Bleak House - Charles Dickens
INTRODUCTION
“ ‘What do you think of Bleak House?’ is a question which everybody has heard propounded within the last few weeks, when this serial was drawing towards its conclusion; and which, when the work was actually closed, formed, for its own season, as regular a portion of miscellaneous chitchat as ‘How are you?’ ”1 So began a review of Dickens’s ninth novel, commenting on the commentary Bleak House was generating and attesting, in this way, not just to the popularity of the writer but, even more, to the supra-literary status of his works. “His current story was really a topic of the day,” a reviewer later reminisced; “it seemed something almost akin to politics and news—as if it belonged not so much to literature as to events.” There was a difference, though: in the serial form in which Dickens’s novels were originally published, the topic of the day stretched on for many, many weeks and months, and with most of them being published in nineteen monthly numbers, these works were before the public for over a year and a half
By the time the serialization of Bleak House concluded, in September of 1853,Dickens had been publishing prodigiously for seventeen years, and his continuous, unprecedented popularity was itself a “regular ... portion” of contemporary criticism. From the day that “ ‘Boz’ first carried away the prize of popular applause... by the publication of the unrivaled Pickwick ... he has had no equal in the favor of the reading public,” another review of Bleak House began. Other Victorian writers could sell more books: G. M. Reynolds, for one, whose career began with a plagiarism of The Pickwick Papers, far surpassed Dickens in sales of his sensational series on The Mysteries of London (1845-1855). But Dickens sold extraordinarily well: “I believe I have never had so many readers as in this book,” he remarked in the preface to Bleak House. And these readers were confined to no class. Dickens was a fixture at “every fireside in the kingdom.” When it came to Bleak House—“To ’recommend’ it would be superfluous. Who will not read it?”
Such a popular novel “is, to a certain extent, independent of criticism,” yet another reviewer asserted, effectively throwing up his hands. Nonetheless, critics had to say something, and what they said was quite mixed. There was censure: “Bleak House is, even more than any of its predecessors, chargeable not simply with faults, but absolute want of construction.” There was praise: Bleak House is “the greatest, the least faulty, the most beautiful of all the works which the pen of Dickens has given to the world.” Most readers of Dickens had long agreed that “the delineation of character is his forte,” but whether the characters of Bleak House were “life-like” or “contrived,” “truthful” or “exaggerated” was another matter. So, too, was the plot: in this regard, the novel represented either “an important advance on anything that we recollect in our author’s previous works” or, quite simply, a “failure.” In short, there may have been a great deal of talk about Bleak House, but there was little consensus in what critics said about Bleak House.
Such controversy is notable in itself. Although Dickens’s reputation among critics had fluctuated somewhat, especially in the 1840s, never before had assessments of his work been so conflicting. Nor had derogatory commentary been so pointed. Going beyond the “merits” and “defects” of the work—which was, after all, not exempt from such judgments—criticism of Bleak House became criticism of the author, whose “usefulness, instructiveness, and value” were coming to be increasingly questioned and whose very popularity was becoming grounds for alarm. “Author and public react on one another,” another critic began; where “truth of nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed to mannerism and point,” the effect was not good. Within a few years, Dickens’s reputation among critics—though not his sales—would take an even more pronounced turn for the worse.
Now, though, we bask in Bleak House. Resurrected by a series of influential twentieth-century readers, such as George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, Bleak House has come, once again, to be a “regular portion” of literary inquiry, its interest sustained and augmented by the many modes of reading we have available to us, both within academic institutions and without. In the last twenty-five years, more than four hundred studies of one form or another have been devoted to Bleak House,2 and, although disagreements certainly persist, Dickens’s most ambitious novel has come to be widely regarded as his most accomplished one, too. Still, the question of what he accomplished in Bleak House remains worth asking, however partial and provisional the answers may be.
For one thing, Dickens wrote a novel that is about virtually anything and everything in mid-Victorian Britain. Comprehensive in its reach, exhaustive in its detail, Bleak House assimilates the multifarious characteristics of society into a coherent imaginative vision that is also a thoroughgoing revision of the sanguine image society held of itself at the time. “Progress” was the catchword of the day in the early 1850s. as well as an ideology encouraging a nearly boundless confidence in the human capacity to shape the world at will. Looking back over the widespread (albeit uneven) economic growth and increasing social mobility of recent decades, Victorians saw the present as a dramatic advance over the past, and they forecast a future that continued the accelerating pace of improvement. Taking a decidedly different view in Bleak House, Dickens depicted a society bound up in “perpetual stoppage” (p. 164).
This is not because Dickens did not share the belief in progress. On the contrary, his affirmation of his “faith ... in the progress of mankind” had recently and prominently appeared in the editorial manifesto for Household Words, the weekly journal he launched in 1850.There, where he spoke of the writer’s duty to spread “sympathy” throughout society by “cherish[ing] that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast,” he also expressed gratitude for “the privilege of living in the sunny dawn of time” (“A Preliminary Word”). In Bleak House, however, “the fire of the sun is dying” (p. 534); “darkness ... dilat[es] and dilat[es]” (p. 590);the “light of Fancy” glints rather than shines.
