Bleak House

Now before you get more than a few sentences into this blog, I want to warn you – this is one of those long, rambly blogs about something I’ve read. There will be no pictures. And even if you like to read that sort of thing, I still want to warn you that I’m going to go over the whole story of Bleak House and if you ever want to read it, you should just stop reading right now, if you take the time and effort to read such a long book, I want you to have the enjoyment of not knowing how things will turn out. That said, if you’re still with me, here we go…

I finally finished Bleak House last week. I had put off reading it because the name just put me off – bleak, it sounded, well, bleak. But the book is not like that at all. It is a complicated weaving of people of different ages and classes and, like all Dickens novels, it has its dark places, but in the end it leaves you feeling hopeful.

The story, like David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, is about a hero – or in this case a heroine, Esther Summerson. Esther, like David and Oliver, is an orphan…or so it seems. In the course of time you learn that Esther’s parents are both still alive at the beginning of the book. (They are both dead by the end.) Esther has been raised by a woman (who turns out to be her aunt), but when that woman dies she is taken under the guardianship of John Jarndyce – an extremely humble and benevolent older man whose family is caught up in an ancient chancery suit – that is (so far as I can tell) a lawsuit disputing a will. The case – known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce – has lasted many generations and has a vicious side – many of the potential heirs spend their whole life expecting a large monetary reward and waste their life waiting on the judgment. Mr. Jarndyce’s house is Bleak House.

Despite all the unusual events in Esther’s life she has determined to be “industrious, contented, and kind-hearted” (18) and throughout her life she must reapply herself to being this way, although she always succeeds and is completely humble in her actions and honest (to the reader) about her inner failings (which are still very few.)

Along with Esther, two cousins – Ada Clare and Richard Carstone – who are relatives of Mr. Jarndyce and therefore potential heirs in the suit, also become wards of Mr. Jardnyce. Esther is a little older than Ada and Richard, but they are all young (early 20s). Esther’s “job” at Bleak House is that of housekeeper, and if Esther’s character hasn’t reminded the reader of Agnes Wickfield yet, her position makes it clear. Agnes, like Esther, carries a little basket of keys (to show how responsible she is) and, also like Esther, is able to separate her intense feelings from her actions. They are both kind to poor, hurting people and pretty much perfect, unrealistic characters. But all that is ok, because all throughout Dickens’ novels are little quirky snippets of unreality and I like that.

The third part of the book deals with a wealthy woman named Honoria Dedlock. She’s married to Sir Leicester Dedlock. They aren’t really involved in the suit, but it turns out that Lady Dedlock had fallen in love with a young soldier (Capt. Hawdon) before she married and they had a baby – guess who? You got it – Esther. Hawdon didn’t know about the baby, Lady Dedlock thought the baby died, because her sister took the baby and told her it had died. At some point Lady Dedlock’s sister had been engaged to a man named Mr. Boythorn, who lived “next door” to the Dedlocks and who is good friends with Mr. Jarndyce. The Dedlock’s attorney, Mr. Tulkinghorn, discovers the whole secret (which seems to be fully known to no one but the aunt, who dies pretty much at the start) about the same time that it’s revealed to Esther that her mother is Lady Dedlock.

But wait, there’s more. Esther’s father, Capt. Hawdon, became a law copier (think Bob Cratchit) and assumed the name “Nemo” (greek for “no one”, not “clown fish”). He became addicted to opium and dies of a drug overdose in a seedy part of London called Tom-all-Alone’s. He’s attended by a young doctor named Allan Woodcourt – Allan seems to pop up out of no where, but he’s important.

Also in Tom-all-Alone’s is a young, homeless boy named Jo and a shriveled up old woman named Miss Flite, she’s also a Jarndyce heir and her life is the picture of what happens to people caught up in the suit – ruined, poor, and basically crazy.

