CHARLES DICKENS
Estratto da "Lectures on Literature"
Vladimir Nabokov
Charles Dickens
Bleak House
(1852-1853)
With Dickens we expand. It seems to me that Jane Austen's fiction had been a charming rearrangement of old-fashioned values. In the case of Dickens the values are new. Modern authors still get drunk on his vintage. Here there is no problem of approach as with Jane Austen, no courtship, no dillydallying. We just surrender ourselves to Dickens's voice—that is all. If it were possible I would like to devote the fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens. However, my job is to direct and rationalize those meditations, that admiration. All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotipn that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.
In discussing Bleak House we shall soon notice that the romantic plot of the novel is an illusion and is not of much artistic importance. There are better things in the book than the sad case of Lady Dedlock. We shall need some information about lawsuits in England, but otherwise it is going to be all play.
At first blush it might seem that Bleak House is a satire. Let us see. If a satire is of little aesthetic value, it does not attain its object, however worthy that object may be. On the other hand, if a satire is permeated by artistic genius, then its object is of little importance and vanishes with its times while the dazzling satire remains, for all time, as a work of art. So why speak of satire at all?
The study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature, for those who do not experience the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades. (I repeat again and again it is no use reading a book at all if you do not read it with your back.) It may be all right to contend that Dickens was eager to castigate the iniquities of Chancery. Such cases as that of Jarndyce did occur now and then in the middle of the last century although, as legal historians have shown, the bulk of our author’s information on legal matters goes back to the 1820s and 1830s so that many of his targets had ceased to exist by the time Bleak House was written. But if the target is gone, let us enjoy the carved beauty of his weapon. Again, as an indictment of the aristocracy the description of the Dedlocks and their set is of no interest or importance whatsoever since our author’s ‘knowledge and notions of that set are extremely meager and crude, and as artistic achievements the Dedlocks, I am sorry to say, are as dead as doornails or door locks (the Dead locks are dead). So let us be thankful for the web and ignore the spider; let us admire the structural qualities of the crime theme and ignore the weakness of the satire and its theatrical gestures.
Finally, the sociologist may write a whole book, if he please, on the abuses that children underwent at a period of time that the historian will call the murky dawn of the industrial age—child labor and all that. But to be quite frank, the link of these poor children in Bleak House is not so. much with social circumstances of the 1850s as with earlier times and mirrors of time. From the point of view of literary technique the connection is, rather, with the children of previous novels, the sentimental novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One should read again the pages of Mansfield Park on the Price family in Portsmouth and see for oneself the quite definite artistic pedigree, the quite definite connection between Miss Austen’s poor children and the poor children of Bleak House, and there are other literary sources, of course. So much for the technique. Now from the emotional point of view, here again we are hardly in the 1850s at all—we are with Dickens in his own childhood—and so once more the historical frame breaks down.
As is quite clear, the enchanter interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher. In the case of Dickens, this attitude seems to me to be the only way of keeping Dickens alive, above the reformer, above the penny novelette, above the sentimental trash, above the theatrical nonsense. There he shines forever on the heights of which we know the exact elevation, the outlines and the formation, and the mountain trails to get there through the fog. It is in his imagery that he is great.
Here are some of the things to notice while reading the book:
1. One of the novel’s most striking themes refers to children—their troubles, insecurity, humble joys, and the joy they give, but mainly their misery. "I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made," to quote Housman. Also, parent-child relations are of interest, involving as they do the theme of "orphans”: either the parent or the child is lost. The good mother nurses a dead child or dies herself. And children who are the attendants of other children. I have a sneaking fondness for the story about Dickens in his difficult London youth one day walking behind a workingman who was carrying a big-headed child across his shoulder. As the man walked on, without turning, with Dickens behind him, the child across the man's shoulders looked at Dickens, and Dickens, who was eating cherries out of a paper bag as he walked, silently popped one cherry after another into the silent child’s mouth without, anybody being the wiser.
2. Chancery—fog—madness: this is another theme.
3. Every character has his attribute, a kind of colored shadow that appears whenever the person appears.
4. Things participate—pictures, houses, carriages.
5. The sociological side, brilliantly stressed for example by Edmund Wilson in his collection of essays The Wound and the Bow, is neither interesting nor important.
6. The whodunit plot (with a kind of pre-Sherlock sleuth) of the second part of the book.
7. The dualism permeating the whole work, evil almost as strong as the good, embodied in Chancery, as a kind of Hell, with its emissary devils Tulkinghorn and Vholes, and a host of smaller devils, even to their clothes, black and shabby. On the good side we have Jarndyce, Esther, Woodcourt, Ada, Mrs. Bagnet; in between are the tempted ones, sometimes redeemed by love as in Sir Leicester, where love conquers rather artificially his vanity and prejudices. Richard, too, is saved, for though he has erred he is essentially good. Lady Dedlock is redeemed by suffering, and Dostoevski is wildly gesticulating in the background. Even the smallest act of goodness may bring salvation. Skimpole and, of course, the Smallweeds and Krook are completely the devil’s allies. And so are the philanthropists, Mrs. Jellyby for instance, who spread misery around them while deceiving themselves that they are doing good though actually indulging their selfish instincts. The whole idea is that these people—Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle, etc.—are giving their time and energy to all kinds of fanciful affairs (paralleling the Chancery theme of uselessness, perfect for the lawyers but misery for the victims) when their children are abandoned and miserable. There may be hope for Bucket and "Coavinses” (doing their duty without unnecessary cruelty) but none for the false missionaries, the Chadbands, etc. The "good” ones are often victims of the "evil” ones, but therein lies salvation for the former, perdition for the latter. All these forces and people in conflict (often wrapped up in the Chancery theme) are •: symbols of greater, more universal forces, even to the death of Krook by fire (self-generated), the devil’s natural medium. Such conflicts are the "skeleton” of the book, but Dickens was too much of an artist to make all this obtrusive or obvious. His people are alive, not merely clothed ideas or 7 symbols.
Bleak House consists of three main themes:
1. The Court of Chancery theme revolving around the dreary suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, emblemized by London’s foul fog and Miss Flite’s caged, birds. Lawyers and mad suitors are its representatives.
2. The theme of miserable children and their relationships with those they help and with, their parents, most of whom are frauds or freaks. The most unhappy child of all is the homeless Jo, who vegetates in the foul shadow of Chancery and is an unconscious agent in the mystery plot.
3. The mystery theme, a romantic tangle of trails followed in turn by three sleuths, Guppy, Tulkinghorn, Bucket, and their helpers, and leading to the unfortunate Lady Dedlock, mother of Esther born out of wedlock.
The magic trick Dickens is out to perform implies balancing these three globes, juggling with them, keeping them in a state of coherent unity, maintaining these three balloons in the air without getting their strings snarled.
I have tried to show by means of connecting lines in my diagram the variety of ways in which these three themes and their agents are linked up in the meandering course of the story. Only a few of the characters are noticed here, but their list is huge: of the children alone there are about thirty specimens. I should perhaps have connected Rachael, Esther’s former nurse who knows the secret of her birth, with one of the frauds, the Reverend Chadband whom Rachael married. Hawdon is Lady Dedlock’s former lover (also called Nemo in the book), Esther’s father. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock’s solicitor, andDucket the detective are the sleuths who try, not unsuccessfully, to unravel that little mystery, driving, incidentally, Lady Dedlock to her death. These sleuths find various helps such as my lady’s French maid Hortense and the old scoundrel Smallweed, who is the brother-in-law of the weirdest, most foglike character in the book, Krook.
My plan is to follow each of these three themes, starting with the Chancery—fog—bird—mad-suitor one; and among other things and creatures a little mad womati, Miss Flite, and the eerie Krook will be discussed as representatives of that theme. I shall then pick up the child theme in all its details and show poor Jo at his best, and also a very repulsive fraud, the false child Mr. Skimpole. The mystery theme will be . treated next. Please mark that Dickens is an enchanter, an artist, in his dealings with the Chancery fog, a crusader combined with an artist in the child theme, and a very clever storyteller in the mystery theme that propels and directs the story. It is the artist that attracts us; so, after outlining the three main themes and the personalities of some of their agents, I shall analyze the form of the'book, its structure, its style, its imagery, its verbal magic. We shall have a good deal of fun with Esther and her lovers, the impossibly good Woodcourt and the very convincing quixotic John Jarndyce, as well as with such worthies as Sir Leicester Dedlock and others.
The basic situation in Bleak House in regard to the Chancery theme is quite simple. A lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is dragging on for years. Numerous suitors expect fortunes that never come. One of the Jarndyces— John Jarndyce—is a good man who takes the whole affair calmly and does not expect anything from the suit, which he believes will scarcely be terminated in his lifetime. He has a young ward Esther Summerson, who is not directly concerned with the Chancery business but is the sifting agent of the book. John Jarndyce is also the guardian of Ada and Richard, who are cousins and on the opposite side of the suit. Richard gets tremendously involved psychologically in the lawsuit and goes crazy. Two other suitors, old Miss Flite and a Mr. Gridley, are mad already.
The Chancery theme is the one with which the book opens, but before looking into it let me draw attention to one of the niceties of the Dickensian method. The interminable suit and the Lord Chancellor are described: "How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading; no man’s nature has been made the better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never coipe to good. . . .
"Thus in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”
Now let us go back to the very first paragraph in the book: "London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. . . . Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.” Accumulating at compound interest, a metaphor which links the real mud and mist to the mud and muddle of Chancery. Sitting in the midst of the mist and the mud and the muddle, the Lord Chancellor is addressed by Mr. Tangle as "Mlud,” At the heart of the mud and fog, "My Lord” is himself reduced to "Mud” if we remove the lawyer’s slight lisp. My Lord, Mlud, Mud. We shall mark at once, at the very beginning of our inquiry, that this is a typical Dickensian device: wordplay, making inanimate words not only live but perform tricks transcending their immediate sense.
There is another example of a verbal link in these first pages. In the initial paragraph, the smoke lowering down from the chimney pots is compared to "a soft black drizzle..” Much later in the book the man Krook will dissolve in this black drizzle. But more immediately, in the paragraph about Chancery and the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce one finds the emblematic names of solicitors in Chancery "Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise [who] have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of office.” Chizzle, Mizzle, Drizzle, a dismal alliteration. And then, right after, "Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause____” Shirking and sharking means to live by stratagems as those lawyers live in the mud and drizzle of Chancery, and, if we go back to the first paragraph again, we find that shirking and sharking is a companion alliteration and an echo of the slipping and sliding of the pedestrians in the mud.
Let us now follow in the footsteps of the mad little woman Miss Flite, who appears as a fantastic suitor at the very beginning and marches off when the empty court is closed up for the day. Very shortly the three young people of the book, Richard (whose destiny is going to be linked up in a singular way with the mad woman’s), his Ada (the cousin whom he will marry), and Esther—these three young people visit the Lord Chancellor and under the colonnade meet Miss Elite: "a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet, and carrying a reticule, came curtseying and smiling up to us, with an air of great ceremony.
" *Oh!' said she. The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty, when they find themselves in this place, and don’t know what’s to come of it.'
" ’Mad!’ whispered Richard, not thinking she could hear him.
” ’Right! Mad, young gentleman,’ she returned so quickly that he was quite abashed. *1 was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time,’curtseying taw, and smiling between every little sentence. I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served, or saved me. 1 have the honour to attend Court regularly. With my documents.
I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment____Pray accept my blessing.’
"As Ada was a little frightened, I said to humour the poor old lady, that we were much obliged to her.
’’ Ye-es!‘ she said mincingly. 'I imagine so. And here is Conversation Kenge. With hisdocuments! How does your honourable worship do?’
" 'Quite well, quite well! Now don’t be troublesome, that’s a good soul!’ said Mr. Kenge, leading the way back.
" 'By no means,’ said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me. "Anything but troublesome. I shall confer estates on both,—which is not being troublesome, I trust? I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. This is a good omen for you. Accept my blessing!’
