‘One by assassination … One by starvation, with phthisis … One by chagrin … One by sorrow … One by insanity … One by paralysis,’ lists John Ruskin, detailing some of Bleak House's ‘nine deaths (or left for death's [sic], in the drop scene),’ as he complains about fiction's obsession with dying, ill, and disabled bodies (‘Fiction, Fair and Foul’ 945). Ruskin reads these deaths and the many disabled and grotesque characters as not just the unmistakable ‘medical evidence’ of ‘brain disease’ in Dickens and other authors (164), but also the results of industrialization and its concomitant social disruptions. Indeed, since ‘Fiction, Fair and Foul,’ critics have taken for granted that the many disabled, diseased, and dying bodies in Bleak House signify a morally diseased society. Numerous critics have considered the role of the disabled or ill body in Bleak House as a symbol of social disorder, but analysing the narrative form used to depict these bodies reveals a more complex and open-ended model of disability than previously acknowledged. By closely reading how the text interprets and conveys bodies via focalization, this chapter instigates a rereading of corporeal difference in Bleak House and exposes how critics have unintentionally reproduced the ableist interpretations of bodies suggested through external focalization of the novel's disembodied narrator without considering the internal focalization through those who experience disability.

Though Ruskin viewed Dickens as Hugo's successor in focusing fiction on aberrant bodies, Dickens inherited more from Hugo than the theme of corporeal deviance: he also employs and adapts Hugo’s method of interrogating the interpretation and categorization of those bodies through novel form. As Hugo makes bodily difference fundamental to Notre-Dame de Paris, peopling it with peripheral characters such as the deaf judge and ‘crippled’ mendicants and placing Quasimodo at the heart of both the novel and the cathedral, Dickens likewise situates deviant bodies at both the margins and centre of Bleak House. Multiple characters with bodies deemed deviant due to conditions such as deafness, illness, epilepsy, senility, invalidism, asthma, gout, paralysis, injuries, and disfigurations populate the margins of this multi-plotted novel and, perhaps most remarkably, Dickens makes corporeal difference central to Bleak House by revealing exactly midway through the novel the disfiguring facial scars of Esther Summerson, one of the novel's two narrators.