Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Like all of Dickens’s really big works, there is so much of interest in Bleak House that it’s hard to know where to start. It is, by turns and all at once, a detective mystery, a thriller, a social commentary, a satire, and a good old-fashioned storybook, and it would be completely beyond me to cover everything that is good in it; I’ll restrict myself to picking out the points that really interest me and leave it at that.
The story starts slowly, in thick, symbolism-laden London fog, but builds up great narrative drive, developing a strong compulsion in the reader to keep on, to find out what happens next. And it is never predictable; even when there are clear directions that must be taken by the plot, alternatives are present, and we are never certain which one will be chosen. It must have been incredibly difficult for readers of the serial to wait for the next instalment, particularly during the remarkable pursuit scenes. As the reader approaches the endings of the various threads of story, it is astonishing to see how Dickens manages his creation and weaves together a satisfying conclusion without ever straying towards the obvious or trite; there is a convincing realism throughout this book, and no exception is made in the final chapters. The lapses from this rule are few, and, strangely enough considering that the book uses a case of spontaneous combustion as a major plot device, the single biggest problem I encountered in terms of believability was Mme. Hortense, Lady Dedlock’s maid, who feels like she has been planted in the story from the start to enable all the main characters to maintain moral superiority. Despite this, she is a fun individual to watch, so I can easily forgive her faint air of implausibility.The characterisation is typically brilliant. There is no caricature here (excepting very minor players like the Revd. Chadband, with such creatures providing some important comic relief). Even the main villain, the clinical calculating Tulkinghorn, has, in common with other Dickens baddies like Uriah Heep, a believability in his motivations, and like Heep is given life by the sympathy with which Dickens portrays him. Whilst we are not given an insight into what terrible events have led to such a warping of humanity in the sinister old lawyer, we feel that he has somehow been made by the world he inhabits, and has not just been dropped in from the heavens to provide our heroes and heroines with something to break against. We can believe that the inexorable machinations of Chancery create beings like Tulkinghorn, that they do not arise spontaneously just because authors need them.
At the other end of the spectrum we have our main female protagonist and part-time narrator. Self-sacrifice and goodness personified, Esther could easily have been irritatingly idealised, but in Dickens’s hands she’s reassuringly human, suffering self-doubt and even making the occasional mistake. Seeing the many of the events of the story through her eyes, we become engaged with the characters she is closest to, and feel for them all the more.
Law and lawyers, and the Court of Chancery in particular, get a pretty thorough condemnation, as in many of Dickens’s other works. Whilst there are honourable exceptions, he clearly wasn’t a fan of the lawyer species, or of the institutional ecology they had evolved within. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the great, twisted equity case which slowly dissipates the fortunes of Ada Clare and Richard Carstone into the pockets of so many lawyers, is the mainspring under force of which the entire novel turns. We are spared the details, presumably to protect our sanity and health, for attempts to understand the case have driven men and women to madness and to their graves, but we are shown its terrible effects in great detail through the fates of an array of characters: from Richard who as a ward of court is directly involved, through poor insane Miss Flite with her caged birds, to unfortunates such as Jo the street-sweeper, who has nothing to do with anything, but is caught up nonetheless in the sprawling complexities of the tale, which draws all its momentum ultimately from the suit.
Bleak House lacks the joy that I found in The Pickwick Papers, because of the various agendas being presented here, and the tragedy surrounding many of the characters, but this underlying seriousness only serves to increase the stature of the book. Chesterton says:
It is strictly the one and only great tragedy that Dickens wrote.
Speaking of the fog with which the book opens, he concludes that it symbolisesthe fog of Chancery. Dickens meant that twilight to be oppressive; for it was the symbol of oppression. Deliberately he did not dispel the darkness at the end of this book, as he does dispel it at the end of most of his books… This tyranny, Dickens said, shall not be lifted by the light subterfuge of a fiction. This tyranny shall never be lifted till all Englishmen lift it together.
Because of this darkness and gloom Bleak House is not so easy to read as some of Dickens’s other novels, but it definitely repays the extra effort demanded of the reader.