"She stopped at the bottom of the steep, broad flight of stairs; but we looked back as we went up, and she was still there, saying, still with a curtsey and a smile between every little sentence, 'Youth. Arid hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray accept my blessing!' ”
The words—youth, hope, beauty—that she keeps repeating are important words, as we shall see farther on. The next day during their walk in London the three young people, and a fourth young person, come again across Miss Flite. Here a new theme is gradually introduced into her speech—this is the bird theme—song, wings, flight. Miss Flite is interested in flight and song, in the melodious birds of the garden of Lincoln’s Inn. We then visit her lodgings, above those of Krook. There is also another lodger, Nemo, of whom more later, also one of the most important figures in the book. Miss Flite shows off some twenty cages of birds. " '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! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?’ ”
She lets in the light so that the birds will sing for her visitors, but she will not tell their names. The sentence "Another time, I’ll tell you their names” is very significant: there is a pathetic mystery here. She again repeats the words youth, hope, beauty.These words are now linked with the birds, and the bars of their cages seem to throw their shadow, seem already to bar with their shadows the symbols of youth, beauty, hope. To see still better how nicely Miss Flite is connected with Esther, you may mark when Esther -in her early teens is leaving home for school with her only companion a bird in a cage. I want to remind you very forcibly at this point of another caged bird that I mentioned in connection with Mansfield Park when I referred to a passage from Sterne's Sentimental Journey about a starling— and about liberty and about captivity. Here we are again following the same thematic line. Cages, bird cages, their bars, the shadow of their bars striking out, as it were, all happiness. Miss Flite’s birds, we should notice finally, are larks, linnets, and goldfinches, which correspond to lark-youth, linnet-hope, goldfinch-beauty.
When her visitors passed the door of the strange lodger Nemo, Miss Flite had warned them, hush, hush. Then this strange lodger is hushed, is dead, and by his own hand, and Miss Flite is sent for a doctor, and later stands trembling inside his door. This dead lodger, we shall learn, was connected with Esther, whose father he was, and with Lady Dedlock, whose lover he was. Such thematic lines as the Miss Flite one are very fascinating and instructive. A little later another poor child, another captive child, one of the many poor captive children of the book, the girl Caddy Jellyby, is mentioned as meeting her lover, Prince, in Miss Flite’s room. Still later, on a visit by the young people, accompanied by Mr. Jarndyce, we learn from Krook’s mouth the names of the birds: Hope,Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. But old Krook leaves out
Beauty—beauty which, incidentally, Esther loses in the course of the novel when she falls ill.
The thematic link between Richard and Miss Flite, between his madness and hers, is started when he becomes infatuated with the suit. This is a very important passage: "He had got at the core of that mystery now, tie told us; and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to take, I don’t know how many thousands of pounds, must be finally established, if there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery ... and that this happy conclusion could not be much longer delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the infatuation. He had even begun to haunt the Court. He told us how he saw Miss Flite there daily; how they talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses; and how, while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart. But he never thought—never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable of so much happiness then, and with such better things before him!—what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind.”
Miss Flite is acquainted with another mad suitor, Mr. Gridley, who is also introduced at the very start: "Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out 'My Lord!’ in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal weather a little." Later on this Mr. Gridley has a lengthy tirade about his situation addressed to Mr. Jarndyce. He has been ruined by a suit about a legacy in which the costs have eaten up three* times the whole amount, and the suit is as yet unsettled. His sense of injury has been elevated to a principle which he/will not abandon: " I have been in prison for contempt of Court. I have bedn in prison for threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and chat trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them—though they have found it amusing, too, to see me committed into custody, and brought up in custody, and all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself. I tell them, that if I did restrain myself, I should become imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in my part of the country say they remember me so; but, now, I must have this vent under my sense of injury, or nothing could hold my wits together... . Besides,’ he added, breaking fiercely out, 'I'll shame them. To the last, I'll show myself in that Court to its shame.’ ” As Esther remarks, "His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage without seeing it," But he dies in Mr. George’s place, attended by the trooper, by Bucket, Esther and Richard, and by Miss Flite. As he dies, " 'O no, Gridley!’ she cried, as he fell heavily and calmly back from before her, ’not without my blessing. After so many years!’ ”
In a very weak passage the author uses Miss Flite to tell Esther of the noble conduct of Dr. Woodcourt during a shipwreck in the East Indian seas. This does not come off well, although it is a brave attempt on the author’s part to link up the mad little woman not only with Richard’s tragic sickness but also with Esther’s future happiness. The relation between Miss Flite and Richard becomes increasingly stressed until, at the last when Richard dies, Esther writes that "When all was still; at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given her birds their liberty.”
Another Chancery-theme character is introduced when Esther and her friends on a visit to Miss Flite stop for a moment in front of Krook’s shop, above which Miss Flite roomed: "a shop, over which was written Krook, Rag and Bottle Warehouse. Also, in long thin letters, Krook, Dealer IN MARINE Stores. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, Bones Bought. In another, Kitchen-Stuff Bought. In another, Old Iron Bought. In another, Waste Paper Bought. In another, Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Wardrobes Bought. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles: I am reminded by mentioning the latter, that the shop had, in several little particulars, the air of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled ’Law Books, all at 9d.’ ”
Here the connection between Krook and the Chancery theme with its legal symbols and rotting laws is established. Please hold in juxtaposition the terms Bones Bought and Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Wardrobes Bought. For what is a suitor in a Chancery case but bones and ragged clothes, and the rags of the robes of law—the rags of law—and the R wastepaper that Krook also buys. This, indeed, is pointed out by Esther I herself, with some assistance from Richard Carstone and Charles Dickens:
| "The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have j been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as V {Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the .bones of clients, to make the picture complete.” Richard, who whispers this, is destined to be a victim of Chancery himself when a temperamental flaw in his nature leads him to drop one after another of the various professions he dabbles in before becoming entangled in the mad muddle and poisonous visions of the Chancery inheritance that will never come.
Krook himself appears, emerging, as it were, from the very heart of the fog (remember his trick of calling the Lord Chancellor his brother—his brother in rust and dust, in madness and mud): "He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs, and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin, that he looked from his breast upward, like some old root in a fall of snow.” There is Krook—crooked Krook. The gnarled-root-in-snow simile should be added to the growing collection of Dickensian comparisons to be discussed later. Another little rheme which emerges here, and is going to breed, is the allusion to fire: "as if he were on fire within." As if—an ominous note.
A later passage where Krook rattles off the names of Miss Flite’s birds— symbols of Chancery and misery—has already been mentioned. Now his \ horrible cat is introduced, ripping at a bundle of rags with his tigerish claws, with a sound that sets Esther’s pretty teeth on edge. Incidentally, old Smallweed, in the mystery-theme group, with his green eyes and sharp claws, is not only a brother-in-law of Krook s but also a kind of human representative of Krook's cat. The bird theme and the cat theme gradually meet—both Krook and his green-eyed, gray tiger are waiting for the birds -to leave their cages. Here the symbolic skint depends on the idea that only death can liberate a Chancery suitor. Thus, Gridley dies and is free. Thus, Richard dies and is free. Krook horrifies his audience with an account of the suicide of a certain Tomjarndyce, a Chancery suitor whom he quotes: "it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill, it's being roasted at a slow fire.” Mark this "slow fire.” Krook himself in his crooked, cranky way is also a victim of Chancery—and he too will burn. Indeed, we get a definite hint of what is going to be his doom. The man was perpetually full of gin, which as dictionaries tell us is a strong liquor made by distilling grain mash, especially rye mash. Krook seems to carry with him wherever he goes a kind of portable hell. Portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.
Krook is not only linked with the Chancery theme, but is also connected with the mystery theme. After Nemo’s death, in order to get from Krook certain letters relating to Lady Dedlock’s former love affair, Guppy, a lawyer’s clerk in a dither of romance and blackmail, and his friend Tony Jobling (also called Weevle) visit Krook. They have his gin bottle refilled, which he receives "in his arms like a beloved grandchild.” Alas, the grandchild might have been more aptly described as an internal parasite. Now we come to the marvelous pages in chapter 32 dealing with Krook’s -marvelous death, a tangible symbol of the slow fire and fog of Chancery. Recall the imagery in the first pages of the book—smog, the soft black drizzle, the flal of soot—this is the keynote, the breeding spot of the gruesome theme which is now going to be developed to its logical end, with the addition of the gin.
Guppy and Weevle are on their way to Weevle’s room (the room in which Lady Dedlock’s lover Hawdon had committed suicide, in the same house where Miss Flite and Krook dwell) to await midnight when Krook is to hand over the letters. On their way they run into a Mr. Snagsby, a law stationer. There is a curious smell and flavor about the thick foggy air.
” 'Airing yourself, as I am doing, before you go to bed?’ the stationer inquires.
Why, there’s not much air to be got here; and what there is is not very refreshing,’ Weevle answers, glancing up and down the court.
" 'Very true? sir. Don’t you observe,’ says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to sniff and taste the air a little; ’don’t you observe, Mr. Weevle, that you’re—not to put too fine a point upon it—that you’re rather greasy here, sir?’
" ’Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place to-night,’ Mr. Weevle rejoins. ’I suppose it’s chops at the Sol’s Arms.’
" ’Chops, do you think? Oh!—Chops, eh?’ Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again. ’Well, sir, I suppose it is. But I should say their cook at the Sol wanted a little looking after. She has been burning ’em, sir? And I don’t think,’ Mr. Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; ’I don’t think—not to put too fine a point upon it—that they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.’ "
The two friends go up to Weevle’s room and have a discussion of the mysterious Krook and the horrors that Weevle feels living in this room and in this house. Weevle complains to Guppy about the atmosphere— mental and physical—in that room. Mark the candle heav 'y burning with "a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.” No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.
Guppy happens to look at his coat sleeve. ” 'Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is there a chimney on fire?’
" 'Chimney on fire!’
'* 'Ah!' returns Mr. Guppy. 'See how the soot’s falling. See here, on my arm! See again on the table here! Confound the stuff, it won’t blow off— smears, like black fat!' ”
Weevle investigates down the staircase but all seems quiet, and he "quotes the remark he lately made to Mr. Snagsby, about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.
_ " 'And it was then,’ resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the table, with their heads very near together, 'that he told you of his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s portmanteau?’ ”
The talk goes on a while, but when Weevle stirs the fire, it makes Guppy start. " 'Fah! Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,’ says he. 'Let us open the window a bit, and get a mouthful of air. It’s too close.’ ” They continue the conversation, leaning on the windowsill, Guppy tapping his hand on the sill until he hastily draws his hand away." "What in the Devil’s name,’ he says, 'is this! Look at my fingers!’
**A thick yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
" ’What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of x window?’
" I pouring out of window? Nothing, I swear. Never, since I have been here!’ cries the lodger.
"And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips, and creeps away down the bricks; here, lies in a little thick nauseous pool.
" ’This is a horrible house,’ says Mr. Guppy, shutting down the window. ’Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off.’
"He so washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells and washes, that he has not long restored himself with a glass of brandy, and stood silently before the fire, when Saint Paul’s bell strikes twelve, and all those other bells strike twelve from their towers of various heights in the dark air, and in many tones.”
Weevle goes down the stairs to keep the appointment and to secure the bundle of Nemo’s papers promised him, but returns in terror. " 'I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there—and the soot is there, and the oil is there—and he is not there!’—Tony ends this with a .groan.
"Mr. Guppy takes the light. They go down, more dead than alive, and holding onranother, push open the door of the back shop. The cat has retreated close to it, and stands snarling—not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire. There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering suffocating vapour in the room, and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.” The old man’s coat ami cap hang on a chair. The red string that had tied the papers is on the floor, but no papers are to be seen: only a crumbled black thing on the floor. ” ’What’s the matter with the cat?’ says Mr. Guppy. ’Look at her!’
" Mad, I think. And no wonder in this evil place.’
"They advance slowly, looking at all these things. The cat remains where they found her, still snarling at the something on the ground, before the fire and between the two chairs. What is it? Hold up the light.
"Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here it is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinked with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.
"Help, help, help! come into this house for Heaven's sake!
"Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.”
And so the metaphor becomes a physical fact, and the evil within a man has destroyed the man. Old Krook is diffused and merged in the fog from which he emerged—fog to fog, mud to mud, madness to madness, black drizzle and greasy ointments of witchcraft. We feel it all physically, and it does not, of course, matter a jot whether or not a man burning down that way from the saturated gin inside him is a scientific possibility. Dickens with his eloquent tongue in his bearded cheek, Dickens, when introducing his book and also within the text, refers to what he lists as actual cases of I spontaneous combustion, the gin and the sin catching fire and the man burning to the ground.
There is something else here more important than the question, is this possible? Namely, we should contrast two styles here in this extended passage: the rapid, colloquial style of Guppy and Weevle, full of jerky movement, and the eloquent apostrophic tolling style of the end. The term apo strop hie is from apostrophe,which in rhetoric means "a feigned turning from one’s audience to address directly a person or thing, or an imaginary object.” Now the question is: what author's style does this apostrophic, booming accent in Dickens recall? The answer is, Thomas Carlyle, (1795-1881), and I am especially thinking of his History of the French Revolution which appeared in 1837. It is fun to dip into that magnificent work and find therein that apostrophic accent, rolling and tolling around the idea of destiny, futility, and nemesis. Two examples may suffice: "Serene Highnesses, who sit there protocolling and manifestoing, and consoling mankind! how were it if, for once in the thousand years, your parchments, formularies and reasons of state were blown to thefour winds ... and Mankind said for itself what the thing was that would console it” (chapter 4, "The Marseillaise”).
