Redemption and inheritance, from Bleak House to Great Expectations

This thesis explores themes of inheritance and redemption through motifs of baptism and apocalypse in two of Charles Dickens’s late works: Bleak House (1852) and Great Expectations (1861). It does so with the specific understanding that the construction of spaces and identities in time are there complexly interdependent entities whose configurations are constitutive of each novel’s narrative fabric. In other words, the spatial construction of each entity (space/place, identity) in relation to time is integral to its interpretation. In Bleak House, the primary motif is that of apocalypse – a motif chiefly concerned with institutional spaces. Great Expectations, conversely, focuses on individual redemption with motifs of baptism. In each of these novels do orphans narrate retroactively their own experiences; in each narrative are the violences perpetrated by parents on children (be they adoptive, biological, or any other variety) foregrounded in Dickens’s social critique. And it is through baptism and apocalypse respectively that such violences are remedied, and inheritance erased