Shadows in Dickens’s personal life certainly contributed to the darkening of his imaginative vision. His father’s death in March of 1851 was followed a month later by that of an infant daughter. In 1852, several close friends died as well. While his wife suffered from a prolonged illness, Dickens, who confessed to feeling “as if I could have given up” (April 5, 1851),did not. The press of the necessity to work was always upon him, regardless of the degree of financial security he attained, and, alongside the discharge of his own daunting agenda of self-appointed duties—which included the painstaking conduct of Household Words, the conscientious management of a “Home for Homeless Women,” a taxing tour of amateur theatricals on which he embarked, and much else besides—there was the obligation to fulfill the ever-increasing demands made upon him by virtue of his stature as a public figure. Having attained an unprecedented measure of success in Victorian letters and prominence in public life, Dickens was coming to be oppressed by his own achievements. However strong such a feeling may have been, though, it extends far beyond Dickens or any individual in Bleak House. “Fog everywhere,” the novelist asserts on the first page of the book. There, Dickens’s severely critical, fiercely satirical vision of society also had something to do with the atmosphere of complacency that had been thickening in mid-Victorian Britain and was consolidated in London in the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was a colossal endeavor, as its full title announces. Among its many aims, the representation and the promotion of progress through a display of industrial manufactures and technological ingenuity were foremost. If the vast miscellany of goods assembled from many nations (not quite “all”) served this agenda rather unevenly—the hordes of visitors to the exhibition tended to be overwhelmed by the sight—the revolutionary plate-glass and iron edifice that was built to house the display did so spectacularly well. Dubbed the “Crystal Palace,” the monumental structure covered nineteen acres of Hyde Park, where it stood as an impressive testament to Britain’s achievements and a potent symbol of its dynamic modernity. Indeed, although the Great Exhibition was initially conceived as an international project, its result was to focus global attention on the triumphs of Britain, which were widely—and wildly—praised. In the rhetoric of the moment, Britain was said to have attained the pinnacle of civilization and to be ushering a time when “Utopia ... will take the form and substance of a possible fact” (Illustrated London News, May 3, 1851).In effect, the condition-of-England question—much investigated, widely debated before and after Thomas Carlyle’s coinage of the famous phrase in 1839—seemed to have found a conclusive answer in the summer of 1851.
Inasmuch as the Great Exhibition may have suggested that this condition was exemplary, if not better, the vision it projected, however compelling, was partial. It excluded the condition of the working classes and the impoverished population of the country. Eclipsed by the Crystal Palace and the goods it encased, these realities were also effectively erased in 1851,when “the Exhibition—its glories and its wonders, its accomplishment in the present, and its example to, and promise of, the future” were “the only topics of writing, speaking and reading, and form[ed] almost the only subject... of the draughtsman and the engraver” (Illustrated London News, May 3, 1851). While Dickens had spilled his share of ink on the topic of the day, he was never an avid enthusiast. Privately, he said he was “ ‘used up’ ” by the spectacle. “I don’t say ’there’s nothing in it‘—there’s too much,” he wrote after a foray into the Crystal Palace. “So many things bewildered me” (July 11, 1851). By mid-summer, he was also utterly fed up with the mania for the exhibition and its puffery by the press. It was at that time that he began “pondering afar off” a new novel: “Violent restlessness, and vague ideas of going I don’t know where, I don’t know why are the present symptoms of the disorder” (August 17, 1851), Dickens reported. But he had already indicated his direction earlier that year. Having commented with some admiration on the great resources and extraordinary ingenuity being devoted to the production of the Great Exhibition in an article entitled “The Last Words of the Old Year” (January 31, 1851), Dickens had gone on to ask: “Which of my children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants, of England equally united, for another Exhibition—for a great display of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by the steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all hearts and hands, set right?” Bleak House is that “great display,” in which Dickens turned his back on the other one.
In so doing, he produced a more inclusive vision of mid-Victorian Britain than the Crystal Palace had done. Having spoken of the need to “study the Humanities through these transparent windows” (“Last Words”) , Dickens looked squarely at streets 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’ ” (p. 106). If he was among “ ’the few’ ” who could “ ‘distinguish the grim misery lying underneath the magic brilliance which dazzles the visitor in the Great Exhibition’ ” (the Leader, quoted in Davis, The Great Exhibition, p. 192), Dickens was in an even smaller minority in taking a grim view of the entire condition of England. For, by mid-century, he had come to realize forcefully that Britain’s problems could not be isolated from one another, confined within class divisions, compartmentalized under discrete headings. Far from being local, such problems were inherent in the structure, the institutions, the practices, and the attitudes of society. From this perspective, Dickens could represent the disease emanating from the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s as “work[ing] its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high” (p. 590). Equally, he could represent the abuses of Chancery, the highest court in Britain, as leaving deadly “ ’impressions ... all over England’ ” (p. 106). And, where this court could, and did, hold property interminably in its bureaucratic grasp, he could, and did, link the institution that was supposed to be dedicated to equity with the slum that gave ample evidence of inequity.