"Unhappy France; unhappy in King, Queen and Constitution; one knows not in which unhappiest. Was the meaning of our so glorious French Revolution this, and no other, that when Shams and Delusions, long soul-killing, had become body-killing ... a great People rose," etc, (chapter 9, "Varenne”).
We are now in a position to sum up our Chancery theme. It started with an account of the mental and natural fog attending the Chancery business. In the early pages "My Lord”.was reduced to mud, and we heard the very sound of the mud, slippery and sly, in the trickery of Chancery. We discovered the symbolic meaning, the symbolic plight, the symbolic names. Crazy Miss Elite and her birds are linked with the plight of two other Chancery suitors, both of whom die in the course of the book. Then we came to Krook, a s' mbol of Chancery’s slow fog and slow fire, mud and madness, which ao aire a tangible quality in the horror of his prodigious fate. But what is the fate of the suit itself, of thisjarndyce and Jarndyce case that has been rolling on for years and years, breeding devils and destroying angels? Well, just as Krook’s end was sound logic in the magic world of Dickens, so the Chancery case also has a logical end within the grotesque logic of that grotesque world.
One day when the suit was to come up again, Esther and her friends were delayed so that "when we came to Westminster Hall, we found that the day’s business was begun. Worse than that, we found such an unusual crowd in the Court of Chancery that it was full to the door, and we could neither see nor hear what was passing within. It appeared to be something droll, for occasionally there was a laugh, and a cry of 'Silence!' It appeared to be something interesting, for every one was pushing and striving to get nearer. It appeared to be something that made the professional gentlemen very merry, for there were several young counsellors in wigs and whiskers on the outside of the crowd, and when one of them told the others about it, they put their hands in their pockets, and quite doubled themselves up with laughter, and went stamping about the pavement of the hall.
"We asked a gentleman by us, if he knew what cause was on? He told us Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We asked him if he knew what was doing in it? He said, really no he did not, nobody ever did; but as well as he could make out, it was over. Over for the day? we asked him No, he said; over for good.
'Over for good!
"When we heard this unaccountable answer, we looked at one another quite lost in amazement. Could it be possible that the Will had set things right at last, and that Richard and Ada were going to be rich?* It seemed too good to be true. Alas, it was!
"Our suspense was short; for a break up soon took place in the crowd, and the people came streaming out looking flushed and hot, and bringing a quantity of bad air with them. Still they were all exceedingly amused, and were more like people coming out from a Farce or a Juggler than from a court of Justice. We stood aside, watching for any countenance we knew; and presently great bundles of paper began to be carried out—bundles in bags, bundles too large to be got into any bags, immense masses of papers of all shapes and no shapes, which the bearers staggered under, and threw down for the time being, anyhow, on the Hall pavement, while they went back to bring out more. Even these clerks were laughing. We glanced at the papers, and seeing Jarndyce and Jarndyce everywhere, asked an officiallooking person who was standing in the midst of them, whether the cause was over. 'Yes,' he said; 'it was all up with it at last!’ and burst out laughing too." •Shortly before, under the propulsion of Mr. Bucket, old Smallweed had disgorged a copy of a Jarndyce will, which he had found among the accumulation of Krooks old wastepapers. This will was later than those in contest and gave the major share of the estate to Ada and Richard It had seemed at the time that this new will would end the suit with some promptness. Ed
. The costs had absorbed the whole case, all the fortunes involved. And so the fantastic fog of Chancery is .dispersed—and only the dead do not laugh.
Before one comes to the real children in Dickens's important children’s theme, the fraud Harold Skimpole must be looked at. Skimpole, a falsely brilliant fellow, is introduced to us by Jarndyce, in chapter 6, who says, "There's no one here [in my house] but the finest creature upon earth—a child.’’ This definition of a child is important for the understanding of the novel, which deals in its inner essential part mainly with the misery of little ones, with the pathos of childhood—and Dickens is at his best in these platters. So the definition found by good and kind John Jarndyce is quite correct as it stands: a child was from the point of view of Dickens the finest creature upon earth. But now comes an interesting point: the definition "a child” cannot be really applied to the man Skimpole. Skimpole deceives the world, and he deceives Mr. Jarndyce into thinking that he, Skimpole, is as innocent, as naive, as carefree as a child. Actually he is nothing of the sort; but this false childishness of his throws into splendid relief the virtues of authentic childhood in other parts of the book.
Jarndyce explains to Richard that Skimpole is grown up, at least as old as he, Jarndyce, is, " 'but in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child.
" . He is a musical man; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional, He is an Artist, too; an Amateur, but might have been a Professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners. He has been unfortunate in his affairs, and unfortunate in his pursuits, and unfortunate in his family; but he don’t care—he’s a child!’
. " 'Did you imply that he ha., children of his own, sir?' inquired Richard.
” 'Yes, Rick! Half-a-dozen. More! Nearer a dozen, I should think. But he has never looked after them. How could he? He wanted somebody to look after him. He is a child, you know!’ ”
We are presented to Mr. Skimpole through Esther’s eyes: "He was a little bright creature, with a rather large head; but a delicate face, and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and s: ontaneous, and was said with such a captivating gaiety, that it was fascin: ting to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr. Jarndyce, and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance, in all respects, of a damaged young man, than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy
negligence in his manner, and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neckerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits), which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and experiences.” He had failed as a doctor in the household of a German prince since "he had always been a mere child in point of weights and measures, and had never known anything about them (except that they disgusted him).” When called on to perform any duty, such as ministering to the prince or his people, "he was generally found lying on his back, in bed, reading the newspapers, or making fancy sketches in pencil, and couldn’t come. The prince, at last, objecting to this, in which,' said Mr. Skimpole, in the frankest manner, ’he was perfectly right,’ the engagement terminated, and Mr. Skimpole having (as he added with delightful gaiety) 'nothing to live upon but love, fell in love, and married, and surrounded himself with rosy cheeks.’ His good friend Jarndyce and some other of his good friends then helped him, in quicker or slower succession, to several openings in life; but to no purpose, for he must confess to two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was, that he had no idea of time; the other, that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business, and never knew the value of anything! ... All he asked of society was, to let him live. That wasn’t much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more. He was a mere child in the world, but he didn’t cry for the moon. He said to the world, Go your several ways in peace! Wear red coats, blue coats, lawn sleeves, put pens behind your ears, wear aprons; go after glory, holiness, commerce, trade, any object you prefer; only—let Harold Skimpole live!’
"All this, and a great deal more, he told us, not only with the utmost brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious candour—speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if Skimpole were a third person, as if he knew that Skimpole had his singularities, but still had his claims too, which were the general business of the community and must not be slighted. He was quite enchanting,” although Esther remains somewhat confused as to why he was free of all duties and accountabilities of life.
The next morning at breakfast Skimpole discourses engagingly on Bees and Drones and frankly expresses the thought that the Drone is the embodiment of a wiser and pleasanter idea than the Bee, But Skimpole is not really a stingless drone, and this is the secret point of his personality: he has a sting which remains concealed for a long time. His offhand professions of childishness and carelessness afforded much pleasure to Mr. Jarndyce, who was relieved to find what he thought was a candid man in a world of deceit. But the candid Mr. Skimpole used good Jarndyce’s kind heart for his own ends. A little later, in London, the presence of something hard and evil behind Skimpole’s childish banter becomes more and more evident. A sheriff s officer named Neckett, from the firm of Coavins, who had come one day to arrest Skimpole for his debts, dies, and Skimpole refers to it in a manner that shocks Esther: " 'Coavinses has been arrested by the great Bailiff,’ said Mr. Skimpole. 'He will never do violence to the sunshine any more.’ ” The man has left a motherless family, which Skimpole jokes about as he lightly touches the piano by which he is seated. “ And he told me,’ he said, playing little chords where [says the narrator] I shall put full stops, 'That Coavinses had left [period] Three children [period] No mother [period] And that Coavinses’ profession [period] Being unpopular [period] The rising Coavinses [period] Were at a considerable disadvantage,’ ” Mark the device here—the cheerful rogue idly touching these musical chords in between his trite banter.
Now Dickens is going to do a very clever thing. He is going to take us to the motherless household of the dead man and show us the plight of the children there; and in the light of this plight, Mr. Skimpole’s so-called childishness will reveal its falsity. Esther is the narrator: *'I tapped at the door, and a little shrill voice inside said, 'We are locked in. Mrs. Blinder’s got the key!'
"I applied the key on hearing this, and opened the door. In a poor room, with a sloping ceiling, and containing very little furniture, was a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a heavy child of eighteen months. [/ like the 'heavy,’ which weighs down the sentence at the necessary point.] There was no fire, though the weather was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets, as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched, and their small figures shrunken, as the boy walked up and down, nursing and hushing the child with its head on his shoulder.
" 'Who has locked you up here alone?' we naturally asked.
'* 'Charley,' said the boy, standing still to gaze at us.
'' Is Charley your brother?'
" 'No. She's my sister, Charlotte. Father called her Charley.' . . ;
" 'Where is Charley now?’
" 'Out a-washing,' said the boy. . . .
"We were looking at one another, and at these two children, when there came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face—pretty-faced too—wearing a womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her, and drying her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with washing, and the soapsuds were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms. But for this, she might have been a child, playing at washing, and imitating a poor working-woman with a quick observation of the truth.” So Skimpole is a vile parody of a child, whereas this little girl is a pathetic imitator of an adult woman. "The child [the boy] was nursing, stretched forth its arms, and cried out to be taken by Charley. The little girl took it, in a womanly sort of manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.
" 'Is it possible,’ whispered [Mr. Jarndyce] ... 'that this child works for the rest? Look at this! For God's sake look at this!’
"It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure.”
Now, please, note the intonation of pity and of a kind of tender awe in Mr. Jarndyce's speech: " 'Charley, Charley!’ said my guardian. 'How old are you?'
" 'Over thirteen, sir,’ replied the child.
" 'O! What a great age!' said my guardian. 'What a great age, Charley!’
"I cannot describe the tenderness with which he spoke to her; half playfully, yet all the more compassionately and mournfully.
'And do you live alone here with these babies, Charley?' said my guardian.
" 'Yes, sir,’ returned the child, looking up into his face with perfect confidence, 'since father died.’
" 'And how do you live, Charley? O! Charley,’ said my guardian, turning his face away for a moment, 'how do you live?’ ”
I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through Bleak House. I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is. There is no doubt that, say, a story of a student turned shepherd for the sake of a maiden is sentimental and silly and flat and stale. But let us ask ourselves, is not there some difference between Dickens’s technique and the old writers. For instance, how different is this world of Dickens from the world of Homer or from the world of Cervantes. Does a hero of Homer’s really feel the divine throb of pity? Horror, yes—and a kind of generalized routine compassion—but is the keen sense of specialized pity as we understand it today, as it were, in the dactyllic past? For let us nurse no doubt about it: despite all our hideous reversions to the wild state, modern man is on the whole a better man than Homer’s man, homo homericus,or than medieval man. In the imaginary battle of americus versus homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize. Of course, I am aware that dim throbs of pathos do occur in the Odyssey, that Odysseus and his old father do, suddenly, when they meet again after many years, and after a few casual remarks, suddenly raise their heads and lament in a kind of elemental ululation, a vague howl against fate, as if they were not quite conscious of their own woe. Yes, this compassion is not quite conscious of itself; it is, I repeat, generalized emotion in that old world with its blood puddles and dung heaps on marble, whose only redemption, after all, is that it left us a handful of magnificent epics, an immortal horizon of verse. Well, you have sufficiently heard from me about the thorns and fangs of that world. Don Quixote does interfere in the flogging of a child, but Don Quixote is a madman. Cervantes takes the cruel world in his stride, and there is always a belly laugh just around the corner of the least pity.
Now here, in the passage about the little Necketts, Dickens’s great art should not be mistaken for a cockney version of the seat of emotion—it is the real thing, keen, subtle, specialized compassion, with a grading and merging of melting shades, with the very accent of profound pity in the words uttered, and with an artist’s choice of the most visible, most audible, most tangible epithets.
And now the Skimpole theme is going to meet, head-on, one of the most tragic themes in the book, that of the poor boy Jo. This orphan, this very sick little Jo, is brought by Esther and the girl Charley, now her maid,* to the Jarndyce house for shelter on a cold, wild night. Jo is shown shrunk into the corner of a window seat in the hall of the Jarndyce house, staring with an indifference that scarcely could be called wonder at the comfort and brightness about him. Esther is again the narrator. " This is a sorrowful case,’ said my guardian, after asking him a question or two, and touching him, and examining his eyes. 'What do you say, Harold?’
