196 KNOWING DICKENS
When Detective Bucket is set on her trail with orders to find and forgive,
he goes first to the obvious places: the east London docks where bodies are
dragged from the Thames, the bridges from which she might have jumped.
But Dickens is not following the classic script of the fallen woman; Bucket,
who is, loses valuable time. Through Esther’s narration of the whirlwind
carriage ride she takes with Bucket in search of her mother, we are allowed
to piece together, though not to experience, Lady Dedlock’s two-day walk
of over fifty miles on snowy roads and city streets. She walks from her Lon-
don house to Saint Albans, twenty-three miles out of London (as Jenny, the
brickmaker’s wife, informs Dr. Woodcourt). She is looking for Esther at
Bleak House, just outside of Saint Albans, but doesn’t find her; instead she
rests at the brickmaker’s cottage, changes clothes with Jenny, and turns back
toward London around midnight, just as Bucket and Esther are beginning
their search. As they alight at Saint Albans and pursue the decoy Jenny on the
northern road, Lady Dedlock arrives back in London, getting lost in its streets
as she searches for the fetid graveyard that holds the body of her lost lover.
Jo has shown it to her once, but her memory does not hold; with Guster’s
help, she finally finds it on the night of her second day of flight. When the
search party finds her at dawn, she is dead, clinging to the locked gates of the
cemetery that confirms her final houselessness.
What does Lady Dedlock die of? “These streets!” she writes in her final
note, “I have no purpose but to die. When I left, I had a worse; but I am saved
from adding that guilt to the rest. Cold, wet, and fatigue, are sufficient causes
for my being found dead; but I shall die of others, though I suffer from these”
(BH 59). The streets are both walkways and death traps in Bleak House, con-
cerned as it is with the failures of metropolitan sanitation, and the exclamation
“These streets!” seems to implicate them directly in a death that is otherwise
not sufficiently caused. Death by walking apparently absolves Lady Dedlock
from the selfish guilt of suicide; with the help of cold dark roads and obscure
streets she manages to die in about thirty-six hours. Yet her marathon walk
turns out to be just an alibi: she will really die, Lady Dedlock claims, from an
internal collapse comparable to Krook’s notorious spontaneous combustion.
The picture of Lady Dedlock walking the streets inevitably suggests a
gendered version of streetwalking, allying that internal collapse with the
proverbial despair of the fallen woman. In fact the streets are her refuge;
they allow her to become lost, anonymous, detached from the social identity
she had built at great cost to herself, and from the eyes that have followed
her movements and speculated about them. Her end is told with a curi-
ous mixture of distance and sympathy, as a carefully worked out back-story
discernible behind the veil of Esther’s intense, dread-filled narrative. Like