Its mix of voices, changing perspectives and fragmentary narrative could certainly be said to point the way to TS Eliot and his contemporaries, not to mention great late modernists (if that isn't too much of a contradition) like Lawrence Durrell. Bleak House marks a high point in such experiments with form. The critic Alexander Welsh (currently at Yale), for instance, made a similar observation in Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times, describing Bleak House as "an impressive work of montage, which ought by now to have earned Dickens the reputation of composing in 1852-53 a distinctly modernist text." And even back in the 1920s, when modernism was still - well - modern, the writer and critic Percy Wyndham Lewis claimed that Dickens "anticipated modernism" as early on as the Pickwick Papers thanks to its sylistic and narrative innovation.
I too (so far – I've only just passed the halfway point) adore the book – and it has also struck me that elements of it feel curiously modern. From a writing point of view, I was fascinated by the shift between present tense and past tense, and between first and third person – it made the book feel particularly modern, even when the phrasing and syntax was so very Victorian." "I absolutely adored Bleak House, especially the way that, against expectations, almost everyone and everything ended up being relevant and resolved by the end. Dickens nailed it with a timeless wonder." Who else could capture a whole society, in all its class divisions from the aristocracy down to the street cleaner, in one glorious novel? Our contemporary society is so fragmented, false and fluid that it may never be possible again.
"Bleak House – a metaphor for Britain – is a fantastic book. I am in the happy position of which canfan is so envious, my first read of Bleak House. "I am so pleased that I was persuaded to overcome my totally unfounded prejudices against Dickens and take on this excellent novel.
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