” 'You had better turn him out,’ said Mr. Skimpole.
" 'What do you mean?’ inquired my guardian, almost sternly.
•Elsewhere among the papers, VN has a note that "Charley coming to Esther as a maid is the 'sweet little shadow' instead of the dark shadow of Hortense" who had offered her services to Esther after she had been discharged by Lady Dediock but had not been accepted. Ed.
" 'My dear Jarndyce,' said Mr. Skimpole, 'you know what I am: 1 am a child, Be cross to me, if I deserve it. But I have a constitutional objection to this sort of thing. 1 always had, when I was a medical man. He’s not safe, you know. There’s a very bad sort of fever about him.'
"Mr. Skimpole had retreated from the hall to the drawing-room again, and said this in his airy way, seated on the music-stool as we stood by.
" '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. If you put him out in the road, you only put him where he was before. He will be no worse off than he was, you know. Even make him better off, if you like. Give him sixpence, or five shillings, or five pound ten—you are arithmeticians, and I am not—and get rid of him!’
" 'And what is he to do then?’ asked my guardian.
" Upon my life,’ said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging-smile, 'I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he’ll do it.’ ”
This is of course to imply that all poor Jo has to do is just to die like a sick animal in a ditch. However, Jo is put to bed in a wholesome loft room. And as the reader learns much later, Skimpole is easily bribed by a detective to show the room where Jo is, and Jo is taken away and disappears for a long time.
The Skimpole theme is then related to Richard. Skimpole begins to sponge on him and even, after a bribe, produces a new lawyer for him to pursue the fruitless suit. Mr. Jarndyce takes Esther with him on a visit to Skimpole’s lodgings to caution him, still believing in his naive innocence. "It was dingy enough, and not at all clean; but furnished with an odd kind of shabby luxury, with a large footstool, a sofa, and plenty of cushions, an easy-chair, and plenty of pillows, a piano, books, drawing materials, music, newspapers, and a few sketches and pictures. A broken pane of glass in one of the dirty windows was papered and wafered over; but there was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself reclined upon the sofa, in a dressing-gown, drinking some fragrant coffee from an old china cup—it was then about mid-day— and looking at a collection of wallflowers in the balcony.
"He was not in the least disconcerted by our appearance, but rose and received us in his usual airy manner.
" 'Here I am, you see!’ he said, when we were seated; not without some difficulty, the greater part of the chairs being broken. 'Here 1 am! This is my frugal breakfast. Some men want legs of beef and mutton for breakfast; I don't. Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret; I am content. I don’t want them for themselves, but they remind me of the sun. There’s nothing solar about legs of beef and mutton. Mere animal satisfaction!’ 'This is our friend’s consulting room (or would be, if he ever prescribed), his sanctum, his studio,’ said my guardian to us. [The prescribing is a parody of the doctor theme in Dr. Woodcourt.]
" ’Yes,’ said Mr. Skimpole, turning his bright face about, ’this is the bird’s cage. This is where the bird lives and sings. They pluck his feathers now and then, and clip his wings; but he sings, he sings.’
’’He handed us the grapes, repeating in his radiant way, He sings! Not an ambitious note, but still he sings.’ . . .
This is a day,’ said Mr. Skimpole, gaily taking a little claret in a tumbler, ’that will ever be remembered here. We shall call it Saint Clare and Saint Summerson day. You must see my daughters. I have a blue-eyed daughter who is my Beauty daughter [Arethusa], 1 have a Sentiment daughter [Laura], and 1 have a Comedy daughter [Kitty]. You must see them all. They’ll be enchanted.’ ’’
Something rather significant is happening here from the thematic point of view. Just as in a musical fugue one theme can be imitated in parody of another, we have here a parody of the caged-bird theme in connection with Miss Flite, the cra2y little woman. Skimpole is not really caged. He is a painted bird with a clockwork arrangement for mechanical song. His cage is an imitation, just as his childishness is an imitation. There is also a thematic parody in the names he gives to his daughters, compared to the names of the birds in Miss Flite’s theme. Skimpole the child is really Skimpole the fraud, and in this extremely artistic way Dickens reveals Skimpole’s real nature. If you have completely understood what I have been driving at, then we have made a very definite step towards understanding the mystery of literary art, for it should be clear that my course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures. But remember that what I can manage to discuss is by no means exhaustive. There are many things—themes and facets of themes—that you should find by you rselves. A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.
Towards the end of the book Esther is concerned that Skimpole is draining Richard dry and calls on him to ask him to break off his connection, which he blithely agrees to do when he learns that Richard has no money left. In the course of the conversation it is disclosed that it was he who had assisted in removing Jo after he had been put to bed at Jarndyce’s orders, a disappearance that had remained a complete mystery. He defends himself in characteristic fashion: "Observe the case, my dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy received into the house and put to bed, in a state that I strongly object to. The boy being in bed, a man arrives—like the house thatjack built. Here is the man whodemands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is a bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that I strongly object to. Here is the Skimpole who accepts the bank-note produced by the man who demands the boy who is received into the house and put to bed in a state that 1 strongly object to. Those are the facts. Very well. Should the Skimpole have refused the note? Why should the Skimpole have refused the note? Skimpole protests to Bucket; ‘what’s this for? I don’t understand it, it is of no use to me, take it away.’ Bucket still entreats Skimpole to accept it. Are there reasons why Skimpole, not being warped by prejudices, should accept it? Yes. Skimpole perceives them. What are they?”
The reasons boil down to the fact that as a police officer, charged with the execution of justice, Bucket has a strong faith in money which Skimpole would shake by rejecting the offered bank note with the result that Bucket would be of no further use as a detective. Moreover, if it is blameable in Skimpole to accept, it was more blameable in Bucket to offer the money: "Now, Skimpole wishes to think well of Bucket; Skimpole deems it essential, in its little place, to the general cohesion of things, that he should think well of Bucket. The State expressly asks him to trust to Bucket. And he does. And that’s all he does!”
Skimpole, at the last, is neatly summed up by Esther: "A coolness arose between him and my guardian, based principally on the foregoing grounds, and on his having heartlessly disregarded my guardian’s entreaties (as we afterwards learned from Ada) in reference to Richard. His being heavily in my guardian’s debt, had nothing to do with their separation. He died some five years afterwards, and left a diary behind him, with letters and other materials towards his Life; which was published, and which showed him to have been the victim of a combination on the part of mankind against an amiable child. It was considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it myself than the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the book. It was this. 'Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is the Incarnation of Selfishness.’ ” Actually Jarndyce is one of the best and kindest human beings ever described in a novel.
So to sum up. In the counterpoint arrangement of our book, Mr. Skimpole is shown first as a gay, lighthearted, childish person, a delightful infant, a candid and innocent child. Good John Jarndyce, being in some ways the real child of the book, Is completely taken in and taken up with the pseudochild Skimpole. Dickens has Esther describe Skimpole so as to bring out his shallow but pleasing wit and his cheap but amusing charm; and soon, through this charm, we begin to perceive the essential cruelty and coarseness and utter dishonesty of the man. As a parody of a child, he serves, moreover, the purpose of bringing out in beautiful relief the real children in the book who are little helpers, who assume the responsibilities of grown-up people, children who are pathetic imitations of guardians and providers. Of the utmost importance for the inner development of the story is the meeting between Skimpole and Jo; Skimpole betrays Jo, the false child betraying the real one. There is within the Skimpole theme a parody of the caged-bird theme. Richard, the unfortunate suitor, is really the caged bird. Skimpole who preys upon him is at best a painted fowl, at worst a vulture. Finally, though almost entirely undeveloped, there is the contrast between the real doctor, Woodcourt, who uses his knowledge to help mankind, and Skimpole, who refuses to practice medicine and, on the only occasion in which he is consulted, correctly diagnoses Jo’s fever as dangerous but recommends that he be thrown out of the house, undoubtedly to die.
The most touching pages in the book are devoted to the child theme. You will note the stoic account of Esther’s childhood, her godmother (actually aunt) Barbary continually impressing on her consciousness a sense of guilt. We have the neglected children of the philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby, the orphaned Neckett children as little helpers, the "dirty little limp girls in gauze dresses’’ (and the little boy who dances alone in the kitchen) who take dancing lessons at the Turveydrop school to learn the trade. With the coldly philanthropic Mrs. Pardiggle we visit the family of a brickmaker and look at a dead baby: But among all these poor children, dead or alive or half-alive, among these "poor dull children in pain” the most unfortunate little creature is the boy Jo, who is so closely and blindly mixed up with the mystery theme.
At the coroner’s inquest on the dead lodger Nemo it is recalled that he had been seen talking with the boy who swept the crossing down the lane, and the boy is brought in. "O! Here’s the boy, gentlemen!
"Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy!—But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces.
“Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can’t exactly say what’ll be done to him arter he’s dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it’ll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right—and so he’ll tell the truth."
After the inquest, at which Jo is not allowed to testify, he is privately questioned by Mr. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor. Jo knows only: "That one cold winter night, when he, the boy, was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, the man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having questioned him and found that he had not a friend in the world, said, 'Neither have I. Not one!’ and gave him the price of a supper and a night’s lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since; and asked him whether he slept sound at night, and how he bore cold and hunger, and whether he ever wished to die; and similar strange questions. . . .
'He wos wery good to me,’ says the boy, wiping his eyes with his wretched sleeve. 'Wen I see him a-layin’ so stritched out just now, I wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos wery good to me, he wos!’ ’’ Dickens then writes in his Carlylean mode, with tolling repetitions. The lodger’s body, "the body of our dear brother here departed [is borne off] to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed. . . . Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial.
"With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life—here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together.”
And here is the blurred silhouette of Jo in the fog and the night. "With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court, to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands, and looks in between the bars; stands looking in for a little while.
"It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step, and makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly; looks in again, a little while; and so departs.
"Jo, is it thou? [Again the Carlylean eloquence] Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who can’t exactly say’ what will be done to him in greater hands than men’s, thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this:
" 'He wos wery good to me, he wos!’ ”
; Constantly "moved on” by the police,Jo sets out from London and, in the : first stages of smallpox, is sheltered by Esther and Charley, to whom he transmits the disease, and then, mysteriously disappearing, is not heard from until he reappears in London, worn down by his illness and privations, and lies dying in the shooting gallery that belongs to Mr. George. His heart is compared to a heavy cart. "For the cart so hard to draw, is near its journey’s end, and drags over stony ground. All round the clock it labours up the broken steps, shattered and worn. Not many times
can the sun rise, and behold it still upon its weary road____There, too, is Mr. Jarndyce many a time, and Allan Woodcourt almost always; both thinking much, how strangely Fate [with the genial help of Charles Dickens] has entangled this rough outcast in the web of very different lives... .Jo is in a sleep or in a stupor to-day, and Allan Woodcourt, newly arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a while, he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards him . .. and touches his chest and heart. The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more. . . .
” 'Well, Jo! What is the matter? Don’t be frightened.’
" 'I thought,’ says Jo, who has started, and is looking round, I thought I wos in Tom-all-Alone’s [the frightful slum where he lived] agin. Ain’t there nobody but you, Mr. Woodcot?’ [Mark the symbolism in the special twist Jo gives the doctor's name, turned into Woodcot, that is, a little cottage of wood, a coffin.]
" 'Nobody.’
” ’And I ain’t took back to Tom-all-Alone’s. Am I, sir?’
" ’No.’ Jo closes his eyes, muttering, 'I’m wery thankful.’
"After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very near his ear, and says to him in a low, distinct voice:
" ’Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?’
" 'Never knowd nothink, sir.’
" ‘Not so much as one short prayer?’
“ 'No, sir. Nothink at all.... I never knowd what it wos all about.'... After a short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, a strong effort to get out of bed.
" 'Stay, Jo! What now?’
" 'It’s time for me to gp to that there berryin-ground, sir,* he returns, with a wild look.
" 'Lie down, and tell me. What burying-ground, Jo?'
" 'Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It’s time fur me to go down to that there berryin-ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. . . .’
" 'Bye-and-bye, Jo. By-and-bye.’ , . .
" 'Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They’ll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it’s aUus locked. And there’s a step there, as I used fur to clean with my broom.—It's turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?'
” 'It is coming fast, Jo.’
"Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.
“ ‘Jo, my poor fellow!'
" 'I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand.’
" 'Jo, can you say what I say?’
" 'I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, fur I know it’s good.’
" 'Our Father.'
" 'Our Fatherl—yes, that’s wery good, sir.’ [Father, a word he had never used.]
" Which art in Heaven.’
" 'Art in Heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?’
" 'It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy Name!’
