously not working, for not putting a shoulder to the wheel, is Harold Skimpole—the father of three who nonetheless remains, as he himself repeatedly says, “a perfect child” for the entire novel (87). The difference between these two iconic shirkers of work and responsibility lies in Dickens’s presentation of their idleness. Where Turveydrop quite literally poses and performs idleness in his physical and sartorial demeanor, Skimpole unabashedly theorizes (and, in his own mind, justifies) his indolence. One of the earliest and most salient examples of his theorizing occurs (ventriloquized through the narrator) during a breakfast discussion following the scene in which Esther, Ada, and Richard pool their money together to release Skimpole from the debt collector, Coavinses (Neckett).

He had no objection to honey … but he protested against the overweening assumptions of Bees. He didn’t see at all why the busy Bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the Bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn’t do it—nobody asked him. It was not necessary for the Bee to make such a merit of his tastes.… He must say he thought the Drone the embodiment of a pleasanter and wiser idea [than professional work]. The Drone said, unaffectedly, “You will excuse me; I really cannot attend the shop! I find myself in a world in which there is so much to see, and such a short time to see it in, that I must take the liberty of looking about me, and begging to be provided for by somebody who doesn’t want to look about him.” This appeared to Mr Skimpole to be the Drone philosophy, and he thought it a very good philosophy. (116)

Of course it is Skimpole’s putting of this philosophy into everyday action that indirectly leads to the orphaning of Neckett’s three young children. While the group travels to Bell Yard to check in on Neckett’s newly orphaned young children, Jarndyce asks a question that could be considered a governing trope of the novel’s preoccupation with the Aesopian idiom: “ ‘Was he [Neckett]—I don’t know how to shape the question … industrious?’ ” asks Jarndyce (243; emphasis mine). And the neighborhood boy’s response places Neckett unequivocally among those in the novel who put their shoulders to their professional wheels: “ ‘Yes, wery much so. He was never tired of watching. He’d set upon a post at a street corner, eight or ten hours at a stretch, if he undertook to do it’ ” (243). This industriousness exacts such a dire physical toll on Neckett (as it does to a slightly lesser degree on the eventually disabled Prince Turveydrop) that, in Esther’s hindsight, is apparent on the night Coavinses tracks down Skimpole for debt payment: “I had already recalled, with anything but a serious association, the image of a man sitting on the sofa that night, wiping his head” in physical exhaustion (242).

Unlike the scenario at the Turveydrop Dancing Academy where fatherly idleness forces the son’s work, in Bell Yard, fatherly earnestness begets daughterly industriousness. Here, we witness the elder Neckett child, Charley, subduing the sorrow of losing mother and father “by the necessity of taking courage, and by her childish importance in being able to work, and by her bustling, busy way” as she goes about her washing (247). The stark necessity of having to muster this kind of courage and industriousness at such a young age is as terrifically appalling as it is extraordinary, and the situation is captured best in Jarndyce’s reaction to the dawning realization of what has come to pass as a result of Neckett’s death: “ ‘Is it possible,’ whispered my Guardian, as we put a chair for the little creature, and got her to sit down with her load: the boy keeping close to her, holding her apron, ‘that this child works for the rest? Look at this! For God’s sake look at this!’ ” (245). Esther’s reaction indexes a similar awe: “It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure” (246).

Dickens’s emphasis on Charley’s practical responsibility and industry despite her age surely elevates the preposterousness of Skimpole’s repeated self-description of himself as a “child” (92). The latter is an educated adult and father of three and yet proudly professes to have “no idea of time” and “no idea of money” (90). Charley, uneducated and just thirteen years old, has no choice but to manage both time and money as she works and cares for her five-year-old brother and infant sister. Richard Altick (1980, 73) maintains that Bleak House’s “manifold strains of imagery and theme, its very language, induce echoes that are repeatedly heard, often elaborated or modified.” Such elaborated and modified thematic echoes certainly reverberate in Dickens’s treatment of Charley’s earnestness. Her actions, in the sense that she relies entirely on her own effort in her washing work, echo, elaborate, and modify the advice Jarndyce gives to Richard to put his shoulder to the wheel “in every kind of effort”—in contrast to the Aesopian wagoner who appeals for divine intervention (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 213). Charley’s “shoulder to the wheel” approach to taking up washing when her father dies dramatizes Richard’s failure to do the same, even in something as light and simple as his promise to write letters for Ada every week (265). To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler (1993, 2), which takes Altick’s observation concerning the “very language” of Bleak House to new heights, discourse in Dickens—in this case, the discourse surrounding Charley’s efforts—often rhetorically “produces the [embodied] effects [that] it names.” Butler’s insight into the workings of language also applies to critical discourse outside the text. It is principally Charley to whom Eagleton (2003, x; emphasis mine) is referring when he asserts in his preface to the novel that a recurring theme in Bleak House involves “precocious, prematurely aged children who have been forced to shoulder … responsibility.”

This uncanny, and who knows how conscious, critical language is an important extension of the “listening narrator” which informs Dickens’s idiomatic imagination more broadly. When such idiomatic rhetoric enters the language of influential Dickensian critics, though, it adds a third integer into the calculus of Bakhtinian (1981, 324; emphasis original) dialogic heteroglossia where “double-voiced discourse … serves two speakers at the same time.” As we saw in Bagstock’s “right-hand man” appellation and the narrator’s adoption of it in Dombey, Bakhtin develops this point further by adding that “all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were—know about each other.… It is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other” (324). My argument up to now has been that this kind of dialogic interrelation becomes idiomatically refracted in Dickens’s novels to such a degree that it could be said to scaffold some of their most imaginative and structural thematics. But when I and other critics (as with Eagleton’s above-cited phrase) use bodily idioms in our own assessments of Dickens’s language, we are participating in a kind of extra-dialogical interrelation that adds a compelling new dimension to Dickens’s “idiom absorption.”¹³ Not only is the dominant idiom of the author absorbed into the novel at the levels of narrative voice, characterization, and theme, but it is also heteroglossically absorbed into the language of the critics who read and write about the novel.

The rhetoric used by Karen Chase and Michael Levenson in their recent work on Bleak House provides another striking example of this unique extra-dialogic interrelation between author, character, and critics. After their appraisal of Esther Summerson as “a tireless laborer,” they write that “she finds herself in, and gives her shoulder to, the realm of filth” and “relentless housekeeping” (Chase and Levenson 2017, 210; emphasis mine). Here, again, Georges Poulet’s (1969, 63; emphasis original) theoretical work on the transposition between artist and critic anticipates the ways in which Chase and Levenson’s “criticism achieves a remarkable complicity” with the text—where “a verbal mimesis which transposes into the critic’s language the sensuous themes of the work” itself.

