I am not sure which was more daunting – reading the near 1000 pages of Bleak House, or trying to summarise the experience in a few paragraphs for this post. Where to begin? This could be the complete English novel. Pride and Prejudice is a more perfect romance, Wuthering Heights a more dramatic melodrama, The Big Sleep a better detective story, and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist a more devastating social critique. But Bleak House is all of the above and so much more. It’s a dazzling display of literary technique, without ever being showy; it is a masterful exhibition of characterisation (of which more later) and the use of themes and motifs is extraordinary. So I ask again, where to begin?

Perhaps a brief plot summary, although to do justice to the byzantine complexity of this novel is quite a challenge in itself. As you may know, Bleak House revolves around the long-running Chancery suit of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a dispute about a series of wills and the associated inheritances. Trapped in this case are two wards of court, who go to live with their uncle, John Jarndyce, in the novel’s title location, Bleak House. Also involved in the litigation is Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife Lady Dedlock. There is clearly an element of mystery about Lady Dedlock’s background – as early as the second chapter it is established that she has secrets. While consulting with the family solicitor, Mr Tulkinghorn, she recognises the handwriting on one of his documents.

“My Lady, changing her position, sees the paper on the table – looks at them nearer – looks at them nearer still – asks impulsively “Who copied that?”

Mr Tulkinghorn notices this reaction, and quickly finds out that the copywriter, “Nemo”, has recently died. The only person who can identify him is the crossing sweeper Jo, who lives in Tom-All-Alone’s, a slum in the poorest part of the City (Tom-All-Alone’s was very nearly the novel’s title).

The novel’s second narrator, Esther Summerson now takes over the tale. This alternating narrative structure, with one a named character, the other unnamed and omniscient, is unusual if not unique. It works well in varying the narrative voice. Esther is naive and reluctant to show her feelings about some close to home topics such as her feelings for Mr Woodcourt, whereas the omniscient narrator is more revealing. Esther starts her narrative by telling the reader about her childhood. She was raised by a Miss Barbary, who denied her affection and told her:

“Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers“.

She is obviously illegitimate, but beyond that knows little about her parents or family. After Miss Barbary dies, Esther becomes the ward of Mr Jarndyce, one of the litigants in the long-running case. She eventually moves in with him along with two other wards in the Jarndyce case, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare.

These parallel storylines – the Jarndyce wards and the Dedlock mystery – intertwine. The mystery of Esther’s parentage is slowly revealed. Along the way Dickens takes any number of diversions, introducing a multitude of characters and sub-plots, all of whom contribute to the development of the novel.

In earlier Dickens novels the villains are often somewhat one dimensional with little to say for them in mitigation. Great characters, but not very nuanced. Bleak House doesn’t really have anyone in this role – in fact it is the law itself which is the real villain of the piece. Many of the other characters while without question fallible have a complexity that allows us to like them even when we disagree with their actions. Lord Dedlock is originally established as the stuffy aristocrat permanently at war with his neighbours and over-bearing to family and servants, but he becomes an almost endearing character by the end of the novel, loving and faithful to the memory of his wife. Tulkinghorn may initially be cast as the scheming lawyer out to fleece his clients of everything he can get his hands on, but as the picture emerges he does seem to be genuinely trying to protect the best interests of his clients, and he doesn’t deserve the fate that befalls him. The aloof Lady Dedlock finds redemption in sacrifice. Inspector Bucket, cruel towards Jo and sinister when he appears as if a ghost in his early scenes, ends up heroically trying to rescue Lady Dedlock and being thoughtful and considerate towards Esther.

Keeping track of the cast of eccentrics in the novel is part of the challenge. I counted over 60 named characters, and there’s no doubt that it is easy to forget who is who unless you are reading the novel with particular care.  Inevitably some of the minor characters are a little one-dimensional, but Dickens creates a vivid cast of grotesques, such as the appalling Mr Skimpole, eternally sponging off his friends while maintaining a pretence of his own childishness. Speaking of himself he confesses 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! . . . He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making fancy sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art. 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. 

