Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“BLEAK HOUSE” by Charles Dickens (first published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853. First published in book form in 1853)   

I feel compelled to write this “Something Old” to complete my comments on what are generally regarded as Charles Dickens’ three most daunting novels, as well as being among his longest. They are Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend (both reviewed on this blog) and Bleak House. In these novels you will find much scathing satire and some incidental humour, but little of the rumbustious action, broad comedy and frank melodrama that continue to make his earlier novels more popular with readers. In short, these three novels are largely serious and heavy affairs. Reviewing Little Dorrit, I called Bleak House Dickens’ second greatest novel after Great Expectations. I hold to this view. But by every rational examination I’m blowed if I know why I do.

So what you are about to read is an exercise in ambiguity.

I will forego giving you a detailed plot summary, as I too often do, and boil the tale down to its essence. 

The Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on uselessly for many years. Three wards-in-Chancery are nurtured and kept by their guardian John Jarndyce.  They are Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Corrupted by his expectations in the suit, Richard Carstone dabbles in medicine, the law and the army, but fails to make a career anywhere. Though he falls in love with, and marries, Ada Clare, he dies a disappointed man, the promise of his youth blighted.  It is to this character we must look if we are to interpret the novel as a solemn satire on the law’s delay and the inefficiency of the legal system. Justice delayed is justice denied etc.

The second, but connected, strand of plot concerns the Tory squire Sir Leicester Dedlock, who is in his 60s, and his younger wife Lady Honoria Dedlock, who is in her 40s. As we long suspect, but find out definitively about halfway through the novel, Esther Summerson is in fact Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate daughter, about whose existence Sir Leicester Dedlock knows nothing. Lady Dedlock is on the point of being blackmailed about this scandal (notably by the lawyer Tulkinghorn, who is found murdered). Fleeing for her husband’s palatial country seat Chesney Wold, she dies at the gates of the pauper graveyard where her lover is buried.

These two threads of narrative (the nurturing and crushed hopes of the wards-in-Chancery and Lady Dedlock’s scandal) are central to the novel’s plot, everything else being what I would call “detachable” – strands of plot that could almost exist on their own.

I have some theoretical objections to much of this.

There are, of course, the frequent coincidences, contrived to bring characters together – John Jarndyce is a good friend of Lawrence Boythorn whose property just happens to abut the Dedlocks’ property etc.etc. There is the plot device of many people noting how like Lady Dedlock young Esther is, but few of them making the obvious connection. My own view is that, unless mother and daughter really looked so alike that the connection was unmistakable, nobody would have noticed a likeness. Of course there are Victorian evasions. Has Sir Leicester Dedlock never had sexual intercourse with his wife? Has he not noticed that she is not a virgin and has stretch marks from her pregnancy? (These are 21st century speculations on my part, but I can’t help making them.) And where evasion is concerned, there is no confrontation of Sir Leicester with his Lady once he knows her past history, even if he “forgives” her. Surely this should have been a major scene in the novel, but was Dickens avoiding having to devise the plain speaking Sir Leicester might have had to use? I also wonder why Dickens has to ritually kill Lady Dedlock for her sins when she has, after all, produced somebody as wonderful as Esther Summerson, whose very name (“summer sun”) so clearly signals what a bringer of joy she is. And isn’t it a pity that Esther is finally paired with such an underdeveloped and uninteresting character as Allan Woodcourt?  Without miring myself in further plot details, I also find the solution to Tulkinghorn’s murder implausible.

But as I said, these are entirely theoretical objections to the novel, of the sort that students produce in undergraduate essays. The fact is, I was quite willing to accept the things I have listed as acceptable conventions for the era in which the novel was written. What makes much of the novel difficult to read, however, is what I would call its “clogged” nature.

As I said when reviewing Little Dorrit on this blog, I think Dickens sustains very well the idea of a prison as a dominating symbol  – of the constraints of social custom - in that novel. But in Our Mutual Friend, what could have been the dominating symbol of the river – as the uncertainty of life - is not sustained after the novel’s opening. Likewise, despite its famous opening, Bleak House does not sustain the image of fog as a symbol of the law’s impenetrability, delay and confusion. There is much dark imagery in the novel, of course, sometimes suggesting the dominance of the past (like the unending case in Chancery) – the “sick humour” of the slums; Krooks’ cat “Lady Jane” threatening to eat a corpse; the “Ghosts’ Walk”, with overt reminders of the past, at Chesney Wold; and the dark wood in which Esther and Lady Dedlock first fully acknowledge each other. But it is not the fog, or any other single symbol, that sustains the idea of confusion and delay.

  How Dickens does display complexity and confusion is by the plethora of characters he introduces. This is what I mean by the novel’s “clogged” nature. There are simply too many replicated characters. We have a delightful parody of misdirected charity in Mrs Jellyby, so why do we need the same point made by the (walk-on) character of Mrs Pardiggle? This “clogging” effect is especially true of the slum characters who jostle around “Nemo” (the pseudonym of Captain Hawdon, Lady Dedlock’s long-ago lover and the father of Esther Summerson). These slum characters are trying to find either material for blackmail or papers relating to the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Frankly, I became lost in the dealings of Krook, Snagsby, Guppy, Smallweed, Jobling (also called “Weevil”) and the rest of the gang. Indeed, I groaned when the avaricious Smallweed was introduced about halfway through the novel. In his grasping corruption, does he really add anything thematically to the novel which Krook hasn’t already displayed? Or did Dickens create him as a back-up, knowing that he was going to destroy Krook by spontaneous combustion? This is on top of the fact that (rather more relevant to his plot of the law’s delay) the novel has a profusion of lawyers -  more, I believe, than appear in any other novel by Dickens. “Conversation” Kenge of the firm of Kenge and Carboy; Snagsby; Tulkinghorn; Vholes etc. And did Dickens write another novel with so many (described or reported) death scenes? Tom Jarndyce commits suicide before the novel begins; “Nemo” dies of an overdose of opium; Krook by spontaneous combustion; Neckett (“Coavinses”) and Gridley of poverty; Richard Carstone of defeated hope; Tulkinghorn is murdered; Lady Dedlock of shame, exhaustion and – apparently – infection; and, of course, the heart-tugging death of young Jo the crossing-sweeper, who dies of smallpox.