" 'Hallowed be—thy--’ ”
And now listen to the booming bell of Carlyle’s apostrophic style: "The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
"Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”
This is a lesson in style, not in participative emotion.
The crime-mystery theme provides the main action of the novel and is its backbone, its binding force. Structurally, it is the most important of the novel’s themes of mystery and misery, Chanary and chance.
One of the branches of the Jarndyce family consisted of two sisters. One of these sisters, the elder, had been engaged to Boythorn, John Jarndyce’s eccentric friend. The other sister had an affair with a Captain Hawdon and bore an illegitimate daughter. The elder sister deceived the young mother into believing that her child had died at birth. Then, breaking all connection with her fiance, Boythorn, her family and her friends, this elder sister retired with the little girl to a small town and reared the child in austerity and harshness that were deserved, in her opinion, by the sinful way it had taken to arrive into this world. The young mother, later, married Sir Leicester Dedlock. After many years of comfortable though deadish wedlock, she, now Lady Dedlock, is being shown some new insignificant affidavits connected with the Jarndyce case by the family lawyer Tulkinghorn and is singularly affected by the handwriting in which one of the documents has been copied. She tries to ascribe her own questions about it to mere curiosity, but almost the next moment she faints. This is enough for Mr. Tulkinghorn to start an investigation of his own. He tracks down the scribe, a man going by the name of Nemo (Latin for "no one"), only to find him dead in a squalid room atKrook's of an overdose of opium, which was much easier to get then than it is now. Not a scrap of paper is found in the room, but a package of most important letters has already been whisked away by Krook even before he brought Tulkinghorn into the lodger’s room. At the inquest held over the body of the dead Nemo it is found that no one knows anything about him. The only witness with whom Nemo used to exchange some personal, friendly words, the little streetsweeper Jo, is rejected by the authorities. But Mr. Tulkinghorn questions him in private.
From newspaper reports Lady Dedlock learns about Jo and comes to see him in disguise, dressed in her French maid’s clothes. She gives him money when he shows her localities, etc., associated with Nemo, for she knows from his handwriting that he was Captain Hawdon, and, especially, Jo takes her to see the pestilent graveyard with the iron gate where Nemo has been buried. Jo’s story spreads and reaches Tulkinghorn, who confronts Jo with Hortense, the French maid, who wears the clothes that Lady Dedlock had borrowed on her secret visit to Jo. Jo recognizes the clothes but is emphatically certain that the voice, the hand, and the rings on the hand of the woman now before him are not those belonging to the other. Thus Tulkinghorn’s idea that Jo's mysterious visitor was Lady Dedlock is confirmed. Tulkinghorn then continues his investigation, but he also sees to it that Jo is made "to move on” by the police, since he does not want others to learn too much from him. (This is why Jo happens to be in Hertfordshire when he is taken ill and why Bucket, with Skimpole’s help, removes him from Jarndyce's house.) Tulkinghorn gradually discovers the identity of Nemo, Captain Hawdon. Getting the trooper George to deliver to him a letter in the Captain’s hand is part of this process. When Tulkinghorn is ready with his story, he tells it in front of Lady Dedlock as if referring to other persons. Seeing herself discovered and at Tulkinghorn's mercy, Lady Dedlock comes to his room in her country mansion, Chesney Wold, to discuss his intentions. She is ready to leave her house, her husband, and to disappear. Tulkinghorn decides that she is to stay and continue in her role as a fashionable woman in society and Sir Leicester’s wife until he makes his decision and chooses his time. When at a later date he tells her that he is about to disclose her past to her husband, she goes out at night for a long walk, and that very night Tulkinghorn is murdered in his rooms. Did she murder him?
The detective Bucket is hired by Sir Leicester to track down his solicitor’s unknown murderer. Bucket first suspects George, the trooper, who has been heard threatening Tulkinghorn, and has George arrested. Later many things seem to point to Lady Dedlock, but all these are false clues. The real murderer is Hortense, the French maid, who has willingly helped Mr. Tulkinghorn to ferret out the secret of her former mistress, Lady Dedlock, but who turns against Tulkinghorn when the latter fails to recompense her sufficiently for her services and, moreover, offends her when he threatens her with jail and practically throws her out of his rooms.
But a Mr. Guppy, a law clerk, had also followed his own line of investigation. For personal reasons (he was in love with Esther), he tried to get from Krook some letters he suspected had fallen into the old man’s hands after Captain Hawdon’s death. He nearly succeeded, when Krook unexpectedly and weirdly dies. Thus, the letters, and with them the secret of the Captain s love affair with Lady Dedlock and of Esther’s birth, fell in the hands of a pack of blackmailers headed by old Smallweed. Though Tulkinghorn had then bought the letters from them, the Smallweeds after his death try to extort money from Sir Leicester. Detective Bucket, our third pursuer, an experienced man, seeks to settle the matter to the Dedlocks’ advantage but in doing so has to tell Sir Leicester his wife’s secret. Sir Leicester loves his wife too much not to forgive her. But Lady Dedlock, warned by Guppy of the fate of her letters, sees in it the hand of vengeful Fate and leaves her home forever, ignorant of her husband’s reaction to the "secret."
Sir Leicester sends Bucket in hot pursuit. Bucket takes along Esther, whom he knows to be her daughter. In the midst of a freezing ice storm, together they trace Lady Dedlock to the brickmaker’s cottage in Hertfordshire, not far from Bleak House, to which Lady Dedlock had gone to seek Esther, who unknown to her had been all the time in London. Bucket finds out that two women had left the cottage shortly before his arrival, one bound for the north but the other southward for London. Bucket and Esther follow the northbound one for a long while until the astute Mr. Bucket suddenly decides to go back through the storm and to pick up the other woman’s trail. The northbound woman had worn Lady Dedlock's clothes, the London-bound one was dressed as the poor brickmaker’s wife, but it suddenly dawns on Bucket that the two had exchanged their clothes. He is right, but he and Esther come too late. Lady Dedlock, dressed as a poor woman, has reached London and has gone to Captain Hawdon’s grave. She dies of exhaustion and exposure, clutching the bars of the iron gate, after walking a hundred miles through a dreadful storm, practically without rest.
As one can see from this bare resume, the plot of the mystery theme does not quite live up to the poetry of the book.
Gustave Flaubert’s ideal of a writer of fiction was vividly expressed when he remarked that, like God in His world, so the author in his book should be nowhere and everywhere, invisible and omnipresent. There do exist several major works of fiction where the presence of the author is as unobtrusive as Flaubert wished it to be, although he himself did not attain that ideal in Madame Bovary. But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son absence—"he shines by his absence.” In connection with Bleak House we are concerned with one of those authors who are so to speak not supreme deities, diffuse and aloof, but puttering, amiable, sympathetic demigods, who descend into their books under various disguises or send therein various middlemen, representatives, agents, minions, spies, and stooges.
Roughly speaking, there are three types of such representatives. Let us inspect them.
First, the narrator insofar as he speaks in the first person, the capital / of the story, its moving pillar. The narrator can appear in various forms: he may be the author himself or a first-person protagonist; or the writer may invent an author whom he quotes, as Cervantes does with his Arabic historian; or one of the third-person characters in the book may be a part-time narrator, after which the master’s voice takes over again. The main point is that, whatever the method, there is a certain capital / who tells a certain story.
Second, a type of author's representative, what I call the sifting agent. This sifting agent may or may not be coincident with the narrator. In fact, the most typical sifting agents I know, such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park or Emma Bovary in the scene of the ball, are not first-person narrators but third-person characters. Again, they may or may not be representative of the author’s own ideas; but their main feature is that whatever happens in the book, every event and every image and every landscape and every character is seen through the eyes, is perceived through the senses, of a main character, a he or she who is the sifting agent, who sifts the story through his-her own emotions and notions.
The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago. It denotes the lowest kind of author’s minion: the character or characters who, throughout the book, or at least in certain parts of the book, are so to speak on duty; whose only purpose, whose only reason for being, is that they visit the places which the author wishes the reader to visit ar4 meet the characters whom the author wishes the reader to meet. In such chapters the perry has hardly an identity of his own. He has no will, no soul, no heart, nothing—he is a mere peregrinating perry although of course he can regain his identity in some other part of the book. The perry visits some household only because the author wants to describe the characters in that household. He is very helpful, the perry. Without the perry a story is sometimes difficult to direct and propel; but better kill the story than have a perry drag its thread about like a lame insect dragging a dusty bit of cobweb.
Now in Bleak House Esther is all things: she is a part-time narrator, a kind of baby-sitter replacing the author, as I shall presently explain. She is also, in some chapters at least, a sifting agent, seeing things for herself, in her own way, although the master’s voice is prone to drown hers even when she speaks in the first person; and, thirdly, the author often uses her, alas, as a perry to move to this or that place while this or. that character or event has to be described.
Eight particular structural features are to be noticed in Bleak House.
1. ESTHER'S BOOK
In chapter 3 Esther, brought up by a godmother (Lady Dedlock's sister), for the first time appears as the narrator, and here Dickens commits a little mistake for which he will have to pay dearly. He begins Esther’s story in a kind of would-be girlish style, in bubbling baby talk (the "my dear old doll" is an easy trick), but he will see very soon that it is an impossible medium for telling a robust story and weshall see very soon his own vigorous and colorful style breaking through artificial baby talk, as is represented by: “My dear old doll! I was such a shy little thing that I seldom dared to open my lips, and never dared to open my heart, to anybody else. It almost makes me cry to think what a relief it used to be to me, when I came home from school of a day, to run upstairs to my room, and say, 'O you dear faithful Dolly, I knew you would be expecting me!’ and then to sit down on the floor, leaning on the elbow of her great chair, and tell her all I had noticed since we parted. I had always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, O no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity.” Note that in these first pages of Esther’s story there are practically no figures of speech, no vivid comparisons, etc. Yet certain features of the baby style begin to break down, as in the Dickensian alliteration "the clock ticked, the fire clicked,” when Esther and her godmother are sitting before the fire, which is not in keeping with the schoolgirl style of Esther.
But when her godmother, Miss Barbary (really her aunt), dies and the lawyer Kenge takes matters into his hands, the style of Esther’s narrative reverts to a general Dickensian style. For instance, Kenge petting his glasses: " 'Not of Jarndyce andjarndyce?’ said Mr. Kenge, looking over his glasses at me, and softly turning the case about and about, as if he were petting something.” One can see what is happening. Dickens starts painting the delightful picture of Kenge, smooth round Kenge, Conversation Kenge (as he is nicknamed), and quite forgets it is a naive girl who is supposed to be writing all this. And within a few pages we already find samples of Dickensian imagery creeping into her narrative, rich comparisons and the like. "When [Mrs, Rachael] gave me one cold f parting kiss upon my forehead, like a thaw-drop from the stone porch—it was a very frosty day—I felt so miserable” or "I sat... watching the frosty | trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar; and the fields all smooth and : white with last night’s snow; and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat; f |nd the ice, dark like metal, where the skaters and sliders had brushed the i'Stiow away.” Or Esther's description of Mrs. Jellyby's slovenly attire: "we • could not help noticing that hier dress didn’t nearly meet up the back, and that the open space was railed across with a lattice-work of stay-lace—like | summer-house." The intonation and irony of her description of Peepy Jellyby’s head caught between the bars is thoroughly Dickensian: "I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened, and crying loudly, fixed by the neck between two iron railings, while a milkman and a beadle, with the kindest intentions possible, were endeavouring to drag him back by the legs, under a general impression that his skull was compressible by those means. As I found (after pacifying him), that he was a little boy, with a naturally large head, I thought that, perhaps, where his head could go, his body could follow, and mentioned that the best mode of extrication might be to push him forward. This was so favourably received by the milkman and beadle, that he would immediately have been pushed into the area, if I had not held his pinafore, while Richard and Mr. Guppy ran down through the kitchen, to catch him when he should be released.”
Dickensian incantatory eloquence is prominent in such passages as Esther’s description of her meeting with Lady Dedlock, her mother: "I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now—for my agitation and -distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother’s voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me; which in my childhood I had never learned to love and recognise, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired by; made an enduring impression on my memory—I say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and support to her. But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one.could help her. Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone."
By midstream, Dickens, writing through Esther, can take up the narration in a more fluent, supple, and conventional style than he did under his own name. This and the absence of vividly listed descriptive details in the beginnings of chapters are the only true points of difference between their respective styles. Esther and the author more or less grow accustomed to their different points of view as reflected in their styles: Dickens with all kinds of musical, humorous, metaphorical, oratorical, booming effects and breaks in style on the one hand; and Esther, on the other, starting chapters with flowing conservative phrases. But in the description at Westminster Hall of the close of the Jarndyce suit, already quoted, when the whole estate is found to have been absorbed by the costs, Dickens at last merges almost completely with Esther. Stylistically, the whole book is a gradual sliding into the matrimonial state between the two. And when they insert word pictures or render conversations, there is no difference between them.
