SOURCE: Eriksen, Donald H. “Bleak House and Victorian Art and Illustration: Charles Dickens's Visual Narrative Style.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 1 (1983): 31-46.

In the following essay, Eriksen investigates Dickens's own views of art and his strongly visual writing style to illuminate the author's development of a more “modern” form of novel writing. Eriksen asserts that in Bleak House Dickens moves away from the Hogarth-inspired style of caricature and satire to a more symbolic form of imagery, a move paralleled by contemporary trends in the visual arts.

In a letter to John Forster, his friend and biographer, Dickens commented upon the visual nature of his literary style: “When … I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it—really do not—but see it, and write it down.”¹ Dickens appears to be describing...