Bleak House

A great window into another Dickensian world.

“It had been called, before his time, the Peaks. He gave it its present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and ruined.”

Bleak House was long, too convoluted, and too melodramatic.

I had so much fun with

A Tale of Two Cities that I fully expected another page-turner, perhaps one particularly atmospheric and featuring more intense courtroom scenes like the ones that I enjoyed so much in

Two Cities.

Bleak House…was not that.

I think one of my biggest problems is that I generally don’t find Dickens funny. And presumably he’s trying to be funny, in a satirical sense, with characters like Harold Skimpole. Harold Skimpole made me insane. He was a dead horse beaten beyond recognition, his ghost pleading (fruitlessly) to be left in peace. We get some variation of this conversation

“You’ll say it’s childish,” observed Mr. Skimpole, looking gaily at us. “Well, I dare say it may be; but I AM a child, and I never pretend to be anything else.

a dozen times, and they often go on for pages. I GET IT, Dickens! I got it the first time! While Skimpole really is the “standout,” basically all the characters get a similar treatment in that they are unchanging caricatures that fail to evolve or deepen over the course of the novel.

The plot is incredibly complicated, and (especially in the beginning) the reader really has to work to track what’s going on through numerous disconnected scenes featuring different sets of characters. While these do usually have a piece that relates back to the main plot (which tangentially surrounds the court case but ultimately focuses on Lady Dedlock’s personal history), it’s a puzzle that has to be put together, and one that’s exhausting rather than fun. I could barely keep everyone straight with how much the story jumped around.

Some of these little subplots are more interesting than others. I did find Esther’s narration to be entertaining—although Esther herself is annoyingly perfect—and her story to be the only emotionally investing part of the novel. I was immensely entertained by Guppy’s flip-flopping. The romance, though, was flipping weird:

having agreed to marry the man who is not only old enough to be her father but has been an actual father figure to her for most of her adult life, he surprises her…by giving her away to the more age-appropriate doctor she’s

actually been in love with, and they’re getting married in a month

! That

is the outcome I wanted, but the way it got there was so,

so bizarre. That detail notwithstanding, I did enjoy her narrative, and if the entirety of

Bleak House was distilled down to an abridged version of Esther’s story, I would have probably liked the book.

The last thing I’ll note is that I don’t think Dickens is a great prose stylist, and for me that really hurt the book. Most of

Bleak House actually sounds interesting on paper, but Dickens’ writing just bored me to tears at times. He can be great when he wants to—Chapter 48, when the murder takes place, was fantastic, and there’s a couple great descriptions of the Dedlock portraits that stood out—but for the most part it just sort of…plodded along. It’s not difficult to read (even the dialect, which, kudos where it’s due, is fairly impressive), but it’s just so

boring.

The jury is still out whether

Bleak House has put me off Dickens entirely, but suffice to say I’m giving him a break for the foreseeable future. My experience with the novel may be summed up thusly:

And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends.

Some favorite passages:

In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

She partly drew aside the curtain of the long, low garret window and called our attention to a number of bird-cages hanging there, some containing several birds. There were larks, linnets, and goldfinches—I should think at least twenty. “I began to keep the little creatures,” she said, “with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgment should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free!

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them.

The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas),

“The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a will and the trusts under a will—or it was once. It’s about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”

It is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out, without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and every door might be death’s door) turning stagnant green, the very crutches on which the ruins are propped decaying.

Miss Summerson! In the mildest language, I adore you. Would you be so kind as to allow me (as I may say) to file a declaration—to make an offer!” Mr. Guppy went down on his knees. I was well behind my table and not much frightened. I said, “Get up from that ridiculous position immediately, sir, or you will oblige me to break my implied promise and ring the bell!”

For smoke, which is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer’s name and clung to his dwelling-place that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered the parent tree.

Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort.

and my guardian laughed so sincerely at and with Mr. Skimpole, as a child who blew bubbles and broke them all day long,

The lattice-windows were all thrown open, and we sat just within the doorway watching the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant countries and the stars THEY saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to be useful to some one in my small way.