When Dickens began writing Bleak House, the injustices perpetrated and perpetuated by the court were not just topical; they were already proverbial. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the phrase “in Chancery” referred, among other things, to “the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything, and the certainty of cost and loss to property” and dates this usage from the 1830s. Twenty years later, when the abuses of Chancery were being widely publicized in the press, Dickens’s indictment of the court extended to the equally dilatory procedures of Parliament, as well as to the reactionary upper classes, figured in the novel by the Dedlocks and their milieu. Both the world of Chancery and that of Fashion are “things of precedent and usage” (p. 23) in Bleak House, where Dickens further links the two in the cohesive symbolic pattern that encompasses all of Britain: “Fog everywhere.” “And ... at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor, in his High Court of Chancery,” where dozens of bewigged lawyers are “mistily engaged” (p. 18) in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a “slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing” (p. 28). Based in part on an actual case that had been dragging on for fifty-three years by 1851, the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House epitomizes the “trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration” (p. 21) of the court. “Conglomeration” is one of Chancery’s effects ; “ ‘Wiglomeration’ ” (p. 107) is the portmanteau summation John Jarndyce gives of the ’deplorable cause’ ” (p. 105). “ ‘The Lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits ... have long disappeared from the face of the earth’ ” (p. 104), he explains. Nonetheless, “ ’through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends’ ” (p. 105).
Something like this can be said3 of the structure of the novel that begins “In Chancery” (chapter 1), “hanging” (p. 17) in a state of suspended animation; goes on to the world of “Fashion” (chapter 2), which is “wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool” (p. 23); and then, departing for yet another scene, concludes an account of “A Progress” (chapter 3), on “streets ... so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen” (p. 42), back “in Chancery” once more. “ ‘Beginning over’ ” and over “ ’again,‘” Bleak House also closes without closure. Leaving off with an ambiguous unfinished sentence, Dickens leaves behind the formulaic fulfillment of wishes that characterizes so many nineteenth-century novels’ endings.
And yet, Bleak House not only has a plot—that mechanism of cause and effect that propels a narrative from beginning to end. It has a compelling one, too, centering on mysteries of identity, driven by the desire to uncover guilty secrets, urged on by the first professional detective in English fiction. Set against the “ ‘bedevilment’ ” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the plot moves forward, gathers momentum, and then, accelerating in “Flight” (chapter 55) and “Pursuit” (chapter 56), yields “A Discovery” (chapter 61) and “Another Discovery” (chapter 62) in the climactic final chapters of the book. Contributing to the vogue for sensation fiction, which flourished in the 1860s, Bleak House, like the later work of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is a thoroughly good read.
It is also a strange one. A novel in which Dickens answers the wish of the opening chapter of the book for “the whole” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce to be “burnt away in a great funeral pyre” (p. 23) with something as bizarre as the “Spontaneous Combustion” (p. 436) of Krook, the gin-sodden rag-and-bottle dealer who styles himself the Lord Chancellor, follows this with the “ ‘smouldering combustion’ ” (p. 526) of Richard Carstone as this youthful hero becomes absorbed in the case, and then goes on to represent the suit as being consumed by its own costs is evidently up to something unusual. “Unnatural” is the word critics of Bleak House used.
While the apocalyptic theme is one of the many linkages between the story line (or snarl) that concerns Jarndyce and Jarndyce and the one that pursues detection—apocalypse being a mode of discovery, unveiling—these strands of the novel are also structurally consistent, as well as being consistently subversive of the onward and upward motion of progress and of narrative that follows this path. As one of the earliest instances of detective fiction, Bleak House demonstrates the distinctive circularity of this genre, which begins after the fact—after the action, criminal or otherwise, that instigates the investigation—and moves forward, gathering the clues and making the discoveries through which the original actions and motives and means are reconstructed. In the backward-looking logic of the forward-moving detective plot, the end recapitulates the beginning. This recursive narrative pattern is even more prominent in the proceedings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. “ ‘It won’t do to think of it!’ ” says John Jarndyce. “ ‘When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the beginning of the end!’ (p. 105). So it is with Richard, who does not heed such warnings, and, ” ‘hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification’ “ (p. 105), becomes another victim of the ”ill-fated cause“ (p. 21).
In these and other ways, Bleak House coheres in a deadly whole that is emblematic of the deadly condition of England. Indeed, while John Ruskin argued that the number of deaths in Bleak House (nine, by his miscount; there are more) answered “a craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement” and that such a novel “entertain[ed]” the jaded reader “by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness the horrors, of Death,” this criticism is offset by Ruskin’s own observation that the number of deaths in Dickens’s fiction is “a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London.” But the point Dickens makes is closer to home. When Jo, the crossing sweeper who figures centrally in Bleak House, succumbs to slum-propagated diseases, he is one of many “dying thus around us every day” (p. 610).