This is fitting in terms of my argument because Esther’s individual effort and work ethic in her housekeeping profession and beyond make her—with the possible exception of Phil Squod (whom I address later)—the finest example of a character “putting her shoulder to the wheel.” She is an “unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded from the first” as her godmother tells her on an early birthday that “ ‘it would have been far better … that [she] had had no birthday; that [she] had never been born!’ ” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 30). Her godmother follows up this fantastically bleak assessment with one even more damning but equally as cryptic: “ ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers” (30). “Diligent work,” she is told, offers her one of the only “preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it” (30). Unlike Richard, who fails to heed Jarndyce’s solemn advice in relation to the Aesopian wagoner, Esther tells us very early on that she “would strive as [she] grew up to be industrious, contented and kind-hearted” (31, 563). And once she reaches Bleak House, she seemingly does nothing but deliver on this kind of striving. Soon after her arrival, she reports having “made up [her] mind to be so dreadfully industrious that [she] would leave [herself] not a moment’s leisure to be low-spirited” (274). Gail Turley Houston (1994, 123) marvels that Esther’s hard work allows her to achieve “a kind of cosmic good housekeeping.” Indeed, the narrative is spangled with accounts of her “great determination” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 274) and industriousness: “I sat up working … late to-night (273–74); “I could go, please God, my lowly way along the path of duty” (570); “still my present duty appeared to be plain” (589); “ ‘Once more, duty, duty, Esther,’ said I” (609); “I had considered within myself that the deep traces of my illness, and the circumstances of my birth, were only new reasons why I should be busy, busy, busy” (693); “I resolved to be doubly diligent” (775).

Despite this emphasis on Esther’s earnest and hardworking qualities, however, it must be acknowledged that Dickens does not ever explicitly use the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom in direct connection with either her or Charley. Its connotation and, as I have argued, is pervasive enough that critics like Eagleton, Chase, and Levenson themselves apply it to female characters. But Dickens conspicuously does not. The fact that critics do so while Dickens does not simultaneously reflects the expression’s diffusive presence and also its troubling absence, which is both propitious and problematic. As we saw with the kinds of “right-hand” feminine solidarity that emerge in Dombey and Son, Dickens’s idiomatic imagination can be expansively positive but still problematically gendered. It is clear that Dickens imagines characters like Charley Neckett and Esther Summerson with “shoulder to the wheel” determination but not clear why he does not explicitly characterize them with direct invocations of the idiom—as he does with the younger Rouncewell and, as we will see later, with Phil Squod. One could reasonably argue that many of Dickens’s other invocations of the idiom represent failed applications; that is, they apply in an unequivocally negative way to male characters such as Richard Carstone, the Elder Turveydrop, the lawyer Vholes, and grandfather Smallweed who conspicuously do not put their shoulders to the wheel. But we are still left with Dickens’s failure to use the expression in association with women who so clearly do live up to its positive connotations. Pointing out the failure of male characters to live by the maxims of the idiom still obscures the point that Dickens often tends to have a troublingly disembodied imagination when it comes to female characters.

It is likely that Dickens’s imagination in this regard was shaped by the mid-nineteenth-century gendered subjectivity that, as Nancy Armstrong (1987, 20) has demonstrated, constructed ideal “femaleness” along the lines of moral “depth” rather than physical “surface.” This differentiation between inner morality and physical embodiment is a major factor in what Schor (1999, 1) and many others have perceived as “the flatness and unrealistic nature of Dickens’s treatment of women.” In her first narrated section of Bleak House, for example, Esther tells the reader that her “little body will soon fall into the back-ground now” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 40). And she follows through on this; her physicality rarely surfaces in the novel. She consistently avoids discussing her own appearance, even after her face is scarred by smallpox. The conspicuous deficit of attention to her body led George Orwell (1965, 131) to include Esther at the top of his list of Dickens’s so-called “legless angels.” As I discuss from a more biographical perspective in the introduction, it is likely that Dickens simply could not move past his tendencies to “angelicize”—and thus disembody—his notions of woman in ways that accord with important analyses of disembodied feminine representation in wider Victorian contexts by Sally Mitchell, Helena Michie, Marlene Tromp, and others.¹⁴

Expansions of the Idiom

Despite Dickens’s tendency toward elision with Esther’s body, it is curious, and probably not purely coincidence, that Esther’s relentless work ethic is juxtaposed with Richard’s wayward inability to keep his shoulder to a whole host of professional wheels. In the same chapter (17) that Esther tells us of her unwavering decision to be “dreadfully industrious,” we learn not only of Richard’s failure in the simple task of letter-writing to Ada but also of his displeasure with yet another profession that Jarndyce has arranged, this time medicine via Bayham Badger. We witness Richard’s continued reliance on eventually “[being] provided for” by the Chancery suit in the way he nonchalantly exchanges what he calls the “harum-scarum” of nautical work for the “jog-trotty and hum-drum” of studying medicine (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 269). His primary (but vague) complaint about studying medicine is its monotony: “ ‘to-day is too like yesterday, and to-morrow is too like today’ ” (270). To this, Esther shrewdly responds, “ ‘I am afraid … this is an objection to all kinds of application—to life itself, except under very uncommon circumstances’ ” (270). The exchange reveals Richard’s inability or, perhaps better put, his unwillingness to recognize the work behind any professional application—the kind of “persevering” we have seen Rouncewell describe in conversation with Sir Leicester (107). Richard thinks that to “take to” a profession is tantamount to automatically arriving at its pinnacle, as when he expresses his desire to command a ship at the outset of his nautical studies (270). And perhaps most importantly for the argument I have been pursuing in this chapter, Dickens characterizes Richard’s lack of industriousness in rhetoric that reverberates with the shoulder idiom. He admits to Esther and Ada that he does not “settle down to constancy” in medicine because “it’s such uphill work, and [because] it takes such time!” (270; emphasis mine). This rhetoric of “uphill work” contains echoes of the wagoner’s shoulder to the mired wheel and also of the Sisyphean shoulder put to the enormous rock that must be pushed perpetually up a hill. Moreover, the fact that Sisyphus is futilely destined to repeat this action simultaneously points up Richard’s past (nautical), present (medical), and future (military and legal) professional failures.

And as is typical of the contrasting nature of Dickens’s representation of work in Bleak House, characters who do not shoulder responsibility often appear in tandem with those who do. For example, Mrs. Badger, speaking in the context of Richard’s careless approach to medical study discussed above, emphasizes Allan Woodcourt’s earnest industriousness in the same professional sphere (as a medical doctor). “Young men, like Mr Allan Woodcourt, who take it from a strong interest in all that it can do,” says Mrs. Badger, “will find some reward in it through a great deal of work for a very little money, and through years of considerable endurance and disappointment” (267). Here, Mrs. Badger’s description of Woodcourt’s commitment to working for gradual success resonates with what we know of the ironmaster Rouncewell’s similar commitment.

Without a question, though, the most thematically condensed and rhetorically explicit way that wheels and shoulders enter Bleak House is through the lawyer Mr. Vholes. It is fitting that a lawyer who repeatedly circles around the statement of his need to provide for his three daughters and father (“in the Vale of Taunton”) articulates this need by way of a professional mantra where “the mill should always be going” (607). Richard’s downfall becomes more precipitous once he aligns himself with Vholes, who insists on his ability to turn the wheels of the miry Jarndyce case in the young ward’s favor. Eager for and, as we have seen, inclined toward outside intervention rather than individual effort, Richard fatally misjudges Vholes’s “energy and determination” in relation to the Jarndyce suit, telling Esther, “We are beginning to spin along with that old suit at last.… We don’t do things in the old slow way now. We spin along, now!” (592, 594). Richard’s tragic miscalculation is abetted by Vholes’s hollow idiomatic reassurances: “We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr Carstone, and the wheel is going round” (623).

