Inequality In Bleak House

This shifts significantly to the point where Jo becomes a character with agency that the reader cares for as an individual. He reappears several times in the novel. He identifies Mademoiselle Hortense’s clothing as the clothing the anonymous lady wore when she approached him in Tom-all-Alone’s (Dickens 314). He is subject to the religious ravings of the overzealous preacher Mr. Chadband on two separate occasions. On one of these occasions, Mrs. Snagsby decides he is the illegitimate child of her husband because of a look that passes between the two (Dickens 347). Though false, it is not a difficult leap to make when a poor child is repeatedly brought into your home, a place where children who live in poverty are not supposed to enter. The reader becomes conditioned to expect Jo to appear at any point. He becomes an important periphery …show more content…
Anderson asserts that nation, in this instance the whole of London, “it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). Phrased slightly differently, Anderson writes, “For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this ‘visibility’ was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number” (184-185). Dickens, although he does attempt to show that London’s working class people have differences from higher-class populations, promotes the idea that everyone has an equal part of the whole. He does this by giving Jo and Jenny the agency to transcend the boundaries put in place around higher-class settings and higher-class people: geographic boundaries, class boundaries, and relational boundaries. They interact, although their out-of-placeness is apparent, as if they are