At the same time that Dickens pointed insistently in the novel to the need for reform, he also engaged in a reform of the novel. That is, beyond the subversion of conventional narrative patterns, apart from the introduction of new conventions as well, Bleak House is a radical—and fundamentally unsettling—experiment in story-telling. Marked by its rudimentary difference from any novel written before, Bleak House is equally marked by the acute difference incorporated within, in the rupture that is created by the presence of two narrators and sustained throughout the entirety of the book. To be sure, the play of multiple voices and perspectives in fiction is not unprecedented. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) comes readily to mind as an early nineteenth-century example. What distinguishes Bleak House from other novels that employ a plurality of points of view, however, is how entirely incommensurate Dickens’s two narrators are in persona and perspective.
Speaking in “the voice of the present” (p. 84), the third-person narrator is omnipresent in his portions of Bleak House. Able to move from scene to scene “as the crow flies” (p. 23), covering territory both “National and Domestic” (chapter 40), he guides us through the far-flung reaches of the book and prods us to recognize relationships between its seemingly disparate elements. “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 ... ?” (p. 220), this narrator asks in a famous rhetorical question that re-emphasizes the “connexions” to which Dickens everywhere points.4 Possessed of the ironic consciousness that can assimilate the diffuse and contradictory features of the book and the world, the third-person narrator exemplifies what Dickens termed “a long-sight,” which “perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted person” (preface to Martin Chuzzlewit). He can also see clearly what characters in the novel perceive “only ... by halves in a confused way” (p. 518). For all of his perspicuity, however, the third-person narrator can no more “ ‘read the heart’ ” (p. 523) or the minds of characters than they themselves can. Singularly canny, ever “On the Watch” (chapter 12), the third-person narrator is not omniscient. His perspective, which encompasses many points of view, does not comprehend all points of view.
After all, there is Esther Summerson, whose narrative also occupies Bleak House. At first glance, Esther’s difference from her counterpart is striking. Whereas the third-person narrator is supremely urbane, majestically confident, Esther is painfully inhibited, agonizingly uncertain. “I know I am not clever” (p. 30 and elsewhere)—unthinkable coming from the other narrator—is a refrain in her part of the book. The source of Esther’s self-denial is the denial of herself that she experienced as an illegitimate orphaned child. Raised by the harsh Miss Barbary, Esther is not permitted to know anything about her own or her mother’s identity except that both are bound up in guilt: “ ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers’ ” (p. 32).While Dickens lays a foundation for melodramatic plot complications in this scene, he also demonstrates the acute sensitivity to the impressionable fragility of children for which he is so well known. Told “ ’It would have been far better, little Esther, ... that you had never been born!‘ ” (p. 32), she grows up to feel that she is “no one.” Self-denigration—even in the face of affirmation—is her habitual mode. “O my goodness, the idea of asking my advice” (p. 107),she demurs in a way that has rankled generations of readers. Modern readers have also been irked by Dickens’s depiction of Esther’s selflessness (the other and better face of her self-denial) and not just because she embodies a stereotype of feminine virtue (which some Victorian readers regarded with incredulity as well) . More troubling still is Dickens’s positing Esther’s acts of goodness as a foil to Chancery’s acts of injustice. Esther’s “circle of duty,” which “gradually and naturally expand[s] itself” (p. 113) according to her own “ ’little orderly system’ ” (p. 503), hardly seems an adequate antidote to a system as extensively and devastatingly circuitous as Chancery.
Inasmuch as Esther’s persistently cheery “jingling about with [her] basket of keys” (p. 578) can be as exasperating as her coyness, the response she solicits most directly—“Of course, you are worthy (you silly goose)”—has at least one reforming effect: it confirms that Esther is “Somebody” (p. 409) and thereby corrects the original negation from which she never fully recovers. Such a process of emendation obtains in the structure of her narrative as well. “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (p. 30), Esther begins, emphasizing the impediments under which she labors to tell her story—even though, having begun to write it seven years after the events she describes, Esther has command of this story. Giving her the advantage of knowing “now” what “I did not [know] then” (p. 396), the retrospective perspective reveals that Esther has gained a measure of self-knowledge as well: she is knowing enough “now” to know she was not knowing enough “then.”
If the revisions built into Esther’s narrative make reading it a less than straightforward enterprise, this narrative presents a further problem from the outset. For, at the same time that Esther exhibits the extreme self-consciousness that cripples her, she also demonstrates a curious meta-consciousness of having a narrative companion as she sets out to write “my portion of these pages.” Given the third-person narrator’s preternatural awareness of Esther—he can move from scene to scene “while Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes” (p. 92)—it is tempting to imagine Dickens imagining the two narrators consciously collaborating in producing their distinct contributions to the book. One of the mysteries of Dickens, though, is how unfathomable his creative processes were and are. Writing in silence, behind closed doors, he revealed precious little about his imaginative life. What we have are its effects, and in Bleak House the effect of the presence of the two narrators is disconcerting. Both, to be sure, exhibit Dickens’s focus on the range and the limitations of vision and knowledge; together, they also further the characteristically Victorian project of studying the signs of the times. In Bleak House, though, Dickens pursues the project in an arrestingly new way, juxtaposing the perspectives of the two narrators whose chapters alternate in no regular or predictable pattern. For the original readers of Bleak House, this meant that the discontinuity inherent in the experience of reading a novel in monthly numbers was heightened by the discontinuities embedded within the monthly installments of this serial. Even now, though, the novel that must be read “by halves” keeps us “oscillating” in a “troubled state of mind” (p. 517) that comes of alternating between two minds throughout the entirety of the book.
