Bleak House is a long novel, approaching a thousand pages, and I have a correspondingly large set of things to say about it. I’ll begin by simply saying that I liked it.
From one angle, the book is primarily about Britain’s Court of Chancery. From what I gather, the Court of Chancery was the court that dealt primarily with wills and things of that nature. When I say “the court,” I mean the court. There was only one, presided over by the Lord Chancellor, and all business of this kind had to go through it. But not only was it a bottle-neck, it was dysfunctional. Once any case had been brought before it, as it might be a dispute about a will, the case could be carried on, slowly, painfully, and above all expensively until the estate in dispute had completely vanished into the pockets of an army of lawyers. Dickens regarded this as a great wickedness, and I daresay it was.
In the present volume, consequently, much of the action concerns a case called “Jarndyce and Jarndyce”, a case that has been ongoing for many years and shows no sign of coming to a conclusion. Most of the characters are tied to the case one way or another.
A secondary theme is an English penchant for do-goodery. The book contains portraits of a number of men and women with missions, missions that they pursue to the neglect of the duties directly before them. The most prominent of these is Mrs. Jellyby, who is consumed by a scheme to establish an English colony in the African village of Borrioboola-Gah. She spends her days in feverish correspondence on the subject, while completely neglecting the care and upbringing of her large family. Even from today’s point of view, when most women have entered the work-force and two-income families are common, Mrs. Jellyby’s detachment from the interests of her children is shocking. (I’ll note that there’s not much positive to say about Mr. Jellyby, either.)
At one point, we get to see a large collection of these fervent activists all in one place. One is a feminist of a type still all too familiar:
Miss Wisk’s mission, my guardian said, was to show the world that woman’s mission was man’s mission and that the only genuine mission of both man and woman was to be always moving declaratory resolutions about things in general at public meetings.
And then there was a clergy man, whose home was a wilderness
but whose church was like a fancy fair. A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody’s brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family…
There’s very little new under the sun.
The true backbone of the book, and the source of most of its charm, is the person of Miss Esther Summerson. The book consists of chapters of third-person-omniscient narrative, written from a variety of points of view, all in the present tense, and the first person narrative of Miss Summerson, whom we follow from her earliest days. She is the backbone, and the heart and soul of the book, and I quite fell in love her.
It is notoriously hard to write an interesting book about goodness, especially in our day when we have largely lost the pertinent vocabulary of virtue and vice. Things were different in Dicken’s day, and Esther Summerson is a thoroughly good woman: capable, smart, taking care for others, and blessed with a touching humility. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes the sort of woman who lives for others–and you can tell the others by their hunted looks. Mrs. Pardiggle, a friend of Mrs. Jellyby’s, is a pre-eminent example. Such people do little good and a great deal of harm. But Esther Summerson is the real deal, the true coin of which Mrs. Pardiggle is the counterfeit.
I have the suspicion that this book, and especially the passages involving Esther, are the sort of thing that some would dismiss as “sentimental”. I suspect rather than some people simply don’t recognize goodness when they see it–or don’t believe in it.
There is a host of secondary and tertiary characters, in all states of moral growth or decay, including those who have learned by hard experience and those who have not, those who have grown old in kindness and in depravity. I found it touching, repellent, heartwarming, and funny by turns.
One last note: I did not read the book straight through. I find I need to be in the right mood for this kind of thing, and so I’d usually read a few chapters and then switch to something else. This is another great feature of the Kindle: it’s possible to be reading several books at once, each for a particular purpose of mood, and turn from one to another at a moment’s notice without having to carry multiple volumes about.
The View from the Foothills 