Michaela Seaton Romero

Charles Dickens was a victim of poverty. Growing up he first had an idyllic childhood, even going to school. But when his father was sent to debtor’s prison, he and his sister had to go to work at a shoe blacking factory until their father was freed. Even though he had a happy early childhood, the poverty he witnessed, the preying on the young, and the exploitation of the weak played heavy themes among his later novels. One such novel is Bleak House. Bleak House explores what greed can do to someone, and how poverty plays into it.

Jo is a character readers meet in Bleak House. A street urchin, he shows where the old captain’s grave was.  Jo represents a large multitude of different children Dickens could have met on the streets in his time. Esther, the narrator of Bleak House,  talks about Jo. How odd it must be to be Jo, to see people read and write, but for that to be a completely alien thing to him because he has never been to school, to see people go by without even caring. She seems to think lowly of him, wondering if he ever thinks, if he even can think. Esther talks about how people go to church, which must seem so foreign for Jo, the little lowly street urchin. When he is jostled and pushed out of the way, she wonders if he thinks he’s not really worth anything. In her view, Jo was overlooked until he became what he was, worth nothing more than cow or a dog. His whole life is totally foreign and Esther cannot understand it, she has a gawker mindset when talking about Jo.

It is very probable Dickens put into Esther’s commentary about Jo what he himself heard as a child among the poor people. In his society the poor were considered almost a blight upon the others. It makes me wonder if he was made to feel less than human and not worth anything, not even a kindly glance or for someone to take the time to give him a stale piece of bread. Jo was less than human.

Dickens is making an adept political statement about his society. The Chancery courts in Bleak House were examples of the courts in England, who did not actually care about the people or the law, only what would benefit the ones who could afford to exploit the system. As can be seen in Esther’s portrayal of Jo, Dickens also looks down upon the ill education of the poor and the neglect of them.

The fog is also symbolic of the oppression that permeates Victorian society. The Victorian world was governed by greed and money, of which the poor unfortunately were often victims. His descriptions of the streets, the urchins, and the overcrowded living quarters are all indicative of the conditions during Dickens’s time. It was a gloomy time with society rotting according to Dickens, and this shows through in his work. In one scene he details three children who talk with Esther and her guardian. They have a gawker mindset, completely baffled how the little girl in women’s clothes could be supporting the other two. It is sad, considering Dickens probably felt the same way when he had to support his family. It is horrible how the society ignores their own festering blisters of poverty and does nothing to help the poor children.

Dickens saw the dark side of England, the poverty, when he had to work for his family. What he saw and experienced he put into his books, nudging his political views on poverty into the minds of his readers. Bleak House shows this, as does The Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. Dickens made sure he always included people who suffer from others’ greed, and in doing so, established himself as one of the greatest authors of the Victorian Era.