The author, with the permission of his publishers, has kindly shared with our readers the following extracts from Chapter 2 of his 2023 book, Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language. The illustration comes from our own website, but it also appears in the book, on p.112; note that the references have been reformatted here. — Jacqueline Banerjee]
ithout question, the most thematically condensed and rhetorically explicit way that wheels and shoulders enter Bleak House is through the lawyer Mr. Vholes. It is fitting that a lawyer who repeatedly circles around the statement of his need to provide for his three daughters and father ("in the Vale of Taunton") articulates this need by way of a professional mantra where "the mill should always be going" (607). Richard's downfall becomes more precipitous once he aligns himself with Vholes, who insists on his ability to turn the wheels of the miry Jarndyce case in the young ward's favor. Eager for and, as we have seen, inclined toward outside intervention rather than individual effort, Richard fatally misjudges Vholes's "energy and deter- mination" in relation to the Jarndyce suit, telling Esther, "We are beginning to spin along with that old suit at last.... We don't do things in the old slow way now. We spin along, now!" (592, 594). Richard's tragic miscalculation is abetted by Vholes's hollow idiomatic reassurances: "We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr Carstone, and the wheel is going round" (623).
Attorney and Client: Fortitude and Impatience by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). Click on the image for more information.
With this phrasing, even in reverse order, Dickens explicitly links two of the novel's master tropes. The devil is in the details of the linkage, though. Vholes's phrasing channels John Jarndyce's early advice in terms of Aesop's wagoner (see "Hercules and the Wagoner," Fables, 13), but as the notoriously "slipping and sliding" opening chapters should remind us, because "the wheel is going round" does not necessarily mean that it is gaining any traction. Mistaking "spinning one's wheels" for "putting one's shoulder to the wheel" eventually has fatal implications for Richard, and Dickens repeatedly emphasizes these phrases' tragic conjunction until they eventually come to fruition near the end of the novel. [107-8]
We have seen how Dickens's imaginative course began by seriously considering several variations on "The Ruined Mill" as the title for the book. And clearly, the sense of chaos and futility bound up in the thematic rhetoric of broken or slipping wheels continues to proliferate until very late in the narrative. In her fevered chase with Inspector Bucket to locate Lady Dedlock, for example, Esther reports after each unproductive search that "we were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come; tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow, as if they wore torn up by a waterwheel" (885). Here, the mud and "mire" of Aesop's "shoulder to the wheel" fable converges with the image of a water mill. Indeed, the most melancholy and futile of the Bucket/Esther searches in chapter 2 with hopeless, wheel-oriented imagery. Think, for instance, of the narrator's description of their stop among the "waste[d]" and "wretched" brickmaking section near Tom-all- Alone's: "where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, looks like an instrument of human torture" (864). This particular formulation echoes Richard's fateful comment regarding Ixion's torturous bondage on the wheel to which Vholes so often claims to have put his shoulder.
Although Dickens characteristically does not set forth any programmatic solutions to the heaving failures of mid-Victorian society, hope does (predictably) emerge in the comingling of individual effort and domestic harmony. In the novel's final chapters, those who truly put their shoulders to the wheel are rewarded—but crucially for my argument, they are rewarded in an abruptly positive atmosphere where wheels finally do gain traction and do turn productively. Gone are the many debilitating slippages among the fog and mire of the opening's setting amid the "implacable November weather" (13). At the end, Esther takes possession, on "a beautiful summer morning," of her very own Bleak House which is set in "such a lovely place, so tranquil and so beautiful, with such a rich and smiling country spread around it; with water sparkling away in the distance, here all overhung with summer-growth, there turning a humming mill" (962; emphasis mine). Water finally takes a sparkling, not miry, form. It seems hardly coincidental, then, that the industrious Charley Neckett is married to a prosperous miller and that Esther can observe, from the desk at her window, "the very mill beginning to go round" (986). Moreover, her hardworking brother Tom's apprenticeship to the miller recalls the earnest ironmaster who apprenticed and worked his way to a fulfilling life. Even Caddy, as Esther tells us, "works very hard" to support her disabled husband and their child, but "she is more than contented, and does all she has to do with all her heart" (987). This rhetoric aligns Caddy with a "double" diligence that Dickens so highly prized both in and outside the worlds of his novels. First, it reveals Caddy's achievement of what Esther, perhaps the novel's hardest-working "shoulder to the wheel" character, set out for herself very early on in terms of "striv[ing] . . . to be industrious, contented and kind-hearted" (31). Second, it connects Caddy to the exalted sense of industriousness that Dickens had identified in his previous novel regarding David Copperfield (and by proxy, himself ). David's professional maturation occurs in conjunction with his "golden rule" realization that "whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well ... and there is no substitute for a thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self" (613). [123-24]
Dickens uses the "shoulder to the wheel" idiom or its variants nineteen times in his fictional career, all of which appear in Bleak House. The exclusivity of this finite number provides, if nothing else, I hope, a useful provocation for us to think more broadly and holistically about the mysterious workings of Dickens's idiomatic imagination in this extraordinary novel. [125]
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
[Source of extracts] Capuano, Peter J. Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023. [Review]
Aesop. The Fables of Aesop. Edited by Joseph Jacobs. London: Macmillan 1926.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852–53. New York: Penguin, 2003.
_____. David Copperfield. 1849–50. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Created 8 February 2025