Literally binocular, Bleak House inculcates a kind of double vision in the reader, who also confronts the highly concentrated double-ness of Dickens’s style page after page. Puns abound in this novel and rebound in several directions at once. Thus, when John Jarndyce calls the will in the Chancery suit “ ‘a dead letter’ ” (p. 105), this pun, like so many others in Bleak House, sets off a chain of biblical and legal associations, but as the narrative moves forward, playing off this scriptural conceit, as it were, it also circles back to the literal meaninglessness of “ ’dead letter,‘ ” which, in the end, amounts to what it was in the beginning: a moot point. Indeed, even when Dickens offers respite from the “great wilderness of London” (p. 621) and, focusing on Lincoln’s Inn Fields on a “very quiet night,” gives us a scene that is “ethereal,” bathed in a “pale effulgence,” with sounds of the city “softened,” “pass[ing] ... tranquilly away,” there comes a jolt “where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stops” (p. 622). Chancery, indeed, “drones ... on” (p. 20) inconclusively “ ’We are really spinning along’ ” (p. 651),Richard declares.
Such instances of word-play—of which there are a great, great many in Bleak House—are not merely witty. They are consistent with the wit that animates much of Dickens’s writing and especially his writing in Bleak House. “Wit ... may be considered a kind of discordia concors,” observed Samuel Johnson, “a combination of dissimilar images, or a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”5 Dickens had this startling capacity, this illuminating faculty: “I think it is my infirmity to fancy or perceive relations which are not apparent generally” (quoted in Ford, Dickens and His Readers, p. 144), he wrote. In Bleak House, he appears to have been determined to inculcate this “infirmity” in his readers: “What connexion can there be ... ?” is a question directed at us.
In a novel that is extraordinary for its vast scope and its superfluity of peculiarities, perceiving “connexions” can be perplexing, as Dickens repeatedly points out. “ ‘That little pickled cowcumber of a Mrs. Snagsby,’ ” who collects “ ‘odds and ends’ ” (pp. 687-688) and imagines a relation “with every possible confusion and involvement possible and impossible” (p. 686) is only one case in point; “impelled by the mystery, of which he is a partaker, and yet in which he is not a sharer” (p. 425), her beleaguered husband is another. But even the “keen eye” (p. 667) of Inspector Bucket can be rather dim where so much appears to be “ ’wrapped round with secrecy and mystery’ ” (p. 606). For all of the mystification to which Dickens points in Bleak House, however, his writing in this novel can be conspicuously lucid. Like Esther, we find ourselves “reading the same words repeatedly,” but we “read the words... without knowing what they meant” (p. 42) only if we fail to see the “connexions” between verbal “ ‘odds and ends’ ” that Dickens has scrupulously crafted. “Work up from this” (no. 1), “Lay that ground” (no. 13), “Prepare the way” (nos. 19 & 20) are among the memoranda Dickens wrote for himself in the monthly number plans for Bleak House. In the novel, he carried out these intentions both by prefiguring significant turning points in the plot and by retracing his steps as he moved forward, and the resulting doubling and redoubling of character and incident have a tendency to produce a feeling of déjà vu as we read.6 Not only that: we are reminded that we should be having this experience in Bleak House, where other characters are “ ’dashed’ ” (p. 99), and “disconcerted” (p. 333) by this uncanny feeling of recognition in scenes that illuminate some of the mysteries of the plot.
“Let all concerned in secrecy, Beware!” wrote Dickens in his “mems” for Bleak House, issuing a warning, as it were, for characters in the novel and, perhaps, a reminder for himself. Secrecy is, of course, a writer’s prerogative: the impact of revelation depends on the degree of mystification the writer can contrive and sustain until the moment he or she chooses to lift the veil. Secrecy in Bleak House, however, tends to be destructive. The sinister solicitor Tulkinghorn, for one, whose “‘calling is the acquisition of secrets, and the holding possession of such power as they give him’ ” (p. 485) over those he seemingly serves, drives Lady Dedlock to death with this power. Dickens, in marked contrast, gives up some of the novelist’s capability for captivation in Bleak House. This is not to say that he shows his hand overtly or explicitly or at once. Although he did not exploit the potential for arousing anxious anticipation that is built into the serial mode of publication—the concluding chapters of the monthly numbers are not cliff-hangers—he did carefully calibrate how much to reveal and withhold: “Carry on suspense” (no. 18) is also among his “mems.”
