I
must have begun to read Charles Dickens’s
monumental 880-page novel, Bleak House,
about six weeks ago. Normally the only book- reading I do is in bed, before or
after sleeping. So it does take some time to plow through a huge book. What
takes me six weeks nowadays once took me four days: but that was in the first
gush of youth, undertaking my brief and
only post-secondary studies, when I was able to whip through War and Peace in double-quick time. At
the time I was told by a notable literary critic who was my tutor for six
months, that this was Dickens’s greatest novel, and I have since found other
critics agreed. But myself I rather doubt that.
For one thing, I was never too clear
until well on through the book exactly what the plot was: of course, it starts
in the first paragraph with an unfavourable description of London with its
terrible fogs and dampness and many horrible 19th century streets,
and by the third page the court case known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce makes its appearance, with a strong
intimation that it contains all that is worst in English law, that it is little
more than a scam designed to rob innocent people of their money, and that no one
can be expected to make any sense out of it.
In the following pages, Dickens
describes his immense catalogue of characters, more than 60 of them by any count,
and each of them delineated by some overwhelming characteristic that whenever
they appear is repeated so that they become memorable. Unfortunately it was
never made entirely clear, at least to me, just why the major characters around
whom the novel flows, Esther Summerson, Richard Carstone, and Ada Clare, three
orphans, who might generously be described as upper middle class little twits,
were the subject of this suit, involving their guardian John Jarndyce, who has
since been described by Vladimir Nabokov as “one of the best and kindest human
beings ever described in a novel.” From my curmudgeonly viewpoint, crouched in
the corner, Mr. Jarndyce, as with many of Dickens’s characters, seems far too
good to be true, even though he comes out in the end as having been entirely
true to every noble thought and action known to human beings.
Dickens wrote and published the book
in serial form over19 months between March 1852 and September 1853, with about three chapters per month. He must
of necessity have felt the need to continue entrancing his readers, so each
chapter must surely have contained at least one of his memorable caricatures. And
it is this huge novelistic energy at the novelist’s command that has always, in
my eyes, differentiated Dickens from every other writer who has ever lived.
Anyway, rather than weary readers
with details of the somewhat convoluted plot, I thought I would mention a few
of these caricatures. Having captured something essential to their characters and
outlook with a single phrase or idea, the
novelist never relaxes that hold over them. Mrs Pardiggle, for example,
introduced early in the book as a woman obsessed with doing good works for the
poor, is always portrayed in that way to the very last pages, handing over their allowances to her five
children, and immediately insisting they donate the greater part to charities,
like “Alfred, my youngest (five) who has voluntarily enrolled in the the Infant
Bonds of Joy,” while Alfred, clearly dissatisfied with this disposition of his
allowance, scowls unremittingly in the background. Mrs Jellyby, a woman so obsessed with the
conditions among the Boorioboola-gha tribe in distant Africa, that she has
failed to notice the dire condition of her many children, who are filthy from
head to toe, resumes: ”It is
gratifying…. It involves the devotion of all my energies…and I am more
confident of success every day. Do you know, Miss Summerson, I almost wonder
that you never turned your thought to Africa….the finest climate in the world.”
“Indeed, ma’am?”
“Certainly. With precaution. You may
go into Holborn, without precaution and be run over. You may go into Holborn,
with precaution, and never be run over. Just
so with Africa….If you would like,” said Mrs, Jellyby, putting a number of papers
forward, “to look over some remarks on that head and on the general subject,
(which have been extensively circulated) while I finish a letter I am now dictating…”
It has been claimed in recent years
that many of these caricatures are based on real-live people whom Dickens did
not especially admire. The writer Leigh Hunt is one, mercilessly made fun of in
the character of Mr. Skimpole, a man insisting always on being recognized for
his childlike characteristics, and his total unfamiliarity with money, which he
never has any of, but nevertheless manages to spend a good deal of other
people’s after they have taken pity on him and given him what they can afford.
Others, while retaining that element
of exaggeration which is a mark of Dickens in full flight, are quite touching,
brilliantly delineated, and so memorable --- for example, the teenage boy Jo,
malnourished, neglected, convinced he knows nothing and will never amount to
anything, and yet a youngster with evident smarts that should have served him
well if only just one person had ever taken an interest in him. Several
theatrical performances have in recent years been built around this character and
his pathetic condition.
“….he sees a ragged figure coming
cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls --- which the wretchedest
figure might as well avoid --- and furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth, whose face is
hollow, and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is so intent on getting along
unseen that even the apparition of a stranger in whole garments does not tempt him
to look back. He shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passses on the other
side of the wall, and goes shrinking and creeping on wirh his anxious hand before
him and his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what purpose,
or of what material, it would be impossible to say. They look, in colour and in
substance, like a bundle of rank leaves
of swampy growth, that rotted long ago.”
This is a boy, surely meant to represent
many of the dirt-poor, who has known only one thing as he has hung around in a
slum known as Tom’s-All-Alone, trying
to earn a few pennies as a street sweeper but always enjoined by police and
busy-bodies in general, to move on, to move right along. Eventually, this unfortunate creature, who
never hurt a fly in his life, simply gives it all up and dies on the street.
There is no doubt who are the
villains in Dickens’s world: they are the lawyers, from the most powerful like
the scheming snd heartless Mr Tulkinghorn, who has so successfully ground money
out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce that
when it is finally settled, the fortune expected by his young victims has
already been spent in fees, and who, in the book’s major plot, eventually got
his in the form of a deadly bullet; and Mr Vholes, who has squeezed every sign
of life out of the aforementioned Richard Carstone, one of his clients, so that
he, too, before the last word is written, dies of total inanition. And the aspiring lawyer Mr. Snagsby, so full of himself that, although
having been rejected as suitor by Miss Summerson
on his first application, nonetheless appears after passing all his exams, to
renew his application, only to be rejected again with contumely.
It is the middle-ranking persons in
the English class system who seem to have appealed most to Mr Dickens, and they
appear in this novel in the form of Mr. George, a sturdy soldier home from the
wars, who is wrongly suspected of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s murder, and who foregoes
the invitation to join his long-lost brother in his prosperous business, in favour
of pursuing his family’s destiny by becoming the strong right arm of Sir
Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, (as he is always described by the shrewd detective,
Mr Bucket --- said to have been the first
detective ever to have appeared in a work of fiction). Sir Leicester is a
pompous ass, kept in a sort of diminished power by the sheer force of
tradition, and his continuing hold over his tenants; and it is his wife, the beautiful Lady Honoria,
wrapped in her haughty sense of superiority, around whom the greatest plot
contrivances revolve: she is revealed to have been shamed by a pre-marital affair,
the issue from which is the one of the major female characters in the story. My
Lady dies from shame at the prospect of
her indiscretions being revealed to her husband.
Ah, well, I have fead once more, and
found it, like all of Dickens’s work, full of interest and pleasures, and what
I find to be the enthralling vitality of this great writer. No wonder I have
always loved Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist,
to name only four that I could re-read with even more pleasure.
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