With this phrasing, even in reverse order, Dickens explicitly links two of the novel’s master tropes. The devil is in the details of the linkage, though. Vholes’s phrasing channels John Jarndyce’s early advice in terms of Aesop’s (1926, 13, 623) wagoner, but as the notoriously “slipping and sliding” opening chapters should remind us, because “the wheel is going round” does not necessarily mean that it is gaining any traction. Mistaking “spinning one’s wheels” for “putting one’s shoulder to the wheel” eventually has fatal implications for Richard, and Dickens repeatedly emphasizes these phrases’ tragic conjunction until they eventually come to fruition near the end of the novel. The effect essentially produces an extended series of brilliant rhetorical puns reminiscent of the kind and caliber we saw in the paronomasiac out of hand/without a hand example in Dombey.¹⁵ As a result of its repeated piggybacked emphasis throughout Bleak House, though, the “wheeled” pun begins to partake of what the “ordinary language” philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1997, 7), would later consider an evolving “language game.” The invocation of “spinning one’s wheels” in idiomatic terms tangentially but still relationally connected to the original formulation of “putting one’s shoulder to the wheel” reveals Wittgenstein’s notion of how the demarcated “rules” of language are contextual rules, always awaiting possibility-enhancing creative reformulation. Stewart (2015, 132) has referred to this mode of Dickensian creative play as a “vocabular twofer,” but it appears here in an even more specific sense as an “idiomatic twofer”—all the more impressive because of its imbrication with the theme of circularity in the novel. Even Richard’s other rhetoric identifies—but crucially ignores—all others (“it has been death to many”) who have attempted to move the case out of the wheel-spinning mud and mire and into the traction of judgment and conclusion (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 17). “Others,” he tells Esther, “have only half thrown themselves into it. I devote myself to it. I make it the object of my life” (599). Fatally, Richard confuses “throw[ing] himself [wholly] into the object” with throwing money at the object in the form of Vholes’s legal shoulder to the wheel (601; emphasis mine).

Part of the point is to highlight the unfathomable futility of any endeavor attempting to supply traction to the wheels of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which the novel’s opening chapter makes clear have been spinning without traction for generations. But it is also to emphasize Richard’s selfishly quixotic belief that the wheels would gain traction once he puts his shoulder (or his lawyer’s) to it. The first exchange between Richard and Vholes on the hiring of the latter reflects the young client’s despondency that traction could not be gained more or less immediately, echoing Richard’s naive belief that he could command a gun boat on first entering the nautical profession:

[Richard] throws his hat and gloves upon the ground … flings himself into a chair, half sighing and half groaning; rests his aching head upon his hand, and looks the portrait of Young Despair.

“Again nothing done!” says Richard. “Nothing, nothing done!”

“Don’t say nothing done, sir” returns the placid Vholes. “That is scarcely fair, sir, scarcely fair!”

“Why what is done?” says Richard, turning gloomily upon him.

“That may not be the whole question,” returns Vholes. “The question may be a branch of what is doing, what is doing?”

“And what is doing?” asks the moody client.…

“A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our shoulder to the wheel, Mr Carstone, and the wheel is going round.”

“Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or five accursed months?” exclaims the young man, rising from his chair and walking about the room. (623–24; emphasis mine)

Richard’s additional reference to Ixion in this extended “shoulder to the wheel” sequence recalls the “uphill” work of Sisyphus and implies a different kind of polyphonic futility by way of another closely associated Greek myth. Zeus orders Hermes to bind Ixion to a winged and fiery wheel that is “to spin in perpetuity.” The fact that Dickens inserted the Ixion comment very late (in the final proof stage) suggests a connection may have emerged in his imagination between the explicit idiom of “putting one’s shoulder to the wheel” and the implicit one of “spinning one’s wheels.”¹⁶ Thus Richard’s impetuous sarcasm in Bleak House contains a deeper and darker irony than he can possibly know at this early stage of his so-called dedication to the suit. Like Ixion, all his efforts will be maddeningly futile as he “throw[s] himself into” the hell of torment that is the Jarndyce case—one that is fittingly described by Tom Jarndyce, the ward who “in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane,” as “being ground to bits in a slow mill” (16, 71).

This tragic element is particularly cruel because Richard’s early clear-eyed sarcasm is momentary and fleeting. Since, as we have seen, he knows nothing of personal or professional perseverance, he is easily convinced of such professionalism’s effectiveness in others—most disastrously in the blind assurances of his lawyer that the case can and will be “prosperously ended” through the nebulously described application of shoulders to wheels (629). Paradoxically for Richard but now almost certainly consciously for Dickens at this point in the novel, the empty repetition of this idiom about the effectiveness of practical work suffices for actual work in the novel’s middle sections. The idiom’s appearances in all of the following instances appear in the original manuscript with no hesitation or cross-outs:

Mr Vholes, who never gives up hopes, lays his palm upon the client’s shoulder, and answers with a smile, “Always here, sir. Personally, or by letter, you will always find me here, sir, with my shoulder to the wheel.” (629–30; emphasis mine)

“We whose ambition is to be looked upon in the light of respectable practitioners, sir, can but put our shoulders to the wheel. We do it, sir. At least I do it myself.” (698; emphasis mine)

“But it is some satisfaction, in the midst of my troubles and perplexities, to know that I am pressing Ada’s interests in pressing my own. Vholes has his shoulder to the wheel, and he cannot help urging it on as much for her as for me, thank God!” (703; emphasis mine)

“I wish, sir,” said Mr Vholes, “to leave a good name behind me. Therefore, I take every opportunity of openly stating to a friend of Mr C, how Mr C is situated. As to myself, sir, the labourer is worthy of his hire. If I undertake to put my shoulder to the wheel, I do it, and I earn what I get. I am here for that purpose.” (780; emphasis mine)

The money Ada brought [Richard] was melting away … and I could not fail to understand, by this time, what was meant by Mr Vholes’s shoulder being at the wheel—as I still heard it was … I knew they were getting poorer and poorer every day. (921; emphasis mine)

I have proposed that an unnoticed dimension of Dickens’s “inimitability” lies in his penchant for and felicity in deploying idiomatic language in ways that ingeniously stretch and refract an idiom’s rhetorical application to additional characters and thematically connected scenarios. An example in connection with one of the idiomatic scenarios listed above demonstrates this stretching and refracting quite poignantly in terms of Dickens’s listening narrator. It occurs as Vholes attempts to assure Jarndyce and Esther that despite not making any tangible progress, he and Richard should remain positive simply because they “put [their] shoulders to the wheel” (698). The sense of its effectiveness wanes with Vholes’s clipped description, though: “We do it [put our shoulders to the wheel], sir. At least I do it [put my shoulder to the wheel] myself” (698; emphasis mine). The fact that Richard is not included in Vholes’s last formulation of wheel shouldering causes Esther—on the very next page—to present her conflicted musings in definitively circular, wheeled rhetoric: “At one while, my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless.… In what state should I find Richard, what I should say to him, and what he would say to me, occupied my mind by turns with these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune with these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune … over and over again all night” (699; emphasis mine). Rhetorical linkages by narrators such as this one with Esther make it seem at times as if Dickens is not only conscious of the idiomatic energy running through his prose but that he also wants to flaunt its sustained performative and linguistic exploration of the ways in which vernacular expressions both do and do not have the meanings popularly ascribed to them.¹⁷

In this sense, Bleak House offers us one of the finest examples of Dickens’s development in alternating between, and also meshing, the hypocritically figurative and the admirably literal. We have seen how characters such as Mr. Turveydrop, with his “high-shouldered” bowing and “cold-shouldered” treatment of his family, fit into what I am referring to as the “hypocritically figurative” camp. We have also seen how characters like Mr. Rouncewell, Charley Neckett, and Esther fit into the “admirably literal” designation. But in terms of the former category, Dickens almost outdoes even his own finely tuned sense of humor. It is hard to believe that Dickens did not relish depicting the illustrations (figure 12) of a character, like Vholes, who claims to have his shoulder constantly to the wheel, with very little in the area of actual shoulders.

