Bleak House

Bleak House is the ninth novel of Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853, and many critics consider it his masterpiece — the most complex, ambitious and darkly comic of his books, and one of the great panoramic novels of the nineteenth century. At its centre is a lawsuit in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, about a disputed will, which has dragged on for generations, ruining everyone involved and enriching only the lawyers, until the legal costs swallow the entire estate. Around it Dickens weaves a vast web of characters from every level of English society — the proud aristocratic Lady Dedlock and her secret past; the orphan Esther Summerson, who narrates half the novel; the young wards in the case, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare; the sinister lawyer Tulkinghorn; the crossing-sweeper Jo; the rag-and-bottle dealer Krook, who dies of spontaneous combustion; and Inspector Bucket, the first detective in English fiction — and shows how all of them are secretly connected.

At a glance

The story

The novel opens with one of the most famous passages in English prose:

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… Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city… And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

In the court, the endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is being “heard” again. “This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means… Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.” A little mad old woman, Miss Flite, who has haunted the court for years expecting a judgment, keeps birds in cages that she will release “on the Day of Judgment”.

At Chesney Wold, their rain-soaked estate in Lincolnshire, the aristocratic Sir Leicester Dedlock, pompous, honourable and devoted, and his beautiful, cold, bored wife Lady Dedlock (“bored to death”) live in grand gloom. The family lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, a silent, rusty-black, secretive old man who collects secrets as power, is reading her a legal document when she sees the handwriting of a copy and nearly faints. Tulkinghorn notices and sets out to find the copyist.

Esther Summerson begins her narrative: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever.” She was raised by her harsh godmother, Miss Barbary, who told her: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.” After her godmother’s death, a kindly guardian, John Jarndyce, one of the parties to the suit, arranges her education and brings her to his house, Bleak House, in Hertfordshire, as a companion to his two young wards in the case, Ada Clare and her cousin Richard Carstone, who soon fall in love. Jarndyce is generous and good, refuses to take any part in the suit, and blames the “east wind” whenever he is upset. He is plagued by the charming, childlike sponger Harold Skimpole, who claims to know nothing of money and lives on everyone else.

On the way, the young people stay with Mrs Jellyby, who devotes herself to “telescopic philanthropy” — a project to settle the poor of England at “Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger” — while her own children fall down stairs and her house collapses into filth and neglect; her eldest daughter Caddy, ink-stained, slaves as her secretary. They meet Mrs Pardiggle, who forces charity on bricklayers’ families, and the pompous Mr Turveydrop, model of “deportment”, who lives off his son.

Tulkinghorn traces the handwriting to a law-writer called “Nemo” (“no one”), who lodges above Krook’s rag-and-bottle shop near Chancery Lane — Krook, called “the Lord Chancellor”, hoards old papers he cannot read. Nemo is found dead of an opium overdose in his squalid room. At the inquest, the only person who knew him is Jo, a ragged, illiterate crossing-sweeper who lives in the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s — itself property in Chancery, rotting away — and to whom Nemo had been kind: “He wos wery good to me, he wos!” Jo is constantly “moved on” by the police. Lady Dedlock, disguised as a servant, gets Jo to show her Nemo’s lodging and the miserable graveyard where he is buried, and gives him a coin; Jo notices her rings.

Nemo was Captain Hawdon, Lady Dedlock’s lover before her marriage — and Esther is their daughter, whom Lady Dedlock believed had died at birth; her sister, Miss Barbary, had secretly raised the child. Tulkinghorn sets about uncovering the secret. So does the smooth young law clerk Mr Guppy, who falls in love with Esther, notices her resemblance to Lady Dedlock, and tries to buy Hawdon’s letters from Krook. On the night Guppy is to receive them, Krook dies of spontaneous combustion, leaving only greasy soot and a smouldering pile of ash — a death that Dickens defended in his preface as scientifically possible, and which stands for the self-consumption of corruption like Chancery’s.

Richard, restless and unable to settle to any career — medicine, law, the army — becomes obsessed with the Jarndyce suit, convinced that it will make him rich, and falls under the influence of a sinister, vampire-like lawyer, Mr Vholes, who drains him of money. He quarrels with Jarndyce, believing his guardian’s interests opposed to his, and secretly marries Ada.

