Student Essay on Dickens's Craftsmanship of Plot and Character in Bleak House

The structure of Bleak House is a cycle. Dickens has built a framework of brooding fog, and embedded all his characters and events into the framework. The story begins as well as ends in that foggy atmosphere. With the fog as a running through thread and the skillfully connected scenes as the beads, Bleak House is presented to readers like a tied up necklace, an exquisite production of Dickens's great craftsmanship.

Bleak House was published in monthly parts in 1852-3. The typical Victorian way of publication (that is, to publish a book in series) inevitably affects a writer's organization of an organic book. On the one hand, it is impossible for the writer to correct what has been said or to add what has not been said; on the other hand, readers' opinion keeps influencing the writer on what he/she is going to write. Despite this difficulty, Dickens is a great artist in the writing of Bleak House, especially in his well-calculated structure.

In his famous Cornell lectures on Bleak House, Vladimir Nabokov said "[by structure], we mean the planned pattern of a work of art" (Dickens xii). Obviously the key word for structure is that it has to be "planned." In.....