Here, I am extending Robert Patten’s (2002, 123) notion that illustrations in Dickens’s serialized novels “can expound, elaborate, and enlighten the text.” As with his (vole) namesake—a rodent whose miniscule shoulder vertebrae are precisely what allow it to burrow through the smallest of spaces—Vholes is repeatedly illustrated and described as being so “narrow and stooping” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 606, 695) that his “thin shadow” (695, 698) announces his macabre comings and goings.

We see Dickens at the height of his (probably now conscious) imaginative flair in this regard as he cleverly extends the association of Vholes and voles in his chapter-opening description of the “nook in the dark” from which the lawyer—with the “hole” hiding in his name—comes and goes (789).¹⁸ The passage is worth citing extensively:

The name of MR VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond’s Inn, Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woe-begone inn, like a large dustbin of two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and constructed his inn of old building materials, which took kindly to the dry rot and dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond’s memory with congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr Vholes.

Mr Vholes’s office, in disposition and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty floored dark passage bring the client to Mr Vholes’s jet black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest mid-summer morning, and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr Vholes’s chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire.… The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. (620–21)

The narrator seems to delight in drawing our attention to the incommensurability of Vholes’s professional mantra and the space where he ostensibly practices it. The “squeezed up” subterranean office is on the “GROUND FLOOR” of a building comprised of “dry rot and dirt.” Moreover, its extreme compactness is matched only by its profound darkness—a combination that causes civilians (non v(h)oleses) to strike their heads as they descend the cellarage staircase to meet with him. (Actual voles live subterraneously and thrive in darkness.) This elaborate and ingenious punning reaches its apex in the supreme irony that to be able to get to the place where Vholes puts his professional shoulder to the wheel, he must possess a cylindrical, vole-like body known not for “shouldering” but for shoulderless burrowing and tunneling into the smallest of places—as do the “vermin parasites” that “craw[l] in an out of gaps in walls and boards” at Tom-all-Alone’s (256–57).

Like we see in relation to Richard’s death later in the novel, the comic absurdity of a nearly shoulderless Vholes also takes on a decidedly more predatory valence. The narrator makes an explicit reference to cannibalism, for example, within the same chapter we learn about Vholes’s subterranean office: “As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!” (622–23).¹⁹ Such untoward associations appear even more sinister if we consider their tangential relationship to Dickens’s contemporaneous editorial work outside the novel. During the late summer of 1853, as Dickens was chronicling Richard Carstone’s demise at the hands of Chancery and, by extension, at the shoulder of Vholes, Household Words ran a piece titled “The Mind of Brutes” wherein the object was “to find in [‘various beasts’] analogies with corresponding characters and classes of mankind” (Dixon 1853, 565). The article devoted to “Brutes” does not discuss the dangerousness of larger animals of prey as we might expect but instead focuses on the brutality of rodents—beginning with the biological and homonymical relation to the vole, “The Mole” (565). The article establishes “true brutality” in an animal’s cannibalistic eating of its own kind: “The Bengal tiger is a lizard of sobriety and a lamb of gentleness, when considered side by side with the mole; for the Bengal tiger has never turned the point of its canines against its own flesh and blood. Send your friend a present of a couple of tigers shut up in a box; they will reach their address without accident or injury. Place two moles in the same position, and they will have swallowed each other completely up, before they get to the first baiting-place” (566). The timing and content of this article are provocative considering that it ran during the very month (August 1853) that Dickens was completing the final double number of Bleak House (September 1853). It is in the final pages of this final number that Esther makes the observation that Vholes harbors “a devouring look … as if he had swallowed the last morsel of this client” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 976). This devouring look, of course, applies as much to Vholes’s vampiric relationship with Richard as it does to the long-awaited judgment in the Jarndyce suit, which is consumed—“eaten up” as it were—by legal costs. Moreover, according to the Household Words article, the “muscular superiority of the mole” resides in its minute shoulder vertebrae which give it the ability to flourish “fifty feet underground” (Dixon 1853, 566). This rodent affiliation is further emphasized in what little we learn of Vholes’s private living arrangements: so vole-/mole-like is Vholes, in fact, that he even “dwells … in an earthy cottage situated in a damp garden at Kennington” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 630; emphasis mine).

Vholes is hardly the only shoulderless burrowing figure in the novel, but as I have surmised from the start, a whole cast of them have escaped critical interpretation partly because of their organic absorption into the novel’s wider thematic concerns. The various “shoulderless” motifs (and characters) become so reticulated with some of the innermost themes and structures of the novel, so infused and shaped by Dickens’s idiomatic imagination, that it is easy not to register their significance. Dickens invokes other animals of various kinds lacking pronounced shoulders often throughout Bleak House and always in a negative light. Early on, for example, when John Jarndyce learns of his failure to warn his innocent wards of Skimpole’s free-loading ways, he exclaims, “ ‘Why, what a cod’s head and shoulders I am … to require reminding of it!’ ” (101). This “boneheaded” idiom works, according to the Oxford English Dictionary because of its implication that a cod’s “head” (brain) is as small as its “shoulders”—which, of course, as a fish, it completely lacks. Skimpole, in turn, brags about his ability to “roll [him]self up like a hedgehog” to avoid responsibility on various occasions (293, 678). Tom-all-Alone’s is “a swarm of misery” in part because of the legion of “vermin parasites” that “craw[l] in and out of gaps in the walls and boards” (256–57). Furthermore, Guppy “ferret[s] out evidence” in part by devising a plan to embed (weevil-like) his friend, Tony Jobling-turned-Mr. Weevle, at Krook’s (152, 329). The larger point is that all of these associations contribute to the arc of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination where, as we have seen, those who try to short-circuit earnest industry for the prospect of quick financial gain literally and figuratively have no shoulders to put to the wheel.

Beyond Vholes, the characterization of the Smallweed family is the most prominent and sustained example of the extended idiomatic emphasis on shoulders or lack thereof. The chapter immediately following the one where Weevle digs in as Krook’s boarder serves as an introduction to the Smallweed family lineage, which is encapsulated in similarly burrowing and parasitic language: Smallweed is “a grub at first, and … a grub at last” in the narrator’s estimation (332). The Smallweed family’s “little narrow pinched ways” become embodied in Mr. Smallweed’s perpetual “sliding down in his chair” and illustrated (figure 13) in his “dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street” (342, 346, 333).

