Victorian Visual Culture

I’d describe one of my closest friends as having an obsession with sitting in windows. Anytime we are within the vicinity of a window with a ledge, she always finds a way to perch within its frame. I also love a good window seat, but her insistence on enjoying a window scene stands out to me. Some people and characters are just drawn to windows more than others, and within Bleak House, there is no better encapsulation of this characteristic than Lady Dedlock. What is so important about Lady Dedlock, a character contained within her visuality, constantly looking out of a window? More importantly, what does this say about Dickens’s interest in the window as a literary space? 

One search on LITS for windows and Victorian culture yields an astonishing amount of sources. In this article by Katherine Williams, I learned about the window tax, first introduced in 1696. To summarize briefly, households were taxed proportionally based on the number of windows their homes had. This acted as an early form of income tax, as houses with more windows were naturally bigger in size, therefore belonging to more affluent families. However, Williams writes that this encouraged builders to plan houses with fewer windows and also prompted individuals who could not afford the tax to board up existing windows. It wasn’t until 1825 that “light-deprived householders got a break” and the tax was amended to exclude “dwellings with fewer than eight windows” (Williams 56). Yet, landlords were still incentivized to lease homes with less than eight windows. This period during which houses were constructed without windows, meant that many lived without access to light for quite some time. Without windows, the lower class was shut off from the world and human connection, which naturally brought about hopelessness and psychological upset. 

The article further explains that Dickens viewed the window as representing health and safety, and was thus staunchly anti the window tax. So, when he writes about the window space, it is inherently political, moving beyond being just a place for psychological reflection. Furthermore, there is something inherently strange in seeing the window as a method for accessing total truth, as even glass itself is a product of industry. The production of glass is a representation of industrial mystery, produced by “faceless men in a factory system” who “forge a gleaming, modern substance out of natural elements…all on a massive commercial scale” (62). Glass, previously handmade, is now mechanized, and yet when we look out a window, we do not see that labor. 

Given that Lady Dedlock has married into the estate, the building old and part of a generational inheritance, the window pane she looks from was likely made before large-scale glass production. This would make the window imperfect, handmade. So while I may think of glass as able to grant me a true picture of what lies outside, old windows are slightly opaque, tinging truth. Glass also reflects back an image of yourself, placing your likeness against the landscape. In this might lie part of Lady Dedlock’s attraction to the window, wishing to see herself as outside and not trapped within. Bleak House is a novel largely concerned with obscured truth and partial truth, down to employing both an omniscient narrator and Esther, a biased narrator. Therefore, it makes sense that the window is working out this anxiety, not as inherently truthful as what may first be assumed. 

Lady Dedlock epitomizes Dickens’s fears about photography and its uncontrollable proliferation. Her image is distributed outside of her knowledge, which causes her greatest secret, her motherhood, to be exhumed. But even further, she is shrouded in partial knowledge. The narrative is quick to call her bored and fanciful, these words obscuring the true nature of her dissociation based on the trauma of losing a child (or the belief that she had). We are repeatedly told to misread her. One of the only indications that something might be bubbling under the surface is found in her insistence to be near windows. We are not allowed to know what she might be transposing onto the surface of the glass, what inner narratives might be playing out. But we are given a description of what her window looks like: “The view from my Lady Dedlock’s windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in Indian ink” (Dickens 21). These windows are largely opaque as if spilled on by ink, making the window stained glass. Stained glass is often a method of storytelling, and so it can be inferred that Lady Dedlock is using the window to read her own story, one reflecting her feelings of captivity in the austere house. 

Williams’s article describes the camera lens and the window as synonymous. The camera works by “doubling the eye” magnifying “behind glass plate windows” to make “marketable goods seem intense and dramatic” (67). Lady Dedlock is often described as a physical fixture of the home, interested in the material. So, she can be read in this context as a marketable good and an active participant in commodity culture, made dramatic by her physical appearance. The camera, or the perception of the reader, doubles reality; Dedlock is both a bored wife and a grieving mother. One reality does not see the other. 

If the camera and the window are “a frame for what is inside and what is outside” then Dedlock is left to imagine an outside world through the window (59). Sitting on this threshold, she is both what is seen and also what sees. This connection between surveillance and the inside/outside is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in regards to our own increasingly surveyed society. We are becoming used to being seen, acting as cameras to our own peers. We are primed to document our movements and the movements of others, normalized by the increasing presence of technology in all facets of life. Reading Dedlock’s descent into madness as partially due to her surveillance is a reminder to me that the human psyche is not naturally comfortable in a state in which it might be constantly watched.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Edited by Nicola Bradbury, Penguin Publishing Group, 2003.

Williams, Katherine. “Glass Windows: The View from ‘Bleak House.’” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 33, 2003, pp. 55–85. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44372073. Accessed 22 Oct. 2025.