Seven years after the event, as we learn in chapter 64, Esther writes her book, which amounts to thirty-three of the chapters, or a half of the whole novel, composed of sixty-seven chapters. A wonderful memory! I must say that despite the superb planning of the novel, the main mistake was to let Esther tell part of the story. I would not have let the girl near!
2. ESTHER’S LOOKS
Esther had so strong a resemblance to her mother that Mr. Guppy is much struck by a familiarity that he cannot at first place, when on a country jaunt he tours Chesney Wold, in Lincolnshire, and sees Lady Dedlock’s portrait. Mr. George is also disturbed about her looks, without realizing that he sees a resemblance to his dead friend Captain Hawdon, who was Esthers father. And Jo, when he is "moved on” and trudges through the storm to be rescued at Bleak House, can scarcely be persuaded in his fear that Esther is not the unknown lady to whom he showed Nemo’s house and the graveyard. But a tragedy strikes her. In retrospect, as she writes chapter 31, Esther mentions that she had a foreboding the dayjo fell sick, an omen that is all too well justified, for Charley catches smallpox from Jo and when Esther nurses her back to health (her looks spared), it is passed on to Esther, who is not so fortunate, for she at length recovers with her face disfigured by ugly scars that completely destroy her looks. As she recovers, she realizes that all mirrors have been removed from her room, and she knows the reason why. But when she goes to Mr. Boythorn’s country place in Lincolnshire, next to Chesney Wold, she finally looks at herself. "For I had not yet looked in the glass, and had never asked to have my own restored to me. I knew this to be a weakness which must be overcome; but I had always said to myself that I would begin afresh, when I got to where I now was. Therefore I had wanted to be alone, and therefore I said, now alone, in my own room, 'Esther, if you are to be happy, if you are to have any right to pray to be true-hearted, you must keep your word, my dear.’ I was quite resolved to keep it; burl sat down for a little while first, to reflect upon all my blessings. And then ,1 said my prayers, and thought a little more.
"My hair had not been cut off, though it had been in danger more than once. It was long and thick: I let it down, and shook it out, and went up to the glass upon the dressing-table. There was a little muslin curtain drawn across it. I drew it back: and stood for a moment looking through such a veil of my own hair, that I could see nothing else. Then I put my hair aside, and looked at the reflection in the mirror; encouraged by seeing how placidly it looked at me. I was very much changed—O very, very much. At first, my face was so strange to me, that I think I should have put my hands before it and started back, but for the encouragement I have mentioned. Very soon it became more familiar, and then I knew the extent of the alteration in it better than 1 had done at first. It was not like what I had expected; but I had expected nothing definite, and 1 dare say anything definite would have surprised me.
"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.”
She confesses to herself that she could have loved Allan Woodcourt and been devoted to him, but that it must now be over. Worrying about some flowers he had given her and which she had dried, "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.” This prepares the reader for her accepting Jfarndyce’s proposal at a later time. She had firmly given up all dreams of Woodcourt.
Dickens has handled the problem shrewdly in this scene, for a certain Vagueness must be ldft veiling her altered features so that the reader’s imagination may not be embarrassed when at the end of the book she becomes Woodcourt’s bride, and when in the very last pages a doubt, charmingly phrased, is cast on the question whether her good looks have ^one after all. So it is that though Esther sees her face in the mirror, the reader does not, nor are details provided at any later time. When at the inevitable reunion of mother and daughter Lady Dedlock catches her to her breast, kisses her, weeps, etc., the resemblance theme culminates in the famous reflection Esther makes, "I felt ... a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never couJd disgrace her by any trace of likeness; so that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us.” All this is very unreal (within the limits of the novel), and one wonders was it really necessary to disfigure the poor girl for this rather abstract purpose; indeed, can smallpox kill a family resemblance? But the closest a reader can come to any view of the changed Esther is when Ada holds to her lovely cheek Esther’s "scarred [pockmarked] face.”
It may seem that the author becomes a little fed up with his invention of her changed looks, since Esther soon says, for him, that she will not mention them anymore. Thus when she meets her friends again her appearance is not mentioned except for a few references to its effect on other people, ranging from the astonishment of a village child at the change to Richard’s thoughtful, "Always the same dear girl!” when she raises her veil, which at first she wears in public. Later on the theme plays a structural part in connection with Mr. Guppy’s renouncing his love after seeing her, so she may seem after all to be strikingly ugly. But perhaps her looks will improve? Perhaps the scars will vanish? We wonder and wonder. Still later when she and Ada visit Richard in the scene that leads to Ada’s revelation of her secret marriage, Richard says of Esther that her compassionate face is so like the face of old days, and when she smiles and shakes her head, and he repeats, "--So exactly like the face of old days,” we wonder whether the beauty of her soul is not concealing her scars. It is here, I think, that her looks in one way or another, begin to improve—at least in the reader’s mind. Towards the end of this scene she remarks on her "plain old face”; plain, after all, is not disfigured. Moreover, I still think that at the very end of the novel, after seven years have elapsed and she is twenty-eight, the scars have quietly vanished. Esther is bustling about preparing for a visit from Ada, her little son Richard, and Mr. Jarndyce, and then she sits quietly on the porch. When Allan returns and asks what she is doing there, she replies that she has been thinking: " '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?’
"I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling [Ada] is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing--”
3. THE COINCIDENTAL ALLAN WOODCOURT
In chapter 11 "a dark young man,” the surgeon, appears, for the first time, at the deathbed of Nemo (Captain Hawdon, Esther’s father). Two chapters later there is a very tender and serious scene in which Richard and Ada have fallen in love with each other. And at the same point—so to link things up nicely—the dark young surgeon Woodcourt appears at the chapter's end as a guest at a dinner party, and Esther, when asked if she had not thought him "sensible and agreeable,” answers yes, rather wistfully perhaps. Later, just when a hint is given that Jarndyce, gray-haired Jarndyce, is in love with Esther but is silent about it, at this point Woodcourt reappears before going to China. He will be away a long, long time. He leaves some flowers for Esther. Later, Miss Flite shows Esther a newspaper cutting of Woodcourt’s heroism during a shipwreck. After Esther’s face has been disfigured by smallpox, she renounces her love for Woodcourt. When Esther and Charley travel to the seaport Deal to convey Ada's offer to Richard of her little inheritance, Esther runs into Woodcourt, who has come back from India. The meeting is preceded by a delightful description of the sea, a piece of artistic imagery which, I think, makes one condone the terrific coincidence. Says Esther of the nondescript face: "He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak," and, at the end of the chapter, "in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.”—A nice lyrical strain here, a little remindful of Fanny Price.
By a second remarkable coincidence, Woodcourt comes upon the brickmaker’s wife sleeping in Tom-all-Alone’s, and by yet another coincidence he meets Ja/here, in the presence of this woman who has also been wondering about Jo's whereabouts. Woodcourt takes the sick Jo to George’s shooting gallery. There the wonderful scene of Jo’s death again makes the reader condone therather artificial means of bringing us to Jo’s bedside through Woodcourt, the perry. In chapter 51 Woodcourt visits the lawyer Vholes, and then Richard. There is a curious trick here: it is Esther who is writing the chapter but she is not present at the interview between Woodcourt and Vholes or Woodcourt and Richard, both of which are reported in detail. The question is, how does she know what happened in both places? The bright reader must inevitably conclude that she got all these details from Woodcourt after she became his wife: she could not have known all these past events so circumstantially if Woodcourt had not been on terms of sufficient intimacy to tell her about them. In other words, the good reader should suspect that she will marry Woodcourt after all and hear these details from him.
4. JOHN JARNDYCE S CURIOUS COURTSHIP
When Esther is in the coach being taken to London after Miss Barbary's death, an anonymous gentleman tries to cheer her up. He seems to know about Mrs. Rachael, the nurse hired by Miss Barbary, who had seen Esther off with so little affection, and to disapprove of her. When he offers Esther a piece of thickly sugared plum cake and a pie made out of the livers of fat geese, and she declines, saying they are too rich for her, he mutters, "Floored again!” and throws them out the window as lightly as he will later cast away his own happiness. Afterwards we learn this has been the good, kindhearted, and fairly wealthy John Jarndyce, who serves as a magnet for all kinds of people—miserable children and rogues, and shams, and fools, falsely philanthropic women, and crazy people. If Don Quixote had come to Dickensian London, I suggest that his kind and noble heart might have attracted people in the same way.
As early as chapter 17 we get the first hint that Jarndyce, gray-haired Jarndyce, is in love with twenty-one-year-old Esther but is silent about it. The Don Quixote theme is mentioned by name when Lady Dedlock meets the party, who are visiting nearby Mr. Boythorn, and the young people are presented to her. Gracefully, when the lovely Ada is introduced," 'You will lose the disinterested part of your Don Quixote character,’ said Lady Dedlock to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder again, 'if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this.’ ” She is referring to the fact that at Jarndyce’s request fhe Lord Chancellor has appointed him to be the guardian of Richard and Ada even though the main contention of the suit was over the respective shares of the estate between them. Thus he was being quixotic, Lady Dedlock implies in a compliment, to harbor and to support two young people who were legally his antagonists. His guardianship of Esther was a personal decision he made after a letter from Miss Barbary, Lady Dedlock’s sister and Esther’s real aunt.
John Jarndyce, some time after Esther’s illness, comes to the decision of writing her a letter of proposal. But, and here comes the point, it seems to be suggested that he, a man at least thirty years Esther’s senior, suggests marriage to protect her from the cruel world and is not going to change towards her, will remain her friend and will not become her lover. Not only is this attitude quixotic if what I suspect is true, but also the whole plan of preparing her to receive a letter, the contents of which she is able to guess, only upon her sending Charley for it after a week’s pondering: " 'You have wrought changes in me, little woman, since the winter day in the stagecoach. First and last you have done me a world of good, since that time.’
" Ah, Guardian, what have you done for me since that time!’
’’ ’But,’ said he, 'that is not to be remembered now.’
" It can never be forgotten.’
’’ ’Yes, Esther,’ said he, with a gentle seriousness, 'it is to be forgotten now; to be forgotten for a while. You are only to remember now, that nothing can change me as you know me. Can you feel assured of that, my dear?’
" 'I can, and I do,’ I said.
" 'That's much,’ he answered. 'That’s everything. But I must not take that, at a word. I will not write this something in my thoughts, until you have quite resolved within yourself that nothing can change me as you know me. If you doubt that in the least degree, I will never write it. If you are sure of that, on good consideration, send Charley to me this night week—"for the letter.” But if you are not quite certain, never send. Mind, I trust to your truth, in this thing as in everything. If you are not quite certain on that one point, never send.’
" 'Guardian,' said I; I am already certain. I can no more be changed in that conviction, than you can be changed towards me. I shall send Charley for the letter.’
"He shook my hand and said no more.”
For an elderly man, deeply in love with a young woman, a proposal on such terms is of course a great act of renunciation, self-control, and tragic temptation. Esther, on the other hand, accepts it under the innocent impression, "That his generosity rose above my disfigurement, and my inheritance of shame,” a disfigurement that Dickens is going to play down thoroughly in the last chapters. Actually, of course, and this does not seem to have entered the mind of any of the three parties concerned—Esther Summerson, John Jarndyce, and Charles Dickens—the marriage would not be quite as fair towards Esther as it seems, since owing to its white-marriage implications it would deprive Esther of her normal motherhood while, on the other hand, making it unlawful and immoral for her to love any other man. Just possibly there is an echo of thecaged-bird theme when Esther, weeping although happy and thankful, addresses herself in the glass, "When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are to be as cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to be cheerful; so let us begin for once and for all"
The interplay between Jarndyce and Woodcourt starts when Caddy Turveydrop is sick: " 'Well, you know/ returned my guardian quickly, 'there’s Woodcourt/ ” I like the skimming way he does it: some kind of vague intuition on his part? At this point Woodcourt is planning to go to America, where in French and British books rejected lovers so often go. Some ten chapters later we learn that Mrs. Woodcourt, our young doctor’s mother who early on had suspected her son’s attachment to Esther and had tried to break it up, has changed for the better, is less grotesque, and talks less about her pedigree. Dickens is preparing an acceptable mother-in-law for his feminine readers. Mark the nobility of Jarndyce, who suggests that if Mrs. Woodcourt comes to stay with Esther, Woodcourt can visit them both. We also hear that Woodcourt is not going to America, after all, but will be a country doctor in England working among the poor.
