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Charles Dickens and the sublime, perhaps, but the Hegelian sublime? And why deformed children? Particularly since this paper most concerns a Dickensian child who is not in fact deformed, Jo in Bleak House (1852-53). Surely a certain distortion is going on. That distortion, though, is not in my argument but in its subject: the common ground between deformed children and the sublime is, in the first instance, precisely physical distortion. In both Immanuel Kant and G. W. E Hegel, the sublime arises from an inadequacy in the appearance of an art object or an aspect of nature to represent its significance, a significance with a moral or theological tinge. The sublime object is able to manage that reference to a moral or theological significance (one that contrasts, at least in Kant, with the morally neutral quality of the beautiful) only because the significance itself inadequately corresponds to the ultimate essence of which it is a concept. Thus the sublime object refers to its signified as a result of its inadequacy as a signifier. And the sublime signified acts as a moral or theological concept precisely because of its inadequacy in comparison to the essence it conceptualizes.' Consequently, the sublime inheres both in the significance inadequately embodied and in the very inadequacy itself, which communicates the superiority of both signified and ultimate essence to all physicality.
The example of deformed children was a common one in Victorian literary and political discourse, one with both social and sentimental significance. Antagonists of factory labor, in order to indicate its depredations upon the bodies of laborers, frequently instanced the deformity of children resulting from their confinement to distorting physical tasks.2 But the empirical process of evidencing could quickly become the aesthetic process of sublime signification. Instancing worked to condemn the social injustices of industrial relations by contrasting the innocence of the child with the hardness of the system that caused his deformity. Thus the deformity, from being a result of industrial maltreatment and evidence of it, became a symbol of social injustice. Victorian fiction, while not always referring to an industrial background, also frequently contrasts deformity to high inner worth in children-and not only in Dickens, as the example of Philip Wakem in George Eliot's The Mill on the...