Bleak House — Commentary

In brief

A will case called Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been grinding through the Court of Chancery for generations. Around it Dickens hangs a baronet’s proud wife with a dead lover and a living child, a shy young woman who does not know she is that child, a lawyer who collects secrets, a boy who sweeps a crossing and knows nothing, a rag dealer who bursts into flame, and a murder solved by a stout, friendly policeman. There are dozens of named characters, and it was the most ambitious thing he had attempted.

It is also two books in one binding, one told in the present tense by a voice that sees all of England and one told in the past tense by a young woman who says she is not clever. That split is the novel’s boldest idea. Many readers now rank it first among his novels, and they are probably right.

The argument

The book’s central question arrives in chapter 16, directly stated: “What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom”. The plot exists to answer it. Lady Dedlock pays Jo to show her a pauper’s grave. Jo catches a fever in the slum called Tom-all-Alone’s and carries it out to the brickmakers near Bleak House, where Esther takes him in. Her maid Charley catches it, and then Esther (ch. 31). Esther, whose face it scars, is Lady Dedlock’s daughter. So the mystery plot and the sanitary argument are one thing, and the disease works as Dickens’s best detective, tracing lines that no one in the book will admit exist.

He says so in his angriest register: “Tom has his revenge” (ch. 46), the slum’s corruption reaching every order of society by the air and the water. His England is a body whose organs deny each other. Everyone he attacks commits the same fault, which is looking somewhere else: the law at its own procedure, the Dedlocks at their ancestors, Mrs Jellyby at Africa, whose eyes “could see nothing nearer” (ch. 4), Mrs Pardiggle at her tracts. Jo “don’t know nothink” (ch. 16), but the phrase is a charge against everyone who could have told him something. All that anyone ever tells him is to move on (ch. 19).

The shape of the book

About half the chapters belong to each narrator, alternating irregularly, and neither knows of the other. The present-tense voice opens the book and has the public world: court, drawing room, slum, inquest. Esther, writing seven years afterwards, has the domestic one. The reader alone holds both halves, and much of the pleasure lies in seeing a thing from one side long before anyone sees it from the other. Lady Dedlock’s cry on discovering her child, “O my child, O my child!” (ch. 29), comes seven chapters before Esther learns it; when Esther hears it herself at Chesney Wold (ch. 36), she has already been disfigured by what her mother’s errand set in motion.

Three plots turn over one another. The suit moves so slowly it counts as weather, until a late will is found (ch. 62) and the whole thing collapses. The secret passes from hand to hand: a question about handwriting, “Who copied that?” (ch. 2), the law-writer dead of opium (ch. 10), Guppy, Krook’s papers, Tulkinghorn. And in the last third the book turns thriller, with the shot in Tulkinghorn’s chambers (ch. 48), Bucket’s unmasking of the killer in Sir Leicester’s library (ch. 54), and the night chase through snow that ends at a burial-ground gate (ch. 59), where the two narratives finally meet over one body: “it was my mother, cold and dead”.

The first voice

The opening is justly famous and it still startles. “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.” There is no main verb for paragraphs, as though nothing in this world could act. Then mud, with a Megalosaurus “waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”, then “Fog everywhere”, closing in on the Chancery bench at its dense centre (ch. 1). The whole novel’s method is there: a physical fact that is also a diagnosis.

This voice rarely consoles. It can do satire so dry that it seems bored itself, in the Dedlock chapters, where “My Lady Dedlock has been bored to death” (ch. 12) is simply reported, and it can preach. The high point is the end of Jo’s death, when the prose turns from the room to the reader and to the Queen: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen.” It finishes “And dying thus around us every day” (ch. 47). It should be too much, and after so many chapters of a boy being moved on, it is not.

Krook’s death is the same trick in a darker key. The old rag dealer, nicknamed the Lord Chancellor, is found as a heap of ash, and the voice names the death, “Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died” (ch. 32). It is a medical absurdity offered as moral fact: this is what becomes of all institutions “where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done”.

Esther

Most complaints about the novel are complaints about Esther. “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (ch. 3), she begins, and then spends hundreds of pages reporting other people’s compliments while protesting that she does not deserve them. Readers since Charlotte Brontë have found this cloying.

The way to read her is to take seriously what she tells us in her first chapter. Her aunt, posing as her godmother, says on her birthday: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers”. A small child tells her doll that she will try “to repair the fault I had been born with” and “win some love to myself if I could”. Everything that irritates readers follows from that sentence. Her housekeeping, her jingling keys, her pet names, until “my own name soon became quite lost among them” (ch. 8), are how a person lives who believes her existence needs excusing. She is a damaged narrator, and she is more observant than she claims: it is Esther, not the great voice, who first sees through Skimpole and Vholes. Her sentences hide things, and when she says she is cheerful you learn to look at what comes just before.

Her ending is the book’s last and best stroke. Asked whether she knows she is prettier than ever, she writes that the others can do without much beauty in her, “even supposing—” (ch. 67), and the novel stops there. The scar and the wound are still unresolved, in mid-sentence.

Chancery

The Court of Chancery was real, and handled wills, trusts and the property of wards under rules of equity separate from the common law. Its delays were notorious, and Dickens had his own grudge: in 1844 he won a Chancery action against pirates of A Christmas Carol and still paid the costs. His preface, dated August 1853, insists that all he says of the court is “substantially true, and within the truth”, and cites a suit of nearly twenty years with thirty to forty counsel and seventy thousand pounds in costs (preface). Gridley’s case, he says, is drawn from an actual one. Reform was already beginning as the numbers came out, and the Judicature Acts of the 1870s finally merged the court into the High Court.

