Bleak House and Kierkegaard in a Leveling Age

This article argues that Søren Kierkegaard and Charles Dickens each identified and responded to the same social problem, called “leveling,” or the suppression of the individual in an inert post-revolutionary age. Kierkegaard analyzes the spiritual dangers of this abstracting force in Two Ages (1846), while Dickens in Bleak House (1852–1853) dramatizes a dialectic between mass society and the individual, which both exposes the empty reflections of a leveled society and, in Esther’s narration, intimates an escape route. In addition to glossing a conceptual history of “leveling,” this article advances a model for Victorian realism that disavows psychological interiority to guard instead the inmost self against reductive social abstraction.