Frankly, in reading this novel I was often confused by the dealings of so many characters and the introduction of so many subplots. (Do we really need bluff trooper Mr George turning out to be the son of the Dedlocks’ housekeeper???). Or is this simply another way of saying that I found the serial nature of the novel wearing, and missed that sense of “wholeness” that one finds in more tightly-constructed novels?

And yet (here comes a paradox) it is a curious fact that those parts of Bleak House I most relished were those that involved characters NOT essential to the plot as I have outlined it.

Thus Jo the crossing sweeper, with his “He was very good to me, he was.” And “I don’t know nothink about nothink.” Take or leave his rhetorical death saying the Lord’s Prayer, and sneer if you are of an Oscar Wilde disposition at his sentimental function in the novel, but it is still refreshing to hear his straightforward voice after all the obfuscations of other characters. The scene in which he leads Lady Dedlock through the slums is one of the novel’s highlights. Then there is Harold Skimpole, one of Dickens’ best satirical creations. I have met this sort of man – claiming to be a complete naïf while artfully sponging off other people and then taking no responsibility for the consequences. Scholars say he is based on the elderly Leigh Hunt (just as Boythorn is modelled on Walter Savage Landor) – but what is important is that he lives as hypocrisy incarnate, as convincing as Tartuffe. And I was engaged by Mr Bucket “of the Detective” – the bluff but devious police officer whose leading questions prise information out of dubious characters with the skill of a Maigret so that he ends up solving the problem of the murder of Tulkinghorn. For me, a favourite scene in the novel is the melodramatic one when Bucket scatters, with righteousness on his side, the opportunists who have come to sell information to Sir Leicester Dedlock. To this band of memorables, I am tempted to add Caddy Jellyby and her sulks as she resents fiercely her mother’s shows of charity which actually serve to neglect her family. Alas, Caddy Jellyby is a good and convincing portrait to begin with, but Dickens has to turn her into a more conventional figure of sentiment when she marries young Turveydrop – so I refuse to let her into my Pantheon of memorable characters in Bleak House. 

While I am eviscerating the novel in this fashion, let me comment on how unsettling I find Dickens’ mode of narration. Let nobody be so stupid as to imagine that Dickens was unaware of how innovative his style could be, and how consciously he experimented with different modes of narration. Most of Bleak House is narrated by an ominscient third-person who speaks in the present tense. So far, so (almost) conventional. But there are chapters in which Esther Summerson (addressing herself to whom?) writes in the first-person and in the past tense. There is a certain awkwardness here, as we are frequently told how wonderful and how morally blameless Esther is in her own artless words. I understand that we are meant to be charmed by her disclaimers and self-deprecation, but the effect is still jarring and artificial. For the life of me, I cannot see this as anything more than as an awkward precursor to the much better Great Expectations, all of which is (like David Copperfield) narrated in the first-person to great ironical effect. In Great Expectations, the theme of the oneness of society is better expressed in the tale of a gentleman dependent on a criminal than the tale of a haughty lady who happens to come into contact with a diseased slum-dweller while working out the consequence of her “sin”.

If you have read carefully, dear readers, you will have noticed that I have just systematically condemned Bleak House on many levels. But – here comes the paradox – I still think it is one of Dickens’ greatest achievements. Could it be that the confusions and the multiplicity of characters and the mixed modes of narration and all the things that my rational mind critcises are in fact all the things that make Dickens’ panorama of a whole society so convincing? A whole world is encompassed. Indeed, could all this muddle be the true continuation of the opening image of fog - the portrait of a confused and rudderless society? An immovable image of the tragic and complex nature of life lingers with me from this novel. It annoys me so much that I cannot get it out of me head. Is this what works of genius do?

 Could somebody please sort this paradox out for me?

 

Note on cinema: Like all but one of Dickens’ novels (Barnaby Rudge), Bleak House has a number of times been made into a TV serial but has never been produced as a film for the cinema, if we except a few primitive versions way back in the silent era. I have seen two of the BBC television serials of Bleak House – and given that Dickens wrote his work as serial parts, this was probably the right format for dramatisation of the novel. I was impressed by the 1985 8-part version, and especially by Diana Rigg’s performance as Lady Dedlock, although Denholm Elliott was a little too haughty for the humane John Jarndyce. The 2005 version of Bleak House, chopped into 15 episodes, was not quite up to the same standard. Gillian Anderson was a less impressive Lady Dedlock although Carey Mulligan was perfectly cast as Ada Clare. The main trouble with the 2005 version was that it was consciously aimed at the soap-opera audience. The many episodes were aired in the early-evening, with the aim of catching those who most often watch East Enders or Neighbours. Continuity suffered with all the necessary cliff-hangers at the end of each episode.