“She’s worth her weight in gold,” says the trooper. “In gold?” says Mr. Bagnet. “I’ll tell you what. The old girl’s weight—is twelve stone six. Would I take that weight—in any metal—for the old girl? No. Why not? Because the old girl’s metal is far more precious—than the preciousest metal. And she’s ALL metal!”

And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me and that if he had been richer he would perhaps have told me that he loved me before he went away. I had thought, sometimes, that if he had done so, I should have been glad of it. But how much better it was now that this had never happened! What should I have suffered if I had had to write to him and tell him that the poor face he had known as mine was quite gone from me and that I freely released him from his bondage to one whom he had never seen!

I had never been a beauty and had never thought myself one, but I had been very different from this. It was all gone now. Heaven was so good to me that I could let it go with a few not bitter tears and could stand there arranging my hair for the night quite thankfully. One thing troubled me, and I considered it for a long time before I went to sleep. I had kept Mr. Woodcourt’s flowers. When they were withered I had dried them and put them in a book that I was fond of. Nobody knew this, not even Ada. I was doubtful whether I had a right to preserve what he had sent to one so different—whether it was generous towards him to do it. I wished to be generous to him, even in the secret depths of my heart, which he would never know, because I could have loved him—could have been devoted to him. At last I came to the conclusion that I might keep them if I treasured them only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light. I hope this may not seem trivial. I was very much in earnest.

I had been looking at the Ghost’s Walk lying in a deep shade of masonry afar off and picturing to myself the female shape that was said to haunt it

his best parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in it than were quite convenient,

“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Mr. Guppy, going with one leg and staying with the other, “but this lady being present—your own witness—it might be a satisfaction to your mind (which I should wish to set at rest) if you was to repeat those admissions.” “Well, Caddy,” said I, turning to her, “perhaps you will not be surprised when I tell you, my dear, that there never has been any engagement—” “No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” suggested Mr. Guppy. “No proposal or promise of marriage whatsoever,” said I, “between this gentleman—” “William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex,” he murmured. “Between this gentleman, Mr. William Guppy, of Penton Place, Pentonville, in the county of Middlesex, and myself.” “Thank you, miss,” said Mr. Guppy. “Very full—er—excuse me—lady’s name, Christian and surname both?” I gave them. “Married woman, I believe?” said Mr. Guppy. “Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the city of London, but extra-parochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged.”

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.

As though, Mr. Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!

Through some of the fiery windows beautiful from without, and set, at this sunset hour, not in dull-grey stone but in a glorious house of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in rich, lavish, overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features as the shadows of leaves play there. A dense justice in a corner is beguiled into a wink. A staring baronet, with a truncheon, gets a dimple in his chin. Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess there steals a fleck of light and warmth that would have done it good a hundred years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-heeled shoes, very like her—casting the shadow of that virgin event before her full two centuries—shoots out into a halo and becomes a saint. A maid of honour of the court of Charles the Second, with large round eyes (and other charms to correspond), seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows. But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my Lady’s picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker rises shadow on the wall—now a red gloom on the ceiling—now the fire is out.

letter, though it expressed so much love, but was written just as he would at any time have spoken to me. I saw his face, and heard his voice, and felt the influence of his kind protecting manner in every line.

Perhaps the name brought them to my remembrance. The dried remains of the flowers. It would be better not to keep them now. They had only been preserved in memory of something wholly past and gone, but it would be better not to keep them now.

Then I took them into my own room and burned them at the candle, and they were dust in an instant.

It won’t do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,”

The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-chaise comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day.

As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be.

and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real.

“Allan,” said my guardian, “take from me a willing gift, the best wife that ever man had. What more can I say for you than that I know you deserve her! Take with her the little home she brings you. You know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has made its namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing.”

“The moon is shining so brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have been sitting here thinking.” “What have you been thinking about, my dear?” said Allan then. “How curious you are!” said I. “I am almost ashamed to tell you, but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks—such as they were.” “And what have you been thinking about THEM, my busy bee?” said Allan. “I have been thinking that I thought it was impossible that you COULD have loved me any better, even if I had retained them.” “‘Such as they were’?” said Allan, laughing. “Such as they were, of course.” “My dear Dame Durden,” said Allan, drawing my arm through his, “do you ever look in the glass?” “You know I do; you see me do it.” “And don’t you know that you are prettier than you ever were?”