Nonetheless, in a novel that everywhere emphasizes the “groping and floundering condition” (p. 18) of England, the drive toward clarification is pronounced, and, toward this end, Dickens adopted a “curious manner” of writing that is at once “ ‘very plain’ ” and “backward” (p. 70). Consistent with Chancery, which is so plainly backward in withholding the judgments it is supposed to dispense, such a mode of indirect signification is allegorical in the strict sense of “speaking otherwise.” That is what occurs when the third-person narrator translates Jo’s assertion that he “ ’don’t know nothink’ ” into the suggestion that “perhaps Jo does think, at odd times” (p. 222). Speaking otherwise, the narrator negates a negation, which may be the only way to produce an affirmation where the “ ‘mere truth’ ” (p. 659) is consistently twisted into a false “ ’Terewth’ (p. 348). While the third-person narrator can do the work of emendation for us, Bleak House equally requires it of us. Thus, when Esther visits the court and reports that it ”was so curious and self-contradictory, ... that it was at first incredible, and I could not comprehend it“ (p. 336), her negation of her knowingness is typical, but if we revise the statement in the way that Esther’s narrative invites, her assertion that Chancery is ”self-contradictory“ means that she does in fact understand it. To be sure, reading otherwise in this manner can be frustrating, especially where Chancery’s ”walls of words“ (p. 18) amount to a ”blank“ (p. 19). But it can be enabling, too, for when we learn that Jo, ”who is of no order and no place“ (p. 602), had been befriended by Nemo, whose name, we are so helpfully reminded, means ”no one“ in Latin, we not only register the identification of the two outcasts, but also recognize the effect of this ”connexion“ : namely, the creation of a provisional, ephemeral community out of ”no one.“ Such a ”creation of consciousness—of recognitions and relationships—seems to me to be the purpose of Dickens’s developed fiction,“ wrote the late Raymond Williams (The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, p. 33). In Bleak House, the purpose extends directly to readers. Situating us between the third-person narrator’s public purview and Esther’s private milieu, Bleak House positions us on the middle ground, where the omnipresent and retrospective perspectives converge, and alerts us to the need to make ”connexions“ not only within the book, but also between the book and the world.
All such “connexions” are focused in Jo. The illiterate crossing sweeper who figures centrally in both narratives and is the pivot on which the plot of the novel turns is also at the center of Dickens’s social vision in Bleak House—a vision that comes directly to assimilate us. “It must be a strange state to be like Jo!” the third-person narrator muses:
To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! (p. 222).
Confronting the bafflement of Jo, we may begin to feel baffled ourselves, reading about the experience of being unable to read and wondering, in language, what it is like to be cut off from language. Probing deeper into this “strange state,” the narrator continues:
It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think ... what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business, here, or there, or anywhere; ... It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human ... but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! (p. 222).
Conducting the reader further into the strange state of Jo, the narrator does not do so simply to evince sympathy for Jo. Although Esther is characterized in part by her ready kindness to Jo and unfortunate figures like Jo, even her humanity is inadequate to break down the kind of “iron barrier” that she sees “between us and these people” (p. 117). Rather, the narrator inducts the reader into the bewilderment of Jo in order to create an identification with Jo—an identification that has the effect of “ ‘obliterat[ing] the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion by which things are held together’ ” (p. 541), as Sir Leicester Dedlock would say. Paradoxically, however, the inculcation of bewilderment can bring clarification here. For, in prompting us to identify with Jo, the narrator also prompts us to reflect on how our disregard of Jo has literally bewildered him—forced him to keep “Moving On” (chapter 19) and made him “of no order and no place.” Deterring the kind of interest that the Reverend Chadband takes in Jo, when he expounds on this “tough subject” (p. 346) for his own “ ’spiritual profit’ ” (p. 269), Dickens also curbs the “curious habit of seeming to look a long way off” (p. 50) that characterizes Mrs. Jellyby, whose “Telescopic Philanthropy” (chapter 4), focused exclusively on her African mission in Borrioboola-Gha, diverts her attention away from the chaos at home. Here, the representation of Jo, which turns the focus to Jo and into Jo and then out of him to encompass “me,” makes ignoring the consequences of disregarding “these people” as impossible as it is to disregard Jo. As one reviewer of Bleak House put it, Dickens “writes with a purpose.”
This purpose, reform, is the aim of satire, the impulse of which is fierce indignation. And both the impulse and the aim remain palpable on pages written one hundred and fifty years ago. There, the condition-of-England question has a clear answer: “Fog everywhere.” If anything is obscure about the country as represented in Bleak House, it is how it came to be in such a dire state. Referring to the ubiquity of filth and disease and death in mid-century London, F. S. Schwarzbach writes: “One of the great mysteries of the Victorian period is how stark realities such as these needed to be ‘discovered’ by people who could barely avoid daily contact with them” (Dickens and the City, p. 125). One answer Dickens gives is that such realities are so awful as to be beyond belief. Hence, we find Mr. Snagsby “pass[ing] along the middle of a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water ... and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses” (p. 306). While this recognition of a shocking senselessness in itself begins to make sense of the mystery, Esther’s narrative clarifies further. When she first encounters London, she sees everything in “such a distracting state of confusion that I wondered how the people kept their senses” (p. 42). The answer lies in distraction itself: distraction away from such “distracting state[s] of confusion” provides a means for relief.
