Daniel: Alright Sophia, quick-fire challenge. You have three words to describe Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Go. Sophia: Endless. Lawsuit. Fog. And maybe... spontaneous human combustion? That's four, I cheated. Daniel: Perfect. You've captured the vibe. Most people remember it as this sprawling, gloomy social critique wrapped in London fog. But what if the real story isn't just about a broken legal system, but about ghosts? Ghosts in the narrator's mind, ghosts hidden in the pictures, and even the ghost of Dickens himself. Sophia: Whoa, okay. That is not the version I read in high school. You’re telling me there’s a supernatural thriller hiding inside this Victorian classic? Daniel: In a way, yes. That's the territory we're exploring today through John O. Jordan's book, Supposing Bleak House. Sophia: Supposing Bleak House. I love that title. It feels so... tentative, like it's inviting you to wonder rather than telling you what to think. It’s not called The Truth About Bleak House. Daniel: Exactly! And that's Jordan's whole approach. He uses that final word of the novel, "Supposing," as a key to unlock it. And what's fascinating is that Jordan is primarily a naval historian. He writes these incredibly detailed books about French battleships and naval treaties. Sophia: A naval historian? That’s the last person I’d expect to write a deep dive on Dickens. What does a warship expert see in Bleak House? Daniel: He turns that same meticulous, investigative eye from historical archives onto a literary text. And by doing so, he uncovers things that most literary critics, who might be used to certain ways of reading, have missed for over a century. He’s looking for the structural weaknesses, the hidden compartments, the ghosts in the machine. And the first ghost he finds is in the voice of the narrator herself.

Sophia: Right, Esther Summerson. I remember her as the 'good' one. She’s dutiful, she’s kind, she takes care of everyone. She’s the moral compass in a world of corruption. Daniel: That’s what she wants us to think. But Jordan argues that this "Good Esther" persona is a carefully constructed mask. Beneath it is a deeply traumatized woman, and her entire narrative is a ghost story of her own psyche. The key to understanding her is a psychoanalytic concept from André Green that Jordan applies brilliantly: the "dead mother" complex. Sophia: Hold on, a "dead mother" who is still alive? Because her mother, Lady Dedlock, is alive for most of the book. How does that work? Daniel: It's a fantastic question because the term is so provocative. Green’s theory isn't about a literal death. It’s about a mother who, due to her own depression, trauma, or grief, is emotionally absent. She’s physically present, but psychically dead to the child. The child looks to the mother for love, for recognition, for a reflection of their own existence, and finds… nothing. A blank. A void. Sophia: Wow. That’s a chilling image. A mother who is a ghost in her own home. Daniel: Precisely. And for Esther, this happens twice. First, with her godmother, Miss Barbary, who is actually her aunt, a woman so cold and severe she might as well be made of stone. And then, when she finally meets her real mother, Lady Dedlock, she finds a woman entombed in secrets and aristocratic ice, incapable of giving her the love she craves. Lady Dedlock is the ultimate "dead mother"—beautiful, alive, but emotionally a specter. Sophia: Okay, I can see that. So how does this haunting by a 'dead mother' actually shape Esther's voice as a narrator? Daniel: It fractures it. Jordan points out that Esther is constantly trying to mother everyone else—Ada, Jo, Richard. She becomes the mother she never had. Her relentless "duty" and "responsibility" are a desperate attempt to fill the void inside her. It’s a defense mechanism. But the trauma leaks out in her narration. She uses strange, self-effacing language, calling herself "little Esther" or fairytale names like "Mother Hubbard." She's trying to erase herself. Sophia: That makes her story so much sadder. Her goodness isn't just a virtue; it's a symptom of her pain. Daniel: Exactly. And the most powerful evidence Jordan presents is the climax of Esther's search for her mother. It's a frantic chase through a storm with Detective Bucket, and it ends at the gate of a miserable, muddy graveyard. Daniel, can you paint that scene for us? Daniel: It's one of the most harrowing scenes in all of Dickens. After this hallucinatory chase, Esther sees a figure slumped against the iron gate. Jordan highlights how Esther's narration, which she's writing years later, slows down time to an agonizing crawl. She describes the scene with a strange detachment, resisting the conclusion that is screaming at her. She writes about lifting the "heavy head," putting the "long dank hair aside," and turning the face. She's delaying the moment of recognition. Sophia: Because she already knows who it is, doesn't she? Daniel: On an unconscious level, absolutely. Her mind is fighting a truth her body already understands. And then comes the line that Jordan identifies as the emotional core of her entire story. Just five stark, monosyllabic words: "it was my mother, cold and dead." In that moment, the "dead mother" of her psyche becomes the literally dead mother at her feet. The metaphor becomes reality. Her lifelong search for a living, loving mother ends with a corpse. Sophia: That gives me chills. So her whole narrative, her whole life story that she's telling us, is written from the other side of that trauma. It retroactively poisons everything. Daniel: That's the concept of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, that Jordan brings in from Freud. The trauma of that moment at the gate reaches back in time and re-shapes the meaning of her entire life. Every cold glance from a stranger, every feeling of being an outcast, is now filtered through that ultimate abandonment. Her voice isn't just telling a story; it is the story of a haunting.