Like Vholes, Mr. Smallweed appears virtually shoulderless, and this grub-like attribute indeed serves his “Druidical” clan well as they descend on Krook’s en masse, “digging, delving, and diving” among the ruins (633). The multivalenced association that this particular kind of “grubbing” had begun to accrue in the 1800s was also likely not lost on Dickens. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the verb “to grub” as already beginning to assume its colloquial connotation of groveling meanness by the middle of the century. It makes sense, then, that Krook refers to the Chancery lawyers’ parasitic moneymaking as “grub[bing] on in a muddle” (70). This is exactly what the Smallweeds do as they “retire into holes” and make their money not by earnest industriousness but by grubbing for it upon the laws of “compound interest” (332–33).

The trope of shouldering is also refracted in compelling ways to Bleak House’s earnestly industrious minor characters who do possess the literal and figurative abilities to shoulder responsibilities small and large throughout the novel. The hardworking Chesney Wold housekeeper, for instance, Mrs. Rouncewell, is “broad across the shoulders,” and her self-made ironmaster son has the same broad-shouldered “good figure, like his mother” (451). Mrs. Rouncewell’s other son, Trooper George, is often depicted “squaring” these same “broad square shoulders” to the most venal elements and characters he encounters in the novel’s corrupt landscape (722, 544). Indeed, “the special contrast Mr George makes to the Smallweed family” is rendered in decisively physical, shouldered terminology (341). Where Smallweed (as figure 13) is a shoulderless “clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on top of it,” Trooper George always maintains a “broad-shouldered,” “squared,” and “developed figure” (334, 342). Perhaps most telling in this respect, though, Dickens renders the physical contrast between George and Smallweed as “a broadsword to an oyster-knife” (342). This small but striking comparison is not insignificant for the argument that I have been pursuing: a broadsword’s most defining feature is its oversized “shoulder hilt,” which stops an opposing sword from traveling down the blade to harm the bearer’s hand in combat; by contrast, a narrow oyster knife’s lack of a shoulder hilt is precisely what allows it to run the length of the oyster’s shell and pry it open. Thus, even the smallest of comparative metaphors in this novel carry shouldered implications.

Fittingly, the colloquial expressions other characters use to describe Trooper George’s determination are also shoulder oriented. For instance, when Jarndyce inquires about changing George’s mind to hire a lawyer after he is falsely imprisoned for murder, Mrs. Bagnet responds that “you could as soon take up and shoulder and eight-and-forty pounder by your own strength, as turn that man” (799). George’s “habitual manner … of carrying himself” takes on “an extraordinary contrast” on reuniting with his mother during this prison scene (845). He falls to his knees and sobs, repenting for what he calls a life of “incumbrance and … discredit” to the Rouncewell family reputation (846). The narrator, ever playful and punning with the elasticity of these recurring idiomatic orientations, has Mrs. Bagnet’s shoulder-poking umbrella punctuate the cadences of George’s self-deprecating conversation with his mother. On five different occasions in this scene, George slouches in despair as he recounts what he takes to be his various shortcomings, and each time, Mrs. Bagnet’s umbrella forces him to square his shoulders and reassume the “broad-chested upright attitude” for which he has become known: “[Mrs. Bagnet] relieves her feelings, and testifies her interest in the conversation, by giving the trooper a great poke between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy” (543, 846, 847, 848). Because of Dickens’s emphasis on all kinds of shoulders throughout the novel, though, Mrs. Bagnet’s literally pointed remonstrances are not “affectionate lunacy”; they are small but fitting integers in Bleak House’s more general calculus of thematic structure.²⁰ Her umbrella’s correcting pokes also reflect the Bagnet family’s larger imperative that “discipline must be maintained” (441, 544, 802, 983). Their discipline, unlike the Jellyby family, represents another example of how personal and collective responsibility, along with productive labor, emerges as the best way of coping with the entropic forces that appear elsewhere in the novel.²¹

The Capability of Disabled Shoulders

The most admirably literal instantiation of Dickens’s idiomatic theme of shouldering work, responsibility, and duty, however, comes from the most unlikely of characters: Phil Squod. He is the “little grotesque man” who loyally and ably assumes the position of custodian at Trooper George’s shooting gallery despite being severely scorched and lamed in a gasworks accident (350). The initial description of Phil as he shuts up the gallery is an exquisite study in perseverance:

As Phil moves about to execute this order [to “shut up shop”], it appears that he is lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands that could possibly take place, consistently with the retention of all the fingers; for they are notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over. He appears very strong, and lifts heavy benches about as if he had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round the gallery with his shoulder against the wall, and tacking off at objects he wants to lay hold of, instead of going straight to them, which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally called “Phil’s mark.” (350–51; emphasis mine)

As if to demonstrate how “Phil’s mark” could become so recognizable, the narrator continues on to detail the frequency with which the custodian displays his most “curious” attribute: “Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to shoulder round two sides of the gallery, and then tack off at his mattress” (351); “the dirty little man was shuffling about with his shoulder against the wall” (401); “shouldering his way around the gallery in the act of sweeping it” (418); “Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery” (422).

This emphasis on Phil’s literal use of his shoulders is even more conspicuous in the narrative given the placement of its initial description just after Richard’s able-bodied failure to put his shoulder to a profession, and after Mr. Turveydrop’s similarly able-bodied and “high-shouldered” refusal even to consider a profession. In stark contrast, the repeated descriptions of how Phil makes his shoulder “mark” listed above appear almost immediately before he alone carries “the shapeless bundle” of Grandfather Smallweed (in his chair) up the stairs and into the Shooting Gallery—a feat that prompts Smallweed to remark that “your workman is very strong” despite the attendant observation that “he seems to have hurt himself a good deal” (427, 425, 426).

The narrator also gives us a privileged glimpse into the first meeting between Trooper George and Phil Squod, which explicitly emphasizes the latter’s most conspicuous and yet most paradoxically capable feature:

“It was after the case-filling blow up, when I first see you, commander. You remember?”

“I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.”

