This gigantic, intricately plotted novel revolves around a court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which originated in an attempt to determine the proper heirs to an estate. We come to understand that this law case is a kind of black hole that absorbs the life force and sanity of all those who invest their time and energy in it. Dickens certainly had a sizeable axe to grind regarding the British legal system in the 19th century; presumably he sought to rally supporters to the cause of judicial reform. Two centuries and an ocean away, this aspect of the author’s mission is no longer compelling, but the weird destructive force at the center of Bleak House retains a definite metaphysical fascination. Dickens wisely steers clear of legal details, presenting Jarndyce and Jarndyce exclusively in terms of the psychological effects it has on people. In other words, we don’t see the case directly—we see it reflected in the people it concerns. In this regard it bears comparison to the mind-destroying force at the center of a much different gigantic novel—Infinite Jest. Parties to Jarndyce and Jarndyce who understand that the only safe policy is to ignore it completely go on to lead meaningful lives. Esther Summerson, a ward of the court, and John Jarndyce, a wealthy man who takes Esther into his household and makes her is housekeeper (and later, for a time, his fiancée), are among the ones who are wise enough to take this course. Richard Carstone, another ward, along with the elderly Miss Flite and a Mr. Gridley, are among the unfortunates who invest time and energy in the case. Their fate is madness, death, or both. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is like a medusa—to look at it straight on, to engage with it, is fatal.
Bleak House presents several dozen characters, great and small. Each has a role to play in moving the massive and intricate plot forward. This is much less confusing than it might be because Dickens invests each character with a distinctive characteristic, be it a catch phrase, a physical detail, or a mannerism. It also helps that the great majority of the minor characters are quite peculiar—grotesque even. Thus we get Mr. Turveydrop, the dancing master, whose only occupation and concern is his “deportment”—that is, his appearance and his manners. His son now gives all the lessons, leaving the senior Turveydrop free to pose before the world, like an oversized peacock. Then there is Phil Squod, a rather disheveled but goodhearted former seaman who, due to an unfortunate series of accidents, is disabled to the extent that he must navigate the world by sidling along walls and then pitching out into a room once he is near is destination, much like a ship tacking into the wind. Just reading about him induces a faint sense of vertigo.
As different sets of characters are brought together in a series of intricately plotted encounters, the reader gradually discover the secret at the heart of the novel, which has to do with a child abandoned at birth. Mother and child move separately through the story, at first unaware of each other; Dickens lets the reader guess the solution to mystery just a few hundred pages into the story—and a few hundred pages before it is “officially” revealed. The mother in question, Lady Dedlock, is the wife of a prominent aristocrat. She is a regal and heretofore unimpeachable presence; she fears that public knowledge of the child she bore out of wedlock would destroy her reputation, her marriage, and her husband’s position as the scion of an ancient and illustrious family. The extent to which this fear is warranted is difficult to know—Victorian England was not famous for its tolerance of such improprieties. Nevertheless, when Sir Dedlock does finally learn of the matter, we are glad to find that his only concern is for the well being of his wife.
I was watching Game of Thrones at the same time as I was reading Bleak House, and I could not help comparing them in my mind. One point of comparison is the way both works are able to keep such large casts of characters, and such complicated plots, moving so smoothly forward. Another is the notion that both are prime examples of the maximalist entertainment of their times, works that met their audiences in regular installments over months and years and whose success was a matter of great public interest. Game of Thrones throws hundreds or even thousands of people, millions of dollars, dragons, explosions, sex, incest, torture, just about everything it can at its audience. Which is not to say that the underlying story (which was, after all, created by a single individual with a word processor) isn’t compelling. Dickens had only pen and paper to work with. But he in his own way throws everything in his arsenal into his work: fantastically weird characters, a far-flung web of intrigue, good and evil in extreme manifestations. One character spontaneously combusts about halfway through the book. An additional parallel: both stories have at their centers a matter of concealed parentage. How this parentage is discovered, how its revelation is anticipated, and how it actually occurs are matters at the core of both works.
Dickens also deploys a command of language that frequently amazed me. Here, for example, is a passage where he describes how the great world responds to the news that a man has spontaneously burst into flame, leaving just a small pile of greasy ashes in his wake:
Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too; for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths, reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown, on English Medical Jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so, and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs Foderè and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who would investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred, and even to write an account of it; —still they regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy, in going out of the world by any such by-way, as wholly unjustified and personally offensive.
A quick Internet search reveals that readers questioned Dickens’ inclusion of this bizarre incident; he responded by stating that “he had studied the topic [of spontaneous combustion] seriously and had found there are about 30 cases on record, of which the most famous is that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi described in 1731.” Who needs dragons?
Bleak House has aged well in most respects. The world still loves a great villain, and Bleak House provides a couple of prime examples: one is the inexorable, secretive lawyer Tulkinghorn, who discovers Lady Dedlock’s secret and tortures her by threatening to reveal it. Another is the nasty old Mr. Smallweed, a moneylender who is so physically decrepit that he must be carried everywhere in a chair and then periodically “shaken up” like an understuffed pillow when he settles to the bottom of his chair. Smallweed masks his ferocious rapacity behind a veneer of unctuous courtesy; he pretends that it is “his friend in the city” who is demanding immediate repayment of what his debtor had assumed to be a long-term loan. “You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear,” comments one such debtor.
“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—he might!”
That Smallweed is able to so “squeeze” his clients this way is particularly galling considering that any one of them could easily squeeze the life out of his decrepit frame with one hand.
Dickens’ noble characters, on the other hand, have not aged quite as well. Sometime between 1850 and today we’ve lost our taste for excessively humble, virtuous heroes and heroines. Esther Summerson, who is in fact the daughter of Lady Dedlock, and through whose eyes much of the story is told, could give lessons in saintliness:
When my guardian left me, I turned my face away upon my couch, and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial I had to undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday, when I had aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted, and to do good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could, came back into my mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed, and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I were weak now, what had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish words, and found that its old peace had not departed from it.
In Esther’s defense, she was raised as an orphan in the household of a rather miserable old hag, so she comes by her self-effacement honestly. At least she is ultimately spared the cringe-inducing prospect of marriage to her much older “guardian” Mr. Jarndyce. He has proposed awkwardly to her, asking in a letter if she will be “the mistress of Bleak House”; their mutual emotions run the gamut from respect to gratitude to, uh, admiration and trust. He calls her by such nicknames as “little woman” and “Dame Durden.” I don’t expect fifty shades of anything much from Dickens, but still. Fortunately in the final chapters, Jarndyce relinquishes his claim on Esther and hands her off to the younger, more virile Mr. Woodcourt. (Without first running the idea past Esther herself, it should be noted.) Perhaps Dickens’ original readers would have understood his mind and his world well enough to know that the Jarndyce/Summerson match was not meant to be. I knew that it was awkward and peculiar, but I didn’t understand Dickens and his time well enough to be confident that he wouldn’t go ahead with it.