There are a few more characters, but I’ll sum up. Woodcourt becomes friendly with the people at Bleak House and it’s clear that he has fallen in love with Esther. She loves him too, but it’s early and she’s much to ladylike to even think about such things, so he goes off to India to do medical work and she goes on with life. In the mean time, she contracts small pox from Jo (or some other disfiguring disease, it isn’t clear) and loses her beauty (Agnes was also beautiful, but she never loses it). She figures Woodcourt would never want her like that and accepts a proposal to marry Mr. Jarndyce!!!!! Who is about 40-50 OLDER than her. Ada and Richard fall in love, they’re first cousins I think, I guess these things were not the bizarre, sicko things they would be today. You just have to get past how weird it all seems and move on.

Lady Dedlock approaches Esther and tells her who she is, then Mr. Tulkinghorn starts dropping hints that he will expose Lady Dedlock’s sin, then suddenly he is killed. Lady Dedlock is suspected, she didn’t do it, but she is overwhelmed by how her husband will be ruined by the whole thing and basically commits suicide (she goes out on a cold night and allows herself to freeze to death).

Ada and Richard get married, but Richard is so focus on the chancery suit that he withers away and dies when everyone learns that the suit has taken so long that all the inheritance money has been absorbed by legal costs. Mr. Woodcourt comes back from India and confesses his love to Esther, even though she is so scarred, hmm, and she has to reject him because of her commitment, which it’s clear throughout that she doesn’t love Mr. Jarndyce “in that way”, but wants to make him happy.

Mr. Jarndyce is pretty keen and as I mentioned before VERY humble and VERY benevolent and he knows Esther does not love him like she loves Woodcourt. So he arranges it for Woodcourt to become the doctor of a nearby village and sets him up in a house he names Bleak House, all the while telling Esther she will be Mistress of Bleak House, meaning this OTHER Bleak House that she is unaware of. He works things out to surprise Esther with the news that she will marry Allan instead of him (realistic, I know, but this is 750 pages into the book and by that time you’re so exasperated that your favorite character is going to marry the wrong person and you know Dickens had the gall to make David marry Dora in David Copperfield, that you are just relieved that Esther and Allan will not be separated.)

There ARE more characters and more mini-plots as well. I loved this book, but you can see that this would make the most horrible movie ever! No, a book like this is best as a book. Bleak House, like most of Dickens’ novels (certainly all of the long ones) was published in serial installments. As I’ve mentioned in other blogs, this gives them tv show qualities – a lot of extraneous characters, a lot of extraneous plot lines, and a lot lot lot of pages!

Everyone knows that Dickens’ writes about social ills. Bleak House is about that. Jane Austen was miffed about class differences because it determined whom you could marry, but Dickens was more into how the poor were treated. But, Bleak House shines a light on character – particularly Esther’s character, which is kind to the poor and rich alike, kind to the good and bad alike, kind to the wise and foolish alike. So in this book (and indeed in other Dickens’ books) it’s not just about class disparity, but about trying to convince people that their actions to others have consequences no matter how small. I think his point with Bleak House was to say that you may be rich, you may be poor, but you have a choice in how to treat others. It is condemning of those who do righteous acts for an audience, it pities of those who are enticed by money’s empty promises. And I can’t say enough about how it applauds the character of those who managed to stay above all that.

I guess my point is that I've always been under the impression that Dickens wrote to condemn societial entities - government, etc. But the activities that Dickens villifies in his novels are always connected to an individual (the exception being A Tale of Two Cities, but that is set in France) - and that individual is not always a rich old Ebenezer Scrooge type character. In Bleak House it's the brickmakers who beat their wives, it's Inspector Bucket who uses charm to deceive, and it's Mr. Smallweed who is cruel to his debtors.

So where to go from here – Little Dorrit. I picked it up at the library today to accompany us on our long drive to Arkansas. I don’t know anything about the story and I like it that way. I did glance at the table of contents and several chapters have the world Marshallsea in the title, which was the name of a big debtors prison, I think it was in David Copperfield. I hate credit cards and their maddening interest rates, but Dickens reminds me that there was a time when if you didn’t pay your debts, you and your whole family had to live in a prison until your debt was paid. Well, hopefully we can learn from the past.