Jo, sick with a fever, wanders to Hertfordshire. Esther takes him in; he disappears, but not before infecting her maid Charley; Esther nurses Charley and catches the disease — smallpox — which leaves her face scarred. During her illness, Lady Dedlock reveals herself to Esther in the woods as her mother, begs her forgiveness and says they must never meet again, to protect Sir Leicester’s name. Jarndyce, who loves Esther, proposes to her in a letter, and she accepts out of gratitude, although she loves the young doctor Allan Woodcourt, who has been away at sea.

Inspector Bucket of the detective police — affable, all-seeing, with a “fat forefinger” — appears in Tulkinghorn’s service, hunting for Jo. Jo, ill and hounded, is found again by Woodcourt and dies in a shooting gallery belonging to the old trooper George, as Woodcourt teaches him the Lord’s Prayer. The narrator turns on the reader in fury:

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.

Tulkinghorn confronts Lady Dedlock: he knows her secret and will reveal it to Sir Leicester when he chooses. That night Tulkinghorn is shot dead in his chambers, under a painted ceiling of a Roman figure pointing down. Bucket arrests Trooper George, who had quarrelled with Tulkinghorn, then reveals the real murderer: Lady Dedlock’s French maid, Hortense, a violent woman Tulkinghorn had dismissed and threatened. Bucket’s wife had trapped her.

But Lady Dedlock’s secret is out. Bucket tells Sir Leicester, who suffers a stroke — and, in a moment of moving magnanimity, forgives his wife, writing on a slate “Full forgiveness. Find—”. Lady Dedlock, believing herself suspected of murder and disgraced, has fled. Bucket takes Esther with him in a desperate night-and-snow pursuit across country and back to London. They find her dead, in the clothes of a brickmaker’s wife, at the gate of the pauper graveyard where her lover lies.

A new will is found that would settle Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Richard and Ada’s favour. They hurry to court — and learn that the case is over: the entire estate has been consumed in legal costs. The lawyers come out laughing, carrying great bundles of papers. Richard, broken, coughs blood and dies, reconciled with Jarndyce, as his son is about to be born. Miss Flite releases her birds.

John Jarndyce, understanding that Esther loves Woodcourt, releases her from her promise and gives her a new “Bleak House” in Yorkshire, which he has furnished for her and Woodcourt. Esther marries Woodcourt and lives happily with him and their daughters. The novel ends with Esther, seven years later, reflecting that her looks are gone — and her husband’s words that she is prettier than ever — and an unfinished sentence: “even supposing—”.

Themes

The law. Chancery, the court of equity that dealt with wills, trusts and estates, was notorious for its delays — cases could last decades. Dickens’s satire is not only of an institution but of a system that exists for its own perpetuation: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.” The suit corrupts everyone who believes in it — Richard, Miss Flite, the ruined Gridley, “the man from Shropshire”.

Connection. “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom?” asks the narrator. The plot answers: the great lady and the crossing-sweeper are bound by secret ties, and the fever bred in Tom-all-Alone’s spreads to the comfortable house; “there is not an atom of Tom’s slime… but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud.”

Neglect and false charity. Jo, who has “never heerd of nothink”, is the image of the abandoned poor; Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle, with their missionary projects and forced charity, are satires of philanthropy that ignores what is close at hand. Skimpole’s “childishness” is a mask for selfishness.

Two narrators. The omniscient present-tense narrator is angry, satirical, panoramic and impersonal; Esther is modest, warm, self-deprecating, sometimes cloying (many readers have found her irritating) and limited in what she sees. Together they offer two ways of seeing society — systemic and personal — and the novel’s structure enacts its theme of hidden connection.

Detection. With Inspector Bucket (based on Inspector Charles Field of the new Detective Department, founded 1842), Dickens helped invent the detective novel; his friend Wilkie Collins followed with The Moonstone.

Reception and afterlife

Bleak House sold about 35,000 copies a month. Chesterton called it “not his best novel, but… perhaps his best book”; Vladimir Nabokov lectured on it at Cornell as one of the great novels. The Court of Chancery was reformed in the 1850s and 1870s. The BBC’s 2005 adaptation, filmed in short soap-opera-style episodes like the original serial, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, was widely acclaimed.

In conversation

• Jarndyce and Jarndyce — an endless legal or bureaucratic process that consumes everything.
• Telescopic philanthropy — concern for distant causes while neglecting those close at hand.
• Dickensian fog — confusion and obscurity at the heart of an institution.