20
Popular Culture Review
With the fog (not seen so much in Doyle as in Dickens) that pervades the
novel’s setting and, figuratively, plot somewhat lifted, the audience is still left
unsatisfied, understanding well that “the world of Bleak House would have been
a happier, more contented place, had Lady Dedlock’s youthful indiscretion
remained hidden” (O’Hara 122). Knowledge is made democratically public, but
that “knowledge. .. undermines its own purpose” (Bradbury xxvi). This
purpose (like that of the modem detective novel) is to level Justice’s scales and
put the world rig