Sophia: Okay, so her mind is haunted. I'm sold on that. But you mentioned ghosts in the pictures. That sounds like a conspiracy theory for a 19th-century novel. What's that about? Daniel: This is where Jordan's work gets really fun and, as some critics have noted, a bit controversial. He asks a simple question: who narrates the illustrations? The novel has two verbal narrators—Esther and the anonymous, all-knowing present-tense narrator. But the illustrations, by an artist named Hablot Browne, or 'Phiz,' are their own narrative. Sophia: I always just thought of them as... well, illustrations. Pictures of what's happening in the chapter. Daniel: That’s how most people see them. But Jordan argues they have their own perspective, their own 'focalization,' to use the technical term. Sometimes they show us things neither narrator could see. And in one specific case, he believes Phiz drew an actual ghost that Dickens and nearly everyone since has overlooked. Sophia: Come on, a ghost? In a Phiz illustration? Couldn't it just be a smudge? A printing error from a worn-out plate? Daniel: That's the skeptical argument, and it's a fair one! Jordan spends a whole appendix on this, like a detective presenting his case. The illustration is called "The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold." It’s a dark plate, very atmospheric. It shows the grand, gloomy tomb of the Dedlock family at night. And Jordan directs our eyes to the space just to the left of the mausoleum's heavy door. Sophia: And what does he see there? Daniel: He describes a faint, semi-transparent figure. It's darker than the stone behind it, draped in what looks like a cloak, with a vaguely human shape. He argues it's the ghost of the first Lady Dedlock, the one who cursed the family generations ago and whose footsteps are said to haunt the terrace—the "Ghost's Walk." Sophia: I’m still not convinced. It sounds like seeing faces in the clouds. People are primed to see ghosts in a story that’s already full of spooky atmosphere. Daniel: Absolutely. And Jordan acknowledges that. He says the ghost's visibility depends heavily on which edition of the book you're looking at. In some, it's clearer; in others, it's gone. But he builds a compelling circumstantial case. First, he points to other novelists like Thackeray, whose illustrations for Vanity Fair famously tell a darker story than the text. In one, the heroine Becky Sharp is shown hiding behind a curtain with a dagger, hinting she's a murderer, something the text never confirms. The illustration has priority. Sophia: Okay, so there's a precedent for illustrators adding secret layers. What else? Daniel: He points to the very end of another Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. The final paragraph describes Oliver visiting the memorial for his dead mother, Agnes. And the narrator says, "...if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth... I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook." The text invites us to imagine a ghost. Jordan's supposition is that Dickens might have told Phiz to do the same for Bleak House, but visually—to suggest the shade of Lady Dedlock lingering at her own grave. Sophia: So it’s an invitation to see a ghost, rather than a definitive photograph of one. Daniel: Exactly! It lives in that ambiguous space of "Supposing." It might be a smudge. It might be a shadow. Or it might be a deliberate, spectral hint from the artist. Jordan doesn't demand we believe him; he just asks us to look closer and wonder. It transforms reading the book into an act of ghost hunting.

