SOURCE: Benton, Graham. “‘And Dying Thus around Us Every Day’: Pathology, Ontology, and the Discourse of the Diseased Body. A Study of Illness and Contagion in Bleak House.” Dickens Quarterly 11, no. 2 (February 1994): 69-80.

In the following essay, Benton examines the correlation between illness and such issues as justice and progress in Dickens' Bleak House. Benton argues that disease functions in unpredictable and contrary ways, defining society and underscoring societal boundaries, but also existing beyond such boundaries and in some cases breaking them down.

There was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others. … Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself. Others...