Esther then learns from Woodcourt that he loves her, that her "scarred face” is all unchanged to him. Too late! She is engaged to Jarndyce and supposes that the marriage has not yet taken place only because she is in mourning for her mother. But Dickens and Jarndyce have a delightful trick up their Siamese sleeve. The whole scene is rather poor but may please sentimental readers. It is not quite clear to the reader whether Woodcourt at this point knows of Esther s engagement, for if he does he hardly ought to have cut in, no matter how elegantly he does it. However, Dickens and Esther (as an after-the-event narrator) are cheating—they know all along that Jarndyce will stage a noble fade out. So Esther and Dickens are now going to have a little mild fun at the expense of the reader. She tells Jarndyce that she is ready to become the "mistress of Bleak House.” "Next month,” says Jarndyce. Now Esther and Dickens are ready to spring their little surprise on the little reader. Jarndyce goes to Yorkshire to assist Woodcourt in finding a house there for himself. Then he has Esther come to inspect his find. The bomb explodes. The name of the house is again Bleak House, and she will be its mistress since noble Jarndyce is abandoning Esther to Woodcourt. This has been efficiently prepared for, and there is even a belated tribute to Mrs. Woodcourt who knew everything and now approves the match. Finally, we learn that when Woodcourt was opening his heart to Esther he was doing so with Jarndyce's consent. After Richard’s death there is just perhaps the slightest hint that possibly John Jarndyce may still find a young wife in Ada, Richard’s widow. But at the least, he is the symbolic guardian of all the unfortunate people in the novel.
5. IMPERSONATIONS AND DISGUISES
In order to discover whether it was Lady Dedlock who asked Jo about Nemo, Tulkinghorn arranges it so that Jo is shown Hortense, her discharged French maid, veiled, and he recognizes the clothes. But it is not same jewelled hand nor is it the same voice. Later, Dickens will have some trouble in plausibly arranging Tulkinghorn’s murder by Hortense, but the connection, anyway, is established at this point. Now the sleuths know it was Lady Dedlock who tried to find out things about Nemo from Jo. Another masquerade occurs when Miss Flite, visiting Esther at Bleak House when she is recovering from smallpox, informs her that a veiled lady (Lady Dedlock) has inquired about Esther’s health at the brickmaker’s cottage. (We know that Lady Dedlock now knows that Esther is her daughter—knowledge breeds tenderness.) The veiled lady has taken, as a little keepsake, the handkerchief thar Esther had left there when she had covered the dead baby with it, a symbolic action. This is not the first time that Dickens uses Miss Flite in order to kill two birds with one rock: first, to amuse the reader, and second, as a source of information, a lucidity which is not in keeping with her character.
Detective Bucket has several disguises, not least of which is his playing the fool at the Bagnets (his disguise being his extreme friendliness) while all the time keeping a wary eye on George and then taking him into custody after the two leave. Bucket, being an expert in disguise himself, is capable penetrating the disguises of others. When Bucket and Esther reach the jtfead Lady Dedlock at the gate to the burying-ground, in his best Sherlock [Holmes manner he describes how he came to suspect that Lady Dedlock md exchanged clothes with Jenny, the brickmaker’s wife, and returned to Epndon. Esther does not understand until she lifts "the heavy head": "And fc was my mother, cold and dead.” Melodramatic, but effectively staged.
It might seem, in view of the growing movement of the fog theme in the preceding chapters, that Bleak House, John Jarndyce’s house, would be the height of dismal bleakness. But no—in a structural move which is extremely artistic, we swerve into the sunshine, and the fog is left behind for a while. Bleak House is a beautiful, sunny house. The good reader will recall a clue to this effect that-had earlier been given at the Chancery: " 'The Jarndyce in question,’ said the Lord Chancellor, still turning over leaves,'is Jarndyce of Bleak House.’
" ’Jarndyce of Bleak House, my lord,’ said Mr. Kenge.
A dreary name,’ said the Lord Chancellor.
" ’But not a dreary place at present, my lord,’ said Mr. Kenge.”
While the wards are waiting in London before being taken to Bleak House, Richard tells Ada that he vaguely recalls Jarndyce as "a bluff, rosy fellow.” But still, the sunshine and the cheerfulness of the house come as a splendid surprise.
The clues to the person who killed Tulkinghorn are mixed in a masterly way. Very nicely, Dickens makes Mr. George casually remark that a Frenchwoman comes to his shooting gallery. (Hortense will need these shooting lessons, but most readers will overlook the connection.) And what about Lady Dedlock? ”1 would he were!” thinks Lady Dedlock after her cousin Volumnia has gushed that Tulkinghorn has neglected her so that "I had almost made up my mind that he was dead.” This is what Lady Dedlock is made to say to herself to prepare suspense and suspicion when Tulkinghorn is murdered. It may deceive the reader into thinking that Lady Dedlock will kill him, but the reader of detective stories loves to be deceived. After Tulkinghorn’s interview with Lady Dedlock, he goes to sleep while she paces her room, distraught, for hours. There is a hint that he may soon die ("And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the digger and the spade were both commissioned, and would soon be digging”), and his death should now be firmly linked up in the deceived reader’s mind with Lady Dedlock; while Hortense, the real murderess, has not been heard of for some time.
Hortense now visits Tulkinghorn and aits her grievances. She has not been rewarded enough for her impersonation of Lady Dedlock in front of Jo; she hates Lady Dedlock; she wants employment in a similar position. This is a little weak, and Dickens’s attempts to make her speak English like a Frenchwoman are ridiculous. She is a she-tiger, nevertheless, even though her reactions to Tulkinghorn’s threats to have her locked up in jail if she continues to pester him are unknown at that time.
After warning Lady Dedlock that her release of the servant Rosa has violated their agreement to preserve the status quo and that he must now reveal her secret to Sir Leicester, Tulkinghorn goes home—to his death as Dickens hints. Lady Dedlock leaves her house for a stroll in the moonlight, as if following him. The reader may chink: Aha! This is too pat. The author is deceiving me; the real murderer is someone else. Perhaps Mr. George? Although a good man he has a violent temper. Moreover, at a rather tedious Bagnet family birthday party, their friend Mr. George arrives very white in the face. (Aha, says the reader.) He explains his pallor by the fact that Jo has died, but the reader wonders. Then he is arrested, and Esther, Jarndyce, and the Bagnets visit him in jail. A nice twist occurs here: George describes the woman he met on Tulkinghorn’s stairs about the time Tulkinghorn was murdered. She looked—in figure and in height—like ... Esther. She wore a loose black mantle with a fringe. Now the dull reader will immediately think: George is too good to have done it. It was, of course, Lady Dedlock strikingly resembling her daughter. But the bright reader will retort: we have had already another woman impersonating Lady Dedlock rather efficiently.
One minor mystery is about to be solved. Mrs. Bagnet knows who George's mother is and sets out to fetch her, walking to Chesney Wold. (Two mothers are in the same place—a parallel between Esther’s and George’s situation.)
Tulkinghorn’s funeral is a great chapter, a rising wave after some rather flat chapters that have preceded it. Bucket the detective is in a closed carriage, watching his wife and his lodger (who is his lodger? Hortense!) at Tulkinghorn’s funeral. Bucket is growing in structural size. He is amusing to follow to the end of the mystery theme. Sir Leicester is still a pompous noodle, although a stroke will change him. T.lere is an amusing Sherlock Holmesian talk Bucket has with a tall footman in which it transpires that Lady Dedlock, on the night of the crime, when she left the house for a couple of hours, wore the same cloak that Mr. George had described on the lady he met coming down Tulkinghorn’s stairs just when the crime was ; committed. (Since Bucket knows that Hortense and not Lady Dedlock killed Tulkinghorn, this scene is a piece of deliberate cheating in relation to die reader.) Whether or not the reader believes at this point that Lady ; Dedlock is the murderess is another question—depending upon the reader. (However, no mystery writer would have anybody point at the real ^murderer by means of the anonymous letters that are received (sent by Hortense, as it turns out) accusing Lady Dedlock of the crime. Bucket’s net finally ensnares Hortense. His wife, who at his orders has been spying on her, finds in her room a printed description of Chesney Wold with a piece missing that matches the paper wadding of the pistol, and the pistol itself is recovered by dragging a pond to which Hortense and Mrs. Bucket had gone on a holiday expedition. There is another piece of deliberate cheating when in the interview with Sir Leicester, after Bucket has got rid of the blackmailing Smallweeds, he declares dramatically, "The party to be apprehended is now in this house ... and I'm about to take her into custody in your presence." The only woman the reader thinks is in the house is Lady Dedlock; but Bucket means Hortense who, unknown to the reader, has come with him and who is awaiting his summons, thinking she is to receive some reward. Lady Dedlock remains unaware of the solution of the crime, and she flees on a route followed by Esther and Bucket until she is found dead back in London, clutching the bars of the gate behind which Captain Hawdon lies buried.
7. SUDDEN RELATIONSHIPS
A curious point that reoccurs throughout the novel—and is a feature of many mystery novels—is that of "sudden relationships.” Thus:
a. Miss Barbary, who brought up Esther, turns out to be Lady Dedlock's sister, and, later on, the woman Boythorn had loved.
b. Esther turns out to be Lady Dedlock’s daughter.
c. Nemo (Captain Hawdon) turns out to be her father.
d. Mr. George turns out to be the son of Mrs. Rouncewell, the Dedlock’s housekeeper. George, also, it develops, was Hawdon’s friend.
e. Mrs. Chadband turns out to be Mrs. Rachael, Esther’s former nurse.
f. Hortense turns out to be Bucket’s mysterious lodger.
g. Krook turns out to be Mrs. Smallweed’s brother.
8. THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE BAD OR NOT SO GOOD CHARACTERS
It is a structural point when Esther asks Guppy to lay aside "advancing my interests, and promoting my fortunes, making discoveries of which I should be the subject. ... I am acquainted with my personal history," she says. I think the author’s intention is to eliminate the Guppy line (half-eliminated already by the loss of the letters) so as not to interfere with the Tulkinghorn theme. He "looked ashamed"—not in keeping with Guppy’s character. Dickens at this point makes him a better man than the rascal he was. It is curious that although his shock and retreat at seeing Esther’s disfigured face show he had no real love*for her (loss of a point), his not wishing to marry an ugly girl even if she proved to be aristocratic and rich is a point in his favor. Nevertheless, it is a weak passage.
When he learns the awful truth from Bucket: “Sir Leicester, who has covered his face with his hands, uttering a single groan, requests him to pause for a moment. By-and-bye he takes his hands away; and so preserves his dignity and outward calmness, though there is no more colour in his face than in his white hair, that Mr. Bucket is a little awed by him.” Here is a turning point for Sir Leicester, where for better or worse in the artistic sense he stops being a dummy and becomes a human being in distress. Actually, he has undergone a stroke in the process. After his shock, Sir Leicester's forgiveness of Lady Dedlock shows him to be a lovable human being who is holding up nobly, and his scene with George Is very moving, as is his waiting for his wife’s return. "His formal array of words” as he speaks of there being no change in his attitude toward her is now “serious and affecting.” He is almost on the point of turning into another John Jarndyce. By now the nobleman is as good as a good commoner!
What do we mean when we speak of the form of a story? One thing is its structure, which means the development of a given story, why this or that line is followed; the choice of characters, the use that the author makes of his characters; their interplay, their various themes, the thematic lines and their intersection; the various moves of the story introduced by the author to produce this or that direct or indirect effect; the preparation of effects and impressions. In a word, we mean the planned pattern of a work of art. This is structure.
Another aspect of form is style, which means how does the structure work; it means the manner of the author, his mannerisms, various special tricks; and if his style is vivid what kind of imagery, of description, does he use, how does he proceed; and if he uses comparisons, how does he employ and vary the rhetorical devices of metaphor and simile and their Combinations. The effe t of style is the key to literature, a magic key to Dickens, Gogol, Fla .bert, Tolstoy, to all great masters.
Form (structure ~nd style) = Subject Matter: the why and the how = the what.
The first thing that we notice about the style of Dickens is his intensely sensuous imagery, his art of vivid sensuous evocation.
1, VIVID EVOCATION, WITH OR WITHOUT
THE USE OF FIGURES OF SPEECH
The bursts of vivid imagery are spaced—they do not occur for stretches— and then there is again an accumulation of fine descriptive details. When Dickens has some information to impart to his reader through conversation or meditation, the imagery is generally not conspicuous. But there are magnificent passages, as for example the apotheosis of the fog theme in the description of the High Court of Chancery: "On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.”
"The little plaintiff, or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.” The two wards are ordered by the Court to reside with their uncle. This is the fully inflated summary or result of the marvelous agglomeration of natural and human fog in this first chapter. Thus the main characters (the two wards and Jarndyce) are introduced, still anonymous and abstract at this point. They seem to rise out of the fog, the author plucks them out before they are submerged again, and the chapter ends.
