Like so many relationships, Bleak House begins in the fog:
‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river…fog down the river…chance people on the bridges…with fog all round them.’
Repetition breeds a delicious sensory pleasure. This is Dickens’s incantatory requiem to visual perception. Indeed our perceptions of the real are under review. This marked investment in temporary blindness is a metaphor for the secrecy and moral misjudgement that contaminates the novel on all levels. For Bleak House is a labyrinthine novel which attempts to conceal as much as to reveal; a novel peopled by isolated, lost individuals, clinging to their secrets and stories buried deep beneath the complex narrative web that is Bleak House.