Knots in Glass: Dickens and Omniscience from Boz to Bucket

When Dickens's characters use vitreous objects to observe, they evidence the author's fluid conception of omniscience at the character level. Fol lowing the pedestrian reports of the physically limited Boz, Dickens increasingly endows select characters with extraordinary dexterities that make them powerful observers. These faculties Dickens first grants to his villains, whose methods of surveillance prove oppressive and dangerous. But in Mr. Bucket, the formally unique detective in Bleak House, Dickens demonstrates that omniscience at the character level can benefit both narrative and social progress. Bucket achieves this omniscience through his tricks of the trade: looking down through skylights, he mimics Les age's lame demon, Asmodeus, and navigating London's dark underworld with bull's-eye lanterns, he becomes a Virgil-figure. By exploiting glass objects to achieve narrator-like access to private spaces, Bucket negotiates and connects the novel's many oppositions—geographic, temporal, and formal—thereby demonstrating that omniscience is not an ethereal authority reserved only for narrators, but rather can be a real prospect for both characters and perhaps the author himself.