For the characters of the Dickens and Brontë novels, social distancing was a blunt instrument for preventing the spread of disease in the absence of other scientific tricks. Art work from Alamy

In Chapter 31 of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House,” Esther Summerson realizes that the young girl who is sitting with her, Charley, is very sick. Esther knows that both she and Charley, who works in the household, had been in the company of a boy who had, in the words of another character, “a very bad sort of fever about him.” And just as Charley says, “I think I’m ill,” Esther hears the voice of Ada Clare, another young woman of the house, approaching. Esther doesn’t hesitate: “I hurried to the door of communication between my room and our pretty sitting-room, and locked it. Just in time, for she tapped at it while my hand was yet upon the key.”

Esther Summerson is one of the great heroines of literature, in part because she understands the vital importance of social distancing and isolation, even when it is hard. Dickens does not name the illness, but, based on his description, Charley and, soon, Esther seem to have contracted smallpox. Before Esther slips into delirium, she makes Charley, whom she has nursed and who by then has recovered enough to nurse her, promise not to let anyone in—especially not Ada. “When she knows I am ill, she will try to make her way into the room,” Esther says. “Keep her out, Charley, if you love me truly, to the last!” Charley, despite her youth, does the job, which is a terrible one:

I had heard my Ada crying at the door, day and night; I had heard her calling to me that I was cruel and did not love her; I had heard her praying and imploring me to be let in to nurse and comfort me, and to leave my bedside no more. . . . Charley had been true to me in that time of need, and with her little hand and her great heart had kept the door fast.

Ada remains safe.

“Bleak House” was published in serial installments in 1852-53, before Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had developed the modern germ theory of disease. Social distancing was and is a blunt instrument for preventing the spread of disease in the absence of other scientific tricks—and there is a shortage of those for COVID-19. The disease is caused by a novel coronavirus, to which the world’s population does not have immunity from previous exposure. One of its insidious qualities is its relative mildness in most, though not all, people who are young and healthy, which means that they can spread it to older people and those who have other conditions, such as heart disease, respiratory illnesses, or suppressed immune systems from, for example, cancer treatments. Spreading the disease can kill them in staggering numbers. One model, developed at Imperial College London, shows more than two million Americans dying if nothing is done—but there are things that can be done, starting, urgently, with social distancing and isolation. No public gatherings; close schools and shift to remote instruction; do all you possibly can to avoid travel and gatherings of ten people or more; try to stay six feet away from people outside your household—and do those things even if you don’t yet know of anyone in your community with COVID-19. Odds are, you soon will. “Flatten the curve”—the measure of how quickly cases pile up—to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. (Read Benjamin Wallace-Wells for more on that; there are simply not enough ventilators in America right now.) The government, at all levels, can do a lot—set up hospitals, ramp up emergency production of ventilators, and test people on a mass scale, a tactic that appears to have checked the epidemic in South Korea—but so can everybody. It’s not easy; loneliness is awful. It’s also not hopeless. But the plea from epidemiologists is that social distancing must be done early to be most effective. As with Esther, our hand, collectively, is yet upon the key.

The consequences of Esther’s and Charley’s illness are, within “Bleak House,” mainly personal. When Esther, too, recovers, Lady Dedlock visits her and reveals that, unbeknownst to everyone else, she is her mother (long, Dickensian story). Esther is glad that the scarring to her face obscures their resemblance, protecting Lady Dedlock’s secret. In contrast, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” published six years before Dickens’s novel, holds lessons not only for slowing the COVID-19 crisis but for what could come next. When Jane is ten or eleven, typhus runs rampant at Lowood, the charity school to which she has been consigned by her aunt, who despises her. Lowood is a bleak house; as Jane describes it, “semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection; forty-five of the eighty girls lay ill at one time.” (The description of life at Lowood echoes the experience that Brontë and her sisters had at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge.) Some girls “have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion”; some go home only to die; some die at school, and are buried quickly, “the nature of the malady forbidding delay.” Those that are vulnerable become, during an epidemic, more vulnerable.

And for those, such as Jane, who remain well, “Classes were broken up, rules relaxed. The few who continued well were allowed almost unlimited licence.” Some of the most evocative passages of the book describe a child’s magical sense of suddenly being left to her own devices, observing the world. Those running the school are too busy to mete out strictly limited meals: sometimes Jane is just handed “a large piece of cold pie.” It does her good. Parents who are concerned, in this time of closed schools, with maintaining educational normalcy might find something to reflect on in those pages. Epidemics are a time out of time, and perhaps less a moment to worry about screen time. Many families, of course, have more existential concerns.

Those who read “Jane Eyre” when they were younger may remember that Helen Burns, Jane’s friend, dies during this period, and that Jane sneaks into her room late at night to say goodbye; Helen dies in her arms. What readers might not recall is that Helen is not one of the typhus patients—she has long suffered from consumption, or tuberculosis, and has, in fact, been isolated from the other girls. Indeed, Brontë seems at pains not to endorse any deliberate breach in social distancing, having the adult Jane, who narrates the book, remember that “by consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild, which time and care would be sure to alleviate.” When Jane, the child, goes through the darkened school to where Helen is, guided by moonlight coming through the windows, there is a place she knows not to enter, filled as it is with schoolmates who have succumbed to the epidemic: an “odour of camphor and burnt vinegar warned me when I came near the fever room: and I passed its door quickly.”