“Crawling, guv’ner, again a wall—”

“True, Phil—shouldering your way on—” (421; emphasis mine)

Here, George’s observation that Phil was “shouldering [his] way on” may be seen as a distillation of Dickens’s wider imaginative structure for some of the novel’s deepest preoccupations with work, responsibility, and as Bradbury (2003, xxi) has put it, “the value of going on.” It illuminates the latent “shoulder to the wheel” idiom by the invocation of an otherwise literal description of Phil’s physical bearing when George meets him. Rather than shirk responsibility as so many of Bleak House’s able-bodied do, the lamed Phil who refers to himself as “a limping bag of bones” actively invites it: “ ‘If a mark’s wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can’t spoil my beauty. I’m all right.… They won’t hurt me. I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!’ ” (422; emphasis original). The punning on two senses of “mark” here is also telling. Phil offers himself up as a mark, and yet such dedication to his profession is marked—at shoulder height—all over the walls of George’s shooting gallery. Through sheer perseverance and sense of duty, Phil puts his shoulder to the wheel by putting it to the wall. What we get, then, is another brilliant instantiation of Dickensian paronomasia: the literal “shoulder to the wall” calls forth the idiomatic “shoulder to the wheel” in a cross-phrase association where auricular wit manifests itself as the phonematic partaking in the semantic. Thus, it is not surprising that Dickens represents Mr. Jellyby’s frustration with his wife’s “telescopic philanthropy” among their pressing domestic affairs in similar terms of walls and “marks.” Throughout the novel, Mr. Jellyby uses the wall behind his sitting position to compensate for the inability of his shoulders to hold his head upright so often that Esther “plainly perceive[s] the mark of Mr. Jellyby’s head against the wall” each time she visits the Jellyby household (611).²² The contrast between Phil Squod’s active perseverance and Mr. Jellyby’s passive futility, like so many other dimensions of this novel, is shoulder oriented. Where the able-bodied but feckless Mr. Jellyby finds “consolation in walls,” Phil Squod shoulders them in order to carry out his professional duties (774).

I have discussed at considerable length Dickens’s tendency to conflate ability and disability in my first two chapters. I draw attention to this because one of the larger aims of my book is to demonstrate how Dickens’s imagination of disability often operates within the framework of his wider idiomatic imagination. I hope it is obvious that my interpretations of his tendencies to render disability idiomatically are certainly not meant to invalidate or sidestep disability itself; but they are meant to offer a set of alternative explanations for how disability in (some) Dickens can operate “positively”—similar to the manner in which Bakhtin conceives of the grotesque body in Rabelais.²³ The case of Phil Squod in Bleak House is exemplary in this regard. Many critics, for example, have noted the legion of Dickens’s disabled “grotesqueries.”²⁴ Talia Schaffer has emphasized the connection between the Dickensian grotesque and entertainment. “This is especially evident in the case of Dickens’s ‘grotesques,’ ” Schaffer (2016, 164) writes, because they are “descended from the carnival or the freak show, in which the disabled individual proudly displays the body for others’ enjoyment. Although today we would deplore this kind of voyeuristic gaze, disabled subjects like Phil Squod in Bleak House relish attention.”²⁵ Such a position is difficult to contest, especially when the novel’s narrator first describes Phil as “a little grotesque man, with a large head” (Dickens [1952–53] 2003, 350; emphasis mine). My point here is not to contest that this is true. However, I want to suggest that something additional is also true: that Phil Squod’s disability—his reliance on his shoulders to move about George’s shooting gallery in performing his professional duties—is an extended dimension of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination in Bleak House where the linguistic and thematic energies of the text so often merge with the putting (or not) one’s shoulder to the wheel.²⁶ As is the case with Captain Cuttle’s hook-handed contribution to Dombey’s “right-hand man” theme of surrogacy, Phil Squod’s decisively shouldered descriptions extend Bleak House’s emphasis on a “shoulder to the wheel/wall” type of earnest industry, toughness, and responsibility.

The novel’s most egregious and heartbreaking examples of disowning such responsibility occur with society’s failure to find a place for the streetsweeper, Jo—who “fights it out, at his crossing, among the mud and the wheels” (259). He is told by nearly every person and entity he encounters to “move on.” Chapter 19, titled “Moving On,” features a constable who claims to have told Jo to “move on” “five hundred times” (308). And Jo has no choice but to comply, saying, “ ‘I have been moved on, and moved on … and they’re all a watching and a driving of me … from the time when I don’t get up, to the time when I don’t go to bed’ ” (491). The fact that Jo—nicknamed “toughy” because he is such a “Tough Subject”—does so often “move on,” “with his bare feet, over hard stones, and through the mud and mire,” invokes yet another dimension of setting one’s shoulder to the wheel (359, 261). Seldom appealing for assistance and laboring nonstop in this manner without sleep naturally makes him susceptible to sickness. When Liz attempts to secure help in Tom-all-Alone’s, society’s bureaucratic failure begins to resemble the futile, wheel-like circularity of the suit in Chancery: “At first it was too early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last it was too late. One official sent her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and forward; until it appeared … as if both must have been appointed for their skill in evading their duties, instead of performing them” (491–92). Despite receiving no (medical) care aside from a brief stay at the Bleak House property, Jo “moves on” until Allan Woodcourt tracks him down in Tom-all-Alone’s and his death becomes imminent.

But it is important that Dickens infuses the description of the events leading up to Jo’s death with several of the literal and figurative senses of the central idiom I have been tracing in this chapter. When Woodcourt first glimpses Jo, for instance, “he sees a ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls” (713). And later, we learn that “Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises, and stands, after the manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his high shoulders against it” (716; emphasis mine). So unlike the elder Turveydrop, Jo’s high shoulders are put to (good) use. The descriptions of them in this way reveal that Jo, even at the end of his life, not only “moves on” but “shoulders on” in a manner distinctly reminiscent of “Phil’s mark.” It is appropriate, then, that Jo is taken to the shooting gallery in a chapter titled “Jo’s Will”—where Phil prepares the streetsweeper’s deathbed by “bear[ing] down upon them, according to his usual [wall-shouldering] tactics” (725). Jo and Phil appear to be members of the same “tribe” not because of their orphaned, outcast, or grotesquely disabled status but because of their “will” to shoulder on and ahead amid the most difficult of circumstances. We witness Phil, for instance, at one point “shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping” (418; emphasis mine). In Jo’s actual death scene, Dickens brings the guiding idiom that we have been tracing full circle, so to speak, as he transfers the focus from the streetsweeper’s literal shoulders to his figurative “cart.” He has had his shoulder to the wheel of this cart for his whole life and only physical disintegration slows this. But he still “labours up” and “labours on” to his very last breath:

That cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws with a hollower sound … as the cart seems to be breaking down. (728)

For the cart so hard to draw, is near its journey’s end.… All around the clock, it labours up the broken steps, shattered and worn. (731)

The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more. (732)

The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end. (733)

Although the metaphor figures Jo’s life as the cart, it is clear that road he has had to traverse has been mercilessly arduous in terms of “work.”²⁷ We have been aware since the outset of the novel that “Jo fights it out, at his crossing, among the mud and wheels” for “a scanty sum to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone’s” (259).

This orients, even as it contrasts, Jo’s struggle and his “will” to keep the cart “moving on” with the Aesopian wagoner who gives up so easily and pleads for divine assistance. Jo’s around-the-clock “labours,” laboring to move his cart on “a little more” through the “stagnant channels of mud,” recalls the easily defeated wagoner but also more specifically Richard—the person for whom Dickens principally invokes the idiom and for whom, by this point in the narrative, is already “broken, heart and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery” (711, 559). As we have seen, Jarndyce alludes to Aesop’s idiomatic fable in order to stress the importance of trusting to constancy and individual effort instead of what he senses is Richard’s budding tendency to rely (Skimpole style) on others. One of the great tragedies of the novel, though, is that for Richard, his guardian’s advice—to use terminology germane to Bleak House’s wheeled atmosphere—has no traction. Richard’s early “habit of putting off—and trusting to this, that, and the other chance” only becomes more deeply entrenched as he flounders in his military endeavors but “beseeches Mr Vholes, for Heaven’s sake and Earth’s sake, to do his utmost, to ‘pull him through’ the Court of Chancery” (197, 629).