That had been one of the attractions of the Crystal Palace, which could divert attention away from the “volcanic ... nightmare” (p. 590) of urban slums, as well as reinforce the “agree[ment] to put a smooth glaze on the world, and to keep down all its realities” (p. 164) . In Bleak House, distraction is the allure of Chancery as well. The bewilderment induced by the chaos that appears to be outside Chancery is what gives rise to the desire for meaning and order in Chancery—to the meaning and order that Chancery both promises and withholds. “ ‘There’s a cruel attraction in the place,’ ” Miss Flite explains. “ ‘You can’t leave it. And you must expect’ ” (p. 473). With the expectancy that what makes no sense will yield some keeping the perpetual suspension of meaning and judgment of Chancery in motion, the result is the accumulation of more mud on the street.
This could be the effect of the novel, too, which was after all a diversion, however seriously undertaken by Victorians, who held that the duty of literature was to amuse and to instruct. Dickens appears to have added to these a duty to incite in Bleak House, and, in so doing, he antagonized those critics who felt that he was overstepping the proper bounds of fiction. While this increasingly forthright tendency in Dickens, as much as the savage irony of many of his later works, contributed to the falling off of his reputation among some critics, their remonstrances do not seem to have affected Dickens’s popularity or his social influence, which were both pronounced. Indeed, it was Dickens’s very capacity to act on consciousness through language that formed a constant theme in the otherwise varying views critics had of the novelist throughout his career. A reviewer of Bleak House put the matter thus: “With tens of thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen, Dickens is a hero. His very name gives a sanction to everything to which he lends it. He could do many things among his fellow-creatures, for no other reason than that he wrote Pickwick and Copperfield.” While Dickens’s power to do is a given, the doing remains an open question, and it is one that Dickens himself opens in Bleak House. For, what he also did in this novel was direct attention to what writing can do.
Dickens’s attention to writing itself is not a novelty in his work. It had surfaced most recently in David Copperfield’s famous struggles with the hieroglyphics of stenography—with “the changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different,” with “the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place,” and so on that plunge him into a “sea of perplexity” out of which he emerges, only to be confronted with a “procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I have ever known” (chapter 38). In the earlier novel, however, Dickens extracts David from the morass. David “master [s]” “the tremendous vagaries” of shorthand, and his gaining command of those “arbitrary characters” becomes a testament to his, and his author‘s, character in the extended conceit of Dickens’s autobiographical novel. Pursuing the conceit in Bleak House and developing it in the customary mode of this novel—that is, “perversely” (p. 61)—Dickens graphically represents writing as being more inscrutable and less susceptible to mastery, as well as having pernicious and potentially lethal effects. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a “ ‘dark-looking case’ ” (p. 522), says Richard, who enters Chancery “from the outermost circle of ... evil” (p. 21), plunges into “ ’the mysteries’ ” (p. 650) of the impenetrable documents pertaining to the suit, and then himself becomes a “ ‘dark-looking case,’ ” presenting visible evidence of the “ ‘law-hand’ ” (p. 29) that leaves fatal “traces” (p. 651) on his face. In the “ ’Inkwich’ ” (p. 225) of Bleak House, Dickens represents writing as having the capacity to blemish, blight, and even bewilder unto death.
Such a “ ‘dark-looking case’ ” is not the only one Dickens presents, however. There is the testament of the novel as a whole. It is as though because language is a “union of mind and matter,” to adapt the novel’s own terms for “the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr. Jellyby” (p. 54), Dickens has become newly sensible of the physical qualities of words and of the possibilities incorporated, as it were, in writing, giving us, for example, “Chizzle” and “Mizzle ... vaguely promising themselves that they will ... see what can be done for Drizzle,” pursuing the “shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties” that go on in Chancery, and making their way into “the midst of the mud and ... the heart of the fog” (p. 21), where the Lord Chancellor is addressed by Mr. Tangle: “ ’Mlud’ ” (p. 22). The Babel of the novel is audible as babble. This, again, is not a new characteristic of Dickens’s style. Such perfervid verbosity has ample precedents. One need only think of Jingle in The Pickwick Papers—of the verbal bricolage he emits; of the slogans, catchphrases patched into his telegraphic idiom; of the jangling, rattling sound of his disjointed utterances: “ ‘Ah! Regular mangle—Baker’s patent—not a crease in my coat, after all this squeezing—might have ”got up my linen“ as I came along—ha! Not a bad idea that—queer thing to have it mangled when it’s upon one, though—trying process—very’ ” (chapter 15). In fact, one might say that Dickens amplifies the Jingle principle in Bleak House, which is, among other things, a “mangling” of genres, ranging from the dateline to the gothic, from the nursery rhyme to apocalypse, and a mingling of voices and tongues, ranging from the oracular to the vernacular and including high literary language alongside middle-brow, muddled, and illiterate speech. Dickens’s strength lies as much in a “slangular direction” (p. 155) as any other. He can do many things with words.
