Jordan John O. - Supposing Bleak House

LONG CONTEMPLATED, THIS BOOK WOULD NOT ALLOW ITSELF to be written until it was ready. When the time came, it offered itself with unstinting generosity. Lengthy incubation in this case entails great indebtedness. I owe thanks in the first instance to Murray Baumgarten and Ed Eigner, who brought me along when they had the idea of starting a Dickens research group at the University of California. To Murray in particular, the Dickens Project's founding director and my longtime co-conspirator in all things Dickensian, I owe a debt of gratitude for colleagueship that extends over four decades and that includes many conversations about Bleak House.

An early version of was presented at the 2001 Dickens Universe gathering in Santa Cruz. I am grateful to friends, students, and colleagues for their positive response on that occasion and to delegates at the 2009 Uneasy Pleasures conference in Jerusalem, where I presented a later version of this chapter. The book's appendix appeared in the March 2010 issue of Dickens Quarterly and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the journal's editor, David Paroissien.

To Bob Newsom and Hilary Schor, two passionate, expert readers of Bleak House, I owe special thanks for their long friendship and for innumerable exchanges about Esther and about Dickens. So many of the ideas that appear in these pages first took shape in conversations between the three of us that it is sometimes difficult for me to know to whom they properly belong, though of course I bear ultimate responsibility for the words on the page. Bob read the entire manuscript, offered many useful suggestions, and was especially helpful in sharpening my understanding of the novel's illustrations.

Others who read the manuscript and provided useful advice include Bob Patten, who took valuable time away from his own research to check first editions of the novel at the Rice University library; Dick Stein, whose encouragement came at a crucial moment; Lou Breger and Jon Varese, each of whom saved me from embarrassing mistakes; and Tim Peltason, whose detailed comments helped improve my argument at several points. Helen Hauser provided important research assistance in London. Lunch conversations with Michael Warren, Gary Miles, and Galia Benziman advanced my work in ways of which they may not be fully aware.

A series of informal study sessions with JoAnn and Greg Bellow proved valuable in developing my ideas about psychoanalysis. Even when Greg and I disagreedespecially when we disagreedour exchanges forced me to clarify my thinking and look for further evidence to explain what I was trying to say. The book is better as a result of our dialogue. At a later stage, Estelle Shane gave me incisive comments on some of the psychoanalytic ideas I was trying to work out.

Without the assistance of libraries and librarians, this project would have been impossible to complete. I am grateful to the staff of McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for timely help in processing interlibrary loan requests. For assistance in locating illustrations and for granting permission to reproduce them, I thank John Mustain and Mattie Taormina at the Stanford University Libraries, Katharine Chandler and Joseph Shemtov at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Moira Fitzgerald at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and David Marshall of Duckworth Publishers. At several points my research has been supported by grants from the Academic Senate Committee on Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I appreciate the committee's confidence in my work.

The memory of two people who will never know how much I owe to them looms large in the background of this book. One is my mother, Mary Hamilton Thompson Orr Jordan, whose presence can be felt on almost every page. The other is Sally Ledger, whose untimely death in early 2009, just as a draft of this book was nearing completion, left a large hole in the community of nineteenth-century scholars of which I am a part. The importance for me of Sally's work on Dickens is especially evident in .

To JoAnna Rottke, the Dickens Project's incomparable coordinator, and to Jay Olson, computing assistant at UC Santa Cruz, I am grateful for help in preparing the manuscript for publication. To Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press, I am thankful for many courtesies, for her patience in answering questions, and for her faith in this project. Thanks go as well to Colleen Romick Clark, herself a Victorianist, for her supportive and sharp-eyed copyediting.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Jane, who shares her life with me and from whom I have absorbed much that is in this book. Her love and confidence in me made it possible for Supposing Bleak House to be written.