Dickens’s analysis goes beyond delay. “The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself” (ch. 39), and so a suit is an ecosystem. Vholes, a man of perfect respectability with three daughters and an aged father to support, feeds on Richard as a matter of family duty: “Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!” The cruelty is impersonal, which is what makes it new in Dickens. No villain runs Chancery. “This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means” (ch. 1).

The end is one of the great anticlimaxes in fiction. The court empties as if from a farce, clerks stagger out laughing under bags of paper, and Allan Woodcourt asks whether “the whole estate is found to have been absorbed in costs” (ch. 65). Mr Kenge believes so. Richard, who has put his life into the outcome, dies in the same chapter, saying he will begin the world.

The people

Lady Dedlock

The great frozen beauty of the fashionable world, and in the end the book’s tragic figure. The law never needs to touch her: Tulkinghorn’s knowledge is enough.

Sir Leicester Dedlock

The best surprise in the book. A pompous fool for fifty chapters, sure that any change means the floodgates of society bursting, he is told his wife’s history, has a stroke, and writes on a slate: “Full forgiveness” (ch. 56). Dickens gives the old order this one decent act.

Tulkinghorn and Bucket

Two ways of knowing. Tulkinghorn hoards secrets for the sheer power of having them, and has no other visible pleasure. Bucket, modelled on the real Inspector Charles Field of the London detective force, uses his knowledge kindly and with total lack of illusion, and he and his “fat forefinger” (ch. 53) are among the earliest and most likeable detectives in English fiction.

Skimpole

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free” (ch. 6). Charm as parasitism: a man who has turned childishness into a licence, and who sells the dying Jo to Bucket for a bank-note and explains why that is delightful (ch. 61). Dickens based the manner on his friend Leigh Hunt, who was hurt, and Dickens apologised, not quite convincingly.

Jo

Has no surname, no parents, no idea what the writing on the shops means. The coroner refuses to hear him as a witness. “He wos wery good to me” (ch. 11), said afterwards of the dead law-writer, is all the testimony he has, about the only person who ever spoke kindly to him.

Jarndyce and Richard

Jarndyce blames the east wind whenever someone behaves badly, and does more good than anyone, while his offer of marriage to Esther (ch. 44) and his later handing her over to the man she loves (ch. 64) are both kind and rather strange. Richard Carstone is the book’s saddest case: nothing wrong with him but the expectation of an inheritance.

His anger is selective. Mrs Jellyby is very funny and also a cheap shot, standing in for a real distaste for women in public life and for African missions, which he had attacked before. Her African scheme ends with a king selling his people “for rum” and her taking up “the rights of women to sit in Parliament” (ch. 67), both offered as jokes. Africans and women’s rights exist here only to be laughed at, in a book about people who cannot see what is near. The good women are those who keep house, and the keys are their reward.

How it was made

It ran in twenty monthly numbers, the last a double one, from March 1852 to September 1853, with illustrations by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), whose dark plates of Tom-all-Alone’s and the Ghost’s Walk suit it well. It sold around 35,000 a month. Dickens’s trial titles included Tom-All-Alone’s. He had lost his father and his baby daughter Dora in 1851, had just moved to Tavistock House, and was editing Household Words and writing A Child’s History of England at the same time.

The models were close to home. Hortense draws on Marie Manning, whose hanging Dickens watched in 1849. Boythorn is Walter Savage Landor. He had already written about Field in Household Words. When G. H. Lewes objected in print to Krook’s end, Dickens answered in the novel and again in the preface, naming his authorities, and he was quite wrong. He says he has “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things”, the book’s best description of itself.

Readers and critics

Early reviewers admired the parts and complained about the whole. George Brimley in the Spectator found no construction in it, and Brontë thought Esther weak. Trollope’s The Warden (1855) mocks him as Mr Popular Sentiment.

The reversal came slowly. Chesterton’s verdict remains the best known: “Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’s best book; but perhaps it is his best novel”. Nabokov taught it as a masterpiece, tracing its children and its imagery with an entomologist’s care. Then criticism found the theme of reading itself. J. Hillis Miller’s 1971 introduction treats the novel as a document about the interpretation of documents, in which everyone is trying to read signs, and D. A. Miller in The Novel and the Police (1988) argued that its two narrators and its friendly detective teach us to accept a surveillance we think we are only enjoying.

Afterlives

Jo’s death made him a Victorian stage favourite: Jennie Lee played him for years in Jo (1876), and a 1901 film, The Death of Poor Joe, is the oldest surviving film of a Dickens character. The BBC has filmed the novel three times, and the 1985 serial with Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott was admired. Its 2005 version by Andrew Davies, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock and Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther, ran in fifteen parts mostly in half-hour soap slots, an echo of the serial form. Lawyers still reach for “Jarndyce” when a case outlives its purpose.

How to read it

Read slowly, in numbers. Dickens wrote for a month’s gap, and a few chapters at a time is how the plot’s echoes work.
Keep a list of names. Nearly every minor figure returns; the brickmaker’s wife and the man at the shooting gallery will both matter.
Do not trust Esther’s modesty. Ask what she is avoiding each time she apologises for herself.
Watch every document. Letters, affidavits, handwriting, a will in Krook’s rubbish: the plot moves by paper.

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57). The next step: the whole state as a prison, with the Circumlocution Office in place of Chancery.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). The real people of Jo’s streets, in their own words.
Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855). A quiet rejoinder: a reformer’s certainty can injure a decent man.
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868). By Dickens’s friend: several narrators, a sensible detective, and a mystery that is also a social portrait.
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925). The endless court with the fog taken out and nobody left outside it.