There is a complexity to Dickens’s writing that is easy to overlook. His ear for the way people speak is acute. To give just one example, the lawyer’s formal phrase “I beg your Lordship’s pardon” is rendered “begludship’s pardon” (chapter 1) which as well as capturing the clipped tones of the courtroom also speaks to the incomprehensibility of the proceedings. Later a relative of Lord Dedlock speaks in a similar almost incomprehensible manner:

‘The debilitated cousin holds that it’s sort of thing that’s sure tapn slongs votes—giv’n—Mob.”

(“It is the sort of thing that is sure to happen so long as votes are given to the mob” – in other words a casual condemnation of increasing the popular franchise.)

Modern readers will find the relationship between Esther and her guardian, John Jarndyce, inappropriate if not abusive. It creeped me out every time she refers to him as her loving Guardian after they were engaged. My concern is not so much the substantial age gap but the power imbalance – she is his ward, legally his responsibility and therefore completely off limits. Dickens thankfully swerves at the last minute and allows Esther a more traditional marriage to the eminently suitable Allan Woodcourt.

I know the novel’s famous opening has been analysed to death but I did want to acknowledge Dickens’s audacity as a novelist to open with the one-word sentence – “London” – throwing out all the rules we have ever been taught about sentence structure, and then following it with a series of incomplete sentences:

“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, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

It’s not until the fourth paragraph that a traditionally complete sentence appears, (“The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar” This sentence stands out and draws the reader’s attention precisely because it is complete). If one wanted, a whole essay could be constructed around Dickens’ use of this motif of mud, dirt and dust in the novel. Often the words are used euphemistically – for example where the author writes of the “stagnant channel of mud which is the main street of Tom-all-Alone’s,” That’s not mud really is it? The critic and academic John Sutherland has fun with “the laundered quality of Victorian literary language” in his article in the London Review of Books,

“Assuming, for instance, that the dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend are what Humphry House claimed, urban mountains of shit, is Dickens’s ‘dust’, the modesty of the novel, or the modesty of a man of Dickens’s class and time? One knows that Jo, in Bleak House, is a crossing-sweeper: but why are we never told what it is he is employed to sweep out of the way? (Horse dust, presumably.)

Dust also brings to mind ashes, (one of Miss Flite’s birds is named Ashes) and the inevitable association with fire and death.

Another example of Dickens’s ability to imbue minor incidents or characters with significance to the whole novel is the involvement of the brick-builders. These are impoverished labourers and their families, who we first meet when Esther is dragged off to dispense charity to them by Mrs Pardiggle. While they are there one of the babies, malnourished and sick, dies abruptly. Esther deals with the situation as best she can, and wraps the baby in one of her handkerchiefs. In a nod to Othello this handkerchief is later recognised by Lady Dedlock and is an important clue in her realisation that her long-lost daughter is really alive. The baby’s death is not just a plot-device – the handkerchief could have been left behind for any number of reasons – but also a reminder of the proximity of sudden death for the labouring classes in nineteenth century England. Later the brick-builders appear in London at Tom’s-All-Alone, and then at the novel’s climax in the chase to find Lady Dedlock. As well as playing an important role in the novel’s plot, the brick-builders represent the people who are transforming the country through their labour but sharing no part in the benefits of industrialisation. The working classes are in no way romantised though – the men are alcoholics and beat their wives, who stoically bear it all and join the men in drinking.

I’ve only really scratched the surface in looking at some of Dickens’ techniques in constructing Bleak House. It is a novel that can be read and reread time and again, and analysed from many different perspectives. Apart from its length it is not a difficult read. Sharing the monthly instalments when it was first published in the 1850’s must have been an amazing collective experience, very different from the ‘all in one go’ way of reading the novel one uses today. This was my one-a-year reread of Dickens, and although there is admittedly a sense of having ticked off another reading target for 2021 I am really glad I chose to revisit this epic of Victorian literature.