This failure to put his shoulder to the wheel, in the end figured by a reliance on Vholes to pull him through, also has consequences for how Dickens treats the respective deaths of Jo and Richard. Put plainly, the constancy of Jo’s cart-figured struggle with his broom and his sickness embodies what Bradbury (2003, xxi) and others have described as “the real issue” of survival in the novel. Richard’s death, on the other hand, is narrated with a conspicuous deficit of what we witness in Jo’s almost miraculous “will” to shoulder his life’s cart until its collapse; Richard seems simply to be “wasting away beneath the eyes of [his] adviser” as he ineffectively “haunts the Court” for hundreds of pages of the novel (924). Even his dying words that he will “begin the world” but not “in the old way now” echo with the empty rhetoric of perseverance which characterized the beginnings of each previous failed attempt put his shoulder to the wheel (977–78).

The Idiom at Full Circle

Critics have long marveled at the intricate connections and reconnections woven throughout Bleak House. J. Hillis Miller (1971, 17) has made an influential assertion that “a complex fabric of recurrences” circle around in such a way that “characters, scenes, themes and metaphors return in proliferating resemblances.” In a similar observation on the circularity of the novel’s language, Altick (1980, 73) has pointed out how “manifold strains of imagery and theme, its very language, induce echoes that are repeatedly heard, often elaborated or modified, down to the very last chapters.” Schor (2006, 96) has more recently argued that it is “impossible to make real sense of Bleak House” without accounting for the buried and revolving “connections between one set of images, one set of characters, one set of social crises, and another.” No one would quibble with the validity of these observations. I return to them here because of their common emphasis on the generally circular movement of the novel at a myriad of levels. For my part, I have sought to add a new and very specific argument about the central place of literal and figurative wheels in Dickens’s idiomatic imagination as he composed this intensely complex novel.

We have seen how Dickens’s imaginative course began by seriously considering several variations on “The Ruined Mill” as the title for the book. And clearly, the sense of chaos and futility bound up in the thematic rhetoric of broken or slipping wheels continues to proliferate until very late in the narrative. In her fevered chase with Inspector Bucket to locate Lady Dedlock, for example, Esther reports after each unproductive search that “we were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come; tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow, as if they wore torn up by a waterwheel” (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 885). Here, the mud and “mire” of Aesop’s “shoulder to the wheel” fable converges with the image of a water mill. Indeed, the most melancholy and futile of the Bucket/Esther searches in these final chapters are shot through with hopeless, wheel-oriented imagery. Think, for instance, of the narrator’s description of their stop among the “waste[d]” and “wretched” brickmaking section near Tom-all-Alone’s: “where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, looks like an instrument of human torture” (864). This particular formulation echoes Richard’s fateful comment regarding Ixion’s torturous bondage on the wheel to which Vholes so often claims to have put his shoulder.

Although Dickens characteristically does not set forth any programmatic solutions to the heaving failures of mid-Victorian society, hope does (predictably) emerge in the comingling of individual effort and domestic harmony. In the novel’s final chapters, those who truly put their shoulders to the wheel are rewarded—but crucially for my argument, they are rewarded in an abruptly positive atmosphere where wheels finally do gain traction and do turn productively. Gone are the many debilitating slippages among the fog and mire of the opening’s setting amid the “implacable November weather” (13). At the end, Esther takes possession, on “a beautiful summer morning,” of her very own Bleak House which is set in “such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beautiful, with such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with water sparkling away in the distance, here all overhung with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill” (962; emphasis mine). Water finally takes a sparkling, not miry, form. It seems hardly coincidental, then, that the industrious Charley Neckett is married to a prosperous miller and that Esther can observe, from the desk at her window, “the very mill beginning to go round” (986). Moreover, her hardworking brother Tom’s apprenticeship to the miller recalls the earnest ironmaster who apprenticed and worked his way to a fulfilling life. Even Caddy, as Esther tells us, “works very hard” to support her disabled husband and their child, but “she is more than contented, and does all she has to do with all her heart” (987). This rhetoric aligns Caddy with a “double” diligence that Dickens so highly prized both in and outside the worlds of his novels. First, it reveals Caddy’s achievement of what Esther, perhaps the novel’s hardest-working “shoulder to the wheel” character, set out for herself very early on in terms of “striv[ing] … to be industrious, contented and kind-hearted” (31). Second, it connects Caddy to the exalted sense of industriousness that Dickens had identified in his previous novel regarding David Copperfield (and by proxy, himself). David’s professional maturation occurs in conjunction with his “golden rule” realization that “whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well … and there is no substitute for a thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self” (Dickens [1849–50] 2004, 613).

By the time he starts his next novel, Bleak House, the amalgam of “heart,” “hand,” and “whole self” reaches a new idiomatic configuration in shoulders and wheels—and more specifically, the putting of the former to the latter.

It is worth recalling that Dickens uses the “shoulder to the wheel” idiom or its variants nineteen times in his fictional career, all of which appear in Bleak House. The exclusivity of this finite number provides, if nothing else, I hope, a useful provocation for us to think more broadly and holistically about the mysterious workings of Dickens’s idiomatic imagination in this extraordinary novel. It turns out that Bleak House’s expanding and multiply-valenced reiteration of the shoulder idiom resembles Esther’s moral resolution to combat the inadequacies of “telescopic” work. “I thought it best,” she concludes, “to be as useful as I could, and to render what services I could, to those immediately about me; and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself (Dickens [1852–53] 2003, 128; emphasis mine). To embrace circles of duty (Esther, Charley Neckett, Caddy Jellyby, Trooper George, Phil Squod, Allan Woodcourt, etc.), to misjudge the reach of those circles (Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle), to focus on too-narrow circles (Richard and his Chancery suit, Vholes and his “Vale of Taunton”), to renounce circles of duty altogether (Mr. Turveydrop and Harold Skimpole)—these are all expressions of the novel’s concern for circularity and the need for ethical traction. G. K. Chesterton’s (1911, 152) now-classic contention, therefore, that in “the story[’s] circl[ing] round … itself,” Dickens sees “the conclusion and the whole” of Bleak House seems not only like a viable general claim but one that may be bolstered by specific analysis from an as-yet-unremarked-on, idiomatically oriented perspective. This allows us to see how Dickens draws attention to the crucial ways in which Bleak House is, among other things, an imaginative and thematic exploration of work and responsibility—how we shoulder (or do not) important duties in a far more complex and socially expansive world than the one in which David Copperfield ends. In the next chapter, we will see how Dickens squares his depiction of a similarly complex world with a compacted (weekly) publication schedule in what I call the “manual outlay” of his first post-Darwinian novel.

1. 1. For an alternate reading of responsibility, see Robbins 1990.

2. 2. See C. Tomalin (2011, 240), Bradbury (2003, xxxvii), and Altick (1980).

3. 3. See Flint (2018), Buzard (2005), Schor (2006), Goodlad (2003), Pykett (2000), Robbins (1990), and J. H. Miller (1971).