Daniel: And whether that ghost in the picture is real or not, Jordan argues the book is undeniably haunted by someone else: Charles Dickens himself. The novel becomes a vessel for his own personal and political specters. Sophia: This feels like the final layer of the haunting. How does Dickens's own life bleed into this story? Daniel: In the most heartbreaking way. Jordan connects the emotional core of Bleak House to a series of tragedies Dickens suffered right before and during its writing. The most significant was the death of his infant daughter, Dora Annie, in 1851. Sophia: Oh, that’s awful. Daniel: The details are almost too perfectly novelistic. The baby was named Dora after a character in his previous novel, David Copperfield. While the real Dora was an infant, Dickens was writing the chapters where the fictional Dora, David's child-wife, gets sick and dies. He wrote a letter to a friend saying, "I have been very hard at work these three days, and have still Dora to kill. But with good luck, I may do it to-morrow." Sophia: Oh, that's a horrible coincidence. To be writing about killing a character with the same name as your baby daughter. Daniel: It gets worse. A few months later, his own daughter Dora fell ill and died suddenly while Dickens was out presiding over a public dinner. His friend had to pull him aside and break the news. Dickens was shattered. He sat up all night with the tiny body of his daughter. And just months after that, he began writing Bleak House, a novel saturated with themes of lost children, orphanhood, and parental failure. Sophia: Wow. So when Esther is wrestling with her identity as an orphan, her feelings of being unwanted, her search for a mother... it's Dickens processing his own profound grief and perhaps even guilt. Daniel: That's Jordan's argument. Esther's psychological wounds are, in part, Dickens's own. The novel is an act of mourning. But it's not just his personal ghosts. Jordan argues the book is also haunted by the social ghosts of England. He connects Bleak House to Derrida's concept of "hauntology"—the idea that the present is always haunted by the specters of the past and the lost futures we failed to create. Sophia: And who are the social ghosts in Bleak House? Daniel: The most powerful one is Jo, the homeless crossing-sweeper. He's illiterate, destitute, constantly being told to "move on." He knows nothing, except that one man, Nemo, "wos wery good to me." When Jo dies of poverty and disease, the anonymous narrator's voice erupts with a rage that is pure Dickens. He addresses all of society—royalty, politicians, the church—and thunders at them. Daniel: He writes, "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day." Sophia: That's devastating. Jo becomes the ghost of every person society has failed. He’s the specter of injustice. Daniel: He is. He represents the haunting presence of the poor and the forgotten. So, Dickens is using the novel to channel his personal grief for his daughter and his public fury at a society that allows children like Jo to die in the streets. The book becomes a séance, calling up all these different kinds of ghosts.

Sophia: So, Bleak House isn't just one story. It's like a set of Russian dolls of haunting. You open it up and there's Esther's psychological haunting by her 'dead mother.' You look closer and there's the potential visual haunting in the artwork. And at the very center is the author himself, haunted by his own personal tragedies and the political ghosts of his nation. Daniel: Exactly. And that's the beauty of Jordan's approach, encapsulated in that title, Supposing Bleak House. He shows us that a masterpiece like this isn't a locked box with a single, correct interpretation. It's a haunted house, with many rooms, many corridors, and many specters. And its power comes from the fact that we can keep opening new doors and finding new ghosts. Sophia: It makes the act of reading feel so much more active, more alive. You're not just consuming a story; you're participating in an investigation. Daniel: You are. And it forces you to confront a really profound question. Jordan's analysis of this 170-year-old novel feels incredibly modern. It makes you wonder, what ghosts—personal, political, historical—haunt the stories we tell ourselves today? What are the things we can't see, but can feel, lurking just at the edge of the frame? Sophia: That's a powerful thought to end on. It changes how I'll look at not just Dickens, but any story. We'd love to hear what you all think. Does this idea of a 'haunted' novel resonate with you? Find us on our social channels and join the conversation. Daniel: This is Aibrary, signing off.