But in the volubility of Bleak House, we see and hear a difference, a withholding of words. In this novel, the very dash that is the means for connecting Jingle’s incongruous utterances becomes a mark for the final disconnection that occurs when Jo dies while reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “ ‘Hallowed be—thy—‘ ” (p. 609). This hiatus marks a dead end for language. Dickens can indicate it, or he can write around it. “This world of ours ... has its limits,” the third-person narrator observes, “ (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it, and are come to the brink of the void beyond)” (p. 23). Bringing us as far as the “closing” of “the reverberating door” (p. 534), the narrator’s circuit stops at another “blank.” In the verbal tour de force of Bleak House, Dickens’s language repeatedly calls attention to itself coming up short.
This emphasis on boundaries is quite emphatic in Bleak House, where Dickens demonstrated himself to be at another peak of creative power, yet did not indulge in the novelist’s consummate powers of captivation and mystification. Bewilderment is ample in the book and world, but even as Dickens disclosed some of its sources, he did not promise to dispel the fog once and for all. Pointing to the horrors “around us every day,” he acknowledged the very real need for distraction from them: after all, we have the sheer pleasure of Bleak House. For all of Dickens’s capacity to do with words, he also offered a moderated vision of imaginative writing. Turning from the “sunny dawn of time” to the “time [of] shadow” of Bleak House, “when the stained glass is reflected in pale and faded hues upon the floors, when anything and everything can be made of the heavy staircase beams excepting their own proper shapes” (p. 535), Dickens acknowledged the power of the imagination, even as he restrained his “Fancy” and rested in the realm of likeness and un-likeness, the realm of “as if.” “Purposely dwell[ing] upon the romantic side of familiar things” (p. 6) in Bleak House, he also dwelled on what was: because “no part of [Tom-all-Alone‘s] left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality,” he transformed “these hours of darkness” to daybreak, to present the “vile ... wonder” to the “national glory” (pp. 590-591). Whether “ ’We can see now’ ” (p. 807),as John Jarndyce says near the close of the re-visionary novel, is an open question—a question that Bleak House reopens every time we open this arresting, unsettling book. “ ‘We are really spinning along.’ ”
Tatiana Holway received her Ph.D. from Columbia University A specialist in Victorian literature and society, she has published a number of articles on Dickens and has taught at a variety of undergraduate institutions.
Notes
1 All quotations from nineteenth-century reviews come from A. E. Dyson’s Dickens’ Bleak House: A Casebook and Philip Collins’s Dickens: The Critical Heritage; see “For Further Reading.”
2 This figure comes from Robert Newsom, whose select bibliography for Bleak House can be found through links on the Dickens Project web-site : http://humwww.ucsc.edu/dickens/index.html.
3 And has been said by D. A. Miller, among others, who argues for the resemblance of the novel to the case in “Discipline in Different Voices.” Critics such as Bruce Robbins (in “Telescopic Philanthropy”) differ with Miller.
4 Dickens uses the original spelling of the word, perhaps to emphasize a greater degree of interrelatedness (as in the causal linkages conveyed by the word “nexus”).
5 The famous definition comes from Johnson’s survey of the Metaphysical poets. “Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough,” he continued. “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Some nineteenth-century critics said much the same of Dickens’s “peculiar genius”; they also denied that he had any wit.
6 This effect is discussed by Robert Newsom in Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things (chapter 3). It should be noted, however, that modern readers are in some disagreement over whether Bleak House induces bewilderment in the reader. J. Hillis Miller, for one, has argued that it does in his influential 1971 essay “The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House.”
Works Cited
Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Davis, John R. The Great Exhibition. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. “A Preliminary Word” (Household Words, March 30, 1850) and “The Last Words of the Old Year” (Household Words, January 31, 1851). Reprinted in Michael Slater, ed., The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, vol. 2: The Amusements of the People and Other Papers: Reports, Essays, and Reviews 1834-1851. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.
Dyson, A. E., ed. Dickens’ Bleak House: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1969.
Ford, George H. Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism since 1836. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965.
Miller, D. A. “Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House.” Reprinted in Jeremy Tambling, ed., Bleak House: Charles Dickens. New Casebook Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Interpretive Dance in Bleak House.” Reprinted in Harold Bloom, ed., Charles Dickens’s Bleak House: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Newsom, Robert. Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Robbins, Bruce. “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House.” Reprinted in Jeremy Tambling, ed., Bleak House: Charles Dickens. New Casebook Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Schwarzbach, F. S. Dickens and the City. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1979.
Storey, Graham, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 6: 1850-1852. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Hogarth Press, 1984.