4. 4. The best discussion of the conceptual roots of this phenomenon is still Houghton 1957, 242–51. See also Danahay (2011), Pettitt (2004), Hack (2005, esp. chap. 3), Purton (2000), and Bradshaw and Ozment (2000).

5. 5. Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle—the novel that immediately followed David Copperfield and Bleak House. The standard view of Dickens’s “discipleship” comes largely from House (1941), Tillotson (1856), and Ford (1958). For more on the literary relationship between Carlyle and Dickens, see Goldberg 1972.

6. 6. I am borrowing language here from John Jordan’s “Response” to Deirdre David’s review of Jordan’s Supposing Bleak House (2010), which was published at www.review19.org on September 17, 2011.

7. 7. This larger corpus is comprised of a combination of the following databases: Chadwyck-Healey’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Nebraska Literary Lab. Searching for usages of “shoulder to the wheel” and its cognates in a corpus of this size required new code to extract not only the phrases but also the number of instances in each of the 3,719 novels. See appendix C to the introduction.

8. 8. Butt and Tillotson refer to the novel as a “fable” on multiple occasions in their chapter (7) titled “The Topicality of Bleak House” but never connect it to Aesop’s fable of the wagoner.

9. 9. There are interesting connections between Richard Carstone’s predilections toward idleness and Dickens’s feelings about his son, Charley. In the winter of 1851–52, for instance, Dickens was dissatisfied with his son’s haphazard progress at Eton and eventually decided to remove him from the school and, despite the fact that Charley was only sixteen, asked him to decide on a career. In a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts, Dickens speaks of Charley in ways that seem eerily familiar to his depiction of Richard Carstone: “His inclinations are all good; but I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son. He is not aspiring, or imaginative on his own behalf. With all the tenderer and better qualities which he inherits from his mother, he inherits an indescribable lassitude of character—a very serious thing in a man” (House et al. 1965–2002, vii, 244–46).

10. 10. See Keatley (2017) for a recent analysis linking the Jarndyce will to religious will.

11. 11. See Knoepflmacher (1971), Kincaid (1971), Carey (1973), Vlock (1998), Andrews (2006, 2013), and C. Tomalin (2011).

12. 12. For an extremely original interpretation of the thematic potential embedded in suspended quotations, see Lambert 1981.

13. 13. I offer a much more detailed analysis of this element of “critical” idiom absorption in my conclusion.

14. 14. Sally Mitchell (1981, xii) suggests that materiality itself belonged to the workplace and that middle-class women thus lacked this embodiment. Helena Michie argues that “the distance between the heroine’s body and the words used to describe it are not simply différance, but an intervening between a subject and its representation.” See Michie 1987, 84. Tromp (2000, 23) focuses on the character of Nancy in Oliver Twist to explore “the ways that a middle-class woman’s body served as a counterpoint to the working woman’s physicality, providing instead a means of social embodiment that denied the physical body and therefore made it seem impervious to violence.”

15. 15. It is difficult to locate the pleasures of encountering this kind of inventive strain (“the glory of the quotidian”) in Dickens any better than Garrett Stewart (1974, xxiii, 14) put it: “the sheer verbal gymnastics of words on vacation from meaning, the stylistic fun of language at play.” For a discussion of how the trope of syllepsis operates as “a kind of distended pun,” see Stewart (2015), especially “The Sylleptic Turn” section of chapter 4.

16. 16. Parts of my formulation here are indebted to H. P. Sucksmith (1970, 66–67) who notes the following: “Vholes’s remark about putting one’s shoulder to the wheel suggests Sisyphus as well as Ixion; the two damned and tortured souls were always closely associated and represented side by side in Tartarus. The momentary sarcasm of Richard has a deeper irony than he knows; his case is to be an exact parallel to that of Ixion and Sisyphus. All his schemes are to come to nothing, he is to be involved in an impossible punitive task and his life will become a hell of endless torment. Moreover, the classical reference is perfectly natural in Richard’s mouth since his exclusively classical education at a public school has been insisted upon early in the novel.”

17. 17. Philip Horne (2013, 160) makes a similar point: “The style of speech of a character can extend beyond the sphere of direct quotation and seep into the narration at times so that the prose of the quasi-omniscient narrator takes on local colour from words characteristic of the figures and texts—and places—in the vicinity.”

18. 18. I am indebted to Garrett Stewart for this formulation. Stewart (1974, 135) remarks that Vholes “is hideously ‘inward’ and without surface, a devouring void like the ‘hole’ hiding in his name.”

19. 19. For another view of Vholes’s cannibalism see Stone 1994, 139–41.

20. 20. Mrs. Bagnet’s umbrella pokes offer a far more effective—not to mention more positive—analogy to Judy’s constant “upshaking” of the ever-slouching Smallweed. For a brilliant assessment of Dickens’s “style” by way of his umbrellas, see Bowen 2013.

21. 21. My reading here differs significantly from D. A. Miller, who maintains the Bagnets and their repeated motto exemplify the practice of self-policing that, according to Foucault, characterizes bourgeois society. See D. A. Miller 1988, 105.

22. 22. Here are the other instances where Dickens presents Mr. Jellyby’s passive reliance on walls: “During the whole evening, Mr Jellyby sat in a corner with his head against the wall” (57); “Poor Mr Jellyby … very seldom spoke, and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the wall” (479); “he came in regularly every evening, and sat without his coat, with his head against the wall; as though he would have helped us, if he had known how” (480); “Mr Jellyby groaned, and laid his head against the wall again” (481); he “sat down on the stairs with his head against the wall. I hope he found some consolation in walls. I almost think he did” (484; emphasis mine); he “then sit down, with his head against the wall, and make no attempt to say anything more” (774); “His sole occupation was to sit with his head against the wall” (774; emphasis mine); “Mr Jellyby spends his evenings at [Caddy’s] new house with his head against the wall, as he used to do in her old one” (987).

23. 23. Bakhtin (1968, 303) states that “exaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered fundamental attributes of the grotesque style.” These attributes so often part of Dickens’s characterization, but it is also worth noting Bakhtin’s belief that “in grotesque realism … the bodily element is deeply positive” (19).

24. 24. See, for instance, only one recent example from Stewart (2015, 157): “Edgeworth pushes the trope further toward Dickensian grotesquerie in insisting ‘that ’tis better for a lady to lose her leg than her reputation.’ ”

25. 25. For an interpretation arguing that the disabled in Dickens function to facilitate the heteronormative marriage plot from which they themselves are disbarred, see Free 2008.

26. 26. It is worth noting that most critics who discuss Phil Squod do so by locating his disfigurement in his face. See, for example, Scarry (1994, 56), who maintains that Phil “has a physical countenance in which every millimeter of its damaged surface maps the complexities and vagaries of the industrial revolution.” More recently, Breton (2005, 73) explains that “the sympathetic Phil Squod has been physically deformed by capitalism, by a life of labour. But … if labour creates an identity, the apparatus to identify character (physiognomy) is nonetheless upheld.”

27. 27. In David Copperfield, the novel Dickens ([1849–50] 2004, 553) had most recently finished, David remarks on his various labors with similar rhetoric: “I was always punctual at the office; at the Doctor’s too: and I really did work, as the common expression is, like a cart-horse.”