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Page 4 of 5

• 1. Poverty and despair
• 2. 'Bleak House'
• 3. Dreams of putrefaction
• 4. Tom's revenge
• 5. Novels as representations
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Tom's revenge

Later in the novel, Dickens imagines Tom as a person seeking his revenge as night falls:

'Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere... There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his commiting, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.

'Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. It is a moot point whether Tom-all-Alone's be uglier by day or by night; but on the argument that the more that is seen of it the more shocking it must be, and that no part of it left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality, day carries it. The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom.'

This last sentence brings us to another thought, that in the empire on which the sun never set, the efforts of missionaries to convert the 'heathen' to Christianity were misplaced. When Jo rests on the door step of the palatial offices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Dickens remarks with heavy irony that the poor boy had no idea of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific.

Again, the power of Dickens' language brings to life some aspects of Victorian society, but the historian would need to find some corroborating information before drawing too many conclusions about the role and the work of the missionaries of the British Empire.

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Published: 2004-11-04