The first description of Chesney Wold and of its mistress, Lady Dedlock, is a passage of sheer genius: "The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground, for half a mile in breadth, is a stagnant river, with melancholy trees for islands in it, and a surface punctured ail over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s place’ has been extremely dreary. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays, the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in‘the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge, and seeing the light of a fits upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been 'bored to death.’ " This rain at Chesney Wold is the countryside counterpart of the London fog; and the keeper's child is part of the children theme.
We have an admirable image of a sleepy, sunny little town where Mr. Boythorn meets Esther and her companions: "Late in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to alight from the coach—a dull little town, with a church-spire, and a market-place, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade. After the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along the road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as England could produce.”
Esther has a terrifying experience when she is sick with the smallpox: "Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which / was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?”
When Esther sends Charley for Mr. Jarndyce's letter, the description of the house has a functional result; the house acts, as it were: "When the appointed night came, I said to Charley as soon as I was alone, 'Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley, and say you have come from me— "for the letter." ’ Charley went up the stairs, and down the stairs, and along the passages—the zigzag way about the old-fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that night—and so came back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought the letter. Lay it on the table, Charley,* said I. S 3 Charley laid it on the table and went to bed, and I sat looking at it wi ncut taking it up, thinking of many things.”
When Esther Msits the seaport Deal to see Richard, we have a description of the harbor: "Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don’t know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman just come home: and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.”1
Some readers may suppose that such things as these evocations are trifles not worth stopping at; but literature consists of such trifles. Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular revelations, not of schools of thought but of individuals of genius. Literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist. The passage describing the harbor at Deal occurs at a point when Esther travels to the town in order to see Richard, whose attitude towards life, the strain of freakishness in his otherwise noble nature, and the dark destiny that hangs over him, trouble her and make her want to help him. Over her shoulder Dickens shows us the harbor. There are many vessels there, a multitude of boats that appear with a kind of quiet magic as the fog begins to rise. Among them, as mentioned, there is a large Indiaman, that is, a merchant ship just home from India: "when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea....” Let us pause: can we visualize that? Of course we can, and we do so with a greater thrill of recognition because in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sound of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. And then Dickens goes on to indicate the way "these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed"—and I think it is quite impossible to choose and combine any better words than he did here to render the delicate quality of shadow and silver sheen in that delightful sea view. And for those who would think that all magic is just play—pretty play—but something that can be deleted without impairing the story, let me point out that this is the story: the ship from India there, in that unique setting, is bringing, has brought, young Dr. Woodcourt back to Esther, and in fact they will meet in a moment. So that the shadowy silver view, with those tremulous pools of light and that bustle of shimmering boats, acquires in retrospect a flutter of marvelous excitement, a glorious note of welcome, a kind of distant ovation. And this is how Dickens meant his book to be appreciated.
2. ABRUPT LISTING OF DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS
This listing has the intonation of an author’s notebook, of notes jotted down but some of them later expanded. There is also a rudimentary touch of stream of consciousness here, which is the disconnected notation of passing thoughts.
The novel opens thus, in a passage already quoted: "London.
Michaelmas Term lately over— Implacable November weather____Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. ... Fog everywhere.” When Nemo has been found dead: "Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants. . . . Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest, and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices. . .. Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law.” (Carlyle also used this kind of abrupt account.)
"Snagsby appears: greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a bit of bread and butter. Says, 'Bless my soul, sir! Mr. Tulkinghorn!’ ” (This combines an abrupt, efficient style with vivid epithets, again as Carlyle did.)
3. FIGURES OF SPEECH: SIMILES AND METAPHORS
Similes are direct comparisons, using the words like or as. "Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s [the lawyer’s] learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.”
The carriage taking the young people to stay the night at Mrs. Jellyby’s turns up "a narrow street of high houses, like an oblong cistern to hold the fog.”
At Caddy’s wedding, Mrs. Jellyby’s untidy hair looks "like the mane of a dustman’s horse.”
At dawn, the lamplighter "going his rounds, like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire that have aspired to lessen the darkness."
"Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk.”
A metaphor animates one thing to be described by evoking another without the link of a like\ sometimes Dickens combines it with a simile.
The solicitor Tulkinghorn's dress is respectable and in a general way suitable for a retainer. "It expresses, as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks.”
"The [Jellyby] children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress.”
"Solitude, with dusky wings, sits broodihg upon Chesney Wold.”
When Esther, with Mr.Jarndyce, visits the house where the suitor Tom Jarndyce had shot his brains out, she writes, "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. . . .”
Snagsby, having taken over the business of Peffer, puts up a newly painted sign "displacing the time-honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend, Peffer,only. 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.”
4. REPETITION
Dickens enjoys a kind of incantation, a verbal formula repetitively recited with growing emphasis; an oratorical, forensic device. "On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here____On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On spch an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause... ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns . . . mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Weil may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank!” One should notice here the effect of the three booming on such an afternoon s, and the four wailing well may's as well as the frequent concorded repetition of sound that constitutes assonance, "engaged ... stages ... tripping ... slippery”; and the marked alliteration, "warded ... walls of words... door... deterred... drawl... languidly... Lord . . . looks . . . lantern . . . light."
Just before Sir Leicester and his relatives gather at Chesney Wold at the election, the musical, sonorous jo's reverberate: "Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation, and with no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be, without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die.”
5. ORATORICAL QUESTION AND ANSWER
This device is often combined with repetition. "Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellors court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may he, in legal court suits.”
As Bucket awaits Jarndyce to bring Esther to accompany him in search of the fleeing Lady Dedlock, Dickens imagines himself inside Bucket’s mind: "Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able, with an enchanted power, to bring before him the place where she found it, and the night landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he descry her there? On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning ... traversing this deserted blighted spot, there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall, and out at the great door, of the Dedlock mansion."
In the answer Dickens gives here to the questions, he provides the reader with a hint of the exchange of clothes between Lady Dedlock and Jenny that will for some time puzzle Bucket until he guesses the truth.
6. THE CARLYLEAN APOSTROPHIC MANNER
Apostrophes may be directed, as it were, at a stunned audience, or at a sculptural group of great sinners, or towards some force of elemental nature, or to the victim of injustice. As Jo slouches towards the burying ground to visit the grave of Nemo, Dickens apostrophizes: "Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch!” The apostrophe, already quoted, at Jo's death should also be noted, and before that, the apostrophe when Guppy and Weevle rush for help after discovering Krook's extraordinary end.
7. EPITHETS
Dickens nurtures the rich adjective, or verb, or noun, as an epithet, a basic prerequisite in the case of vivid imagery: the plump seed from which the blossoming and branching metaphor grows. In the opening we have people leaning over the parapet of the Thames, peeping down at the river "into a nether sky of fog.” The clerks in Chancery "flesh their wit” on a ridiculous case. Ada describes Mrs. Pardiggle's prominent eyes as "choking eyes.” As Guppy tries to persuade Weevle to remain in his lodgings in Krook’s house, he is "biting his thumb with the appetite of vexation.” As Sir Leicester waits for Lady Dedlock’s return, in the midnight streets no late sounds are heard unless a man "so very nomadically drunk” as to stray there goes along bellowing.
As happens to all great writers who have a keen visual perception of things, a commonplace epithet can sometimes acquire unusual life and freshness because of the background against which it is set. "The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook [who had gone down for a lighted candle and now comes up again] comes slowly up, with his green-eyed cat following at his heels.” All cats have green eyes—but notice how green these eyes are owing to the lighted candle slowly ascending the stairs. It iff often the position of an epithet, and the reflection cast upon it by neighboring words, that give the epithet its vivid charm.
8. EVOCATIVE NAMES
We have Krook, of course, and then there are Blaze and Sparkle, Jewellers; Mr. Blower and Mr. Tangle are lawyers; Boodle and Coodle and Doodle, etc., are politicians. This is a device of old comedy.
9. ALLITERATION AND ASSONANCE
The device has already been remarked in connection with repetition. But we may enjoy Mr. Smallweed to his wife: "You dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling, poll-parrott” as an example of assonance; or the alliteration of the arch of the bridge that has been "sapped and sopped away” in Lincolnshire, where Lady Dedlock lives in a "deadened” world. Jamdyce and Jarndyceis, in a way, an absolute alliteration reduced to the absurd.
10. THE AND-AND-AND DEVICE
This is made a characteristic of Esther’s emotional manner, as when she describes her companionship at Bleak House with Ada and Richard: "I am sure that I, sitting with them, and walking with them, and talking with them, and noticing from day to day how they went on, falling deeper and deeper in love, and saying nothing about it, and each shyly thinking that this love was the greatest of secrets. ...” And in another example, when Esther accepts Jarndyce: "I put my two arms round his neck and kissed him; and he said was this the mistress of Bleak House; and I said yes; and it made no difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said nothing to my precious pet [Ada] about it.”
11. THE HUMOROUS, QUAINT, ALLUSIVE, WHIMSICAL NOTE
"His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable”; or, "The turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class-grievance (probably Christmas)"; or, "the crowing of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be curious to ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation next to nothing about it”; or, "a short, shrewd niece, something too violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose like a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the end.”
12. PLAY ON WORDS
Some examples are "Inquest-Inkwhich” (tied up with fog); or "Hospital-Horsepittle"; or the law-stationer relates his "Joful and wofulexperience"; or " '111 fo manger, you know,' pursues Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable." There is still a long way from here to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, that petrified superpun, but it is the right direction.
13. OBLIQUE DESCRIPTION OF SPEECH |
This is a further development of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen's manner, with a greater number of samples of speech within the description. Mrs. Piper testifies at the inquest on the death of Nemo by indirect report: "Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell. Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptising of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the Plaintive—so Mrs.
Piper insists on calling the deceased—was reported to have sold himself.
Thinks it was the Plaintive’s air in which that report originatinin. See the Plaintive often and considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her husband and herself and family). Has seen the Plaintive wexed and worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself),” etc., "tc.
Oblique rendering of speech is frequently used, in less eccentric characters, to speed up or to concentrate a mood, sometimes accompanied, as here, by lyrical repetition: Esther is persuading the secretly married Ada
to go with her to visit Richard: " 'My dear,' said I, 'you have not had any difference with Richard since I, have been so much away?’
** 'No, Esther.’
" 'Not heard of him, perhaps?’ said I.
" ’Yes, I have heard of him,* said Ada.
"Such tears in her eyes and such love in her face. I could not make my darling out. Should I go to Richard’s by myself? I said. No, Ada thought I had better not go by myself. Would she go with me? Yes, Ada thought she had better go with me. Should we go now? Yes, let us go now. Well, I could not understand my darling, with the tears in her eyes and the love in her face!”
A writer might be a good storyteller or a good moralist, but unless he be an enchanter, an artist, he is not a great writer. Dickens is a good moralist, a good storyteller, and a superb enchanter, but as a storyteller he lags somewhat behind his other virtues. In other words, he is supremely good at picturing his characters and their habitats in any given situation, but there are flaws in his work when he tries to establish various links between these characters in a pattern of action.
What is the joint impression that a great work of art produces upon us? (By us, I mean the good reader.) The Precision of Poetry and the Excitement of Science. And this is the impact of Bleak House at its best. At his best Dickens the enchanter, Dickens the artist, comes to the fore. At his second test, in Bleak House the moralist teacher is much in evidence, often not without art. At its worst, Bleak House reveals the storyteller stumbling now and then, although the general structure still remains excellent.
Despite certain faults in the telling of his story, Dickens remains, nevertheless, a great writer. Control over a considerable constellation of characters and themes, the technique of holding people and events bunched together, or of evoking absent characters through dialogue—in other words, the art of not only creating people but keeping created people alive within the reader’s mind throughout a long novel—this, of course, is the obvious sign of greatness. When Grandfather Smallweed is carried in his chair into George’s shooting gallery in an endeavor to get a sample of Captain Hawdon’s handwriting, the driver of the cab and another person act as bearers." ’This person,’ [the other bearer, he says] we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence----Judy, my child [he goes on, to his daughter], give the person his twopence. It’s agreat deal for what he has done.’
"The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a 'Mission’ for holding horses and calling coaches, receives his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.” This gesture, this one gesture, with its epithet "over-handed”—a trifle—but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.
A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character like the person who tosses the twopence, has the right to live and breed.
On an inserted leaf VN compares, unfavorably to her, Jane Austen's description of the sea at Portsmouth Harbor when Fanny Price is visiting her family: " 'Theday was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and every thing looked so beautiful |and a little repetitious) under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts/ etc. The hues are not rendered; glee is borrowed from minor poetry; the whole thing is conventional and limp." Ed.
