Bleak House.  

   Dickens began work on Bleak House at the end of 1851, a year which has often been taken to mark a turning-point in Victorian social history. The Great Exhibition of that year affirmed a commercial and nationalistic pride that could hardly have been predicted from the social unease of the eighteen-thirties and forties: the fifties were the first decade of Victorian self-confidence. The limitations of such an over-simplification have been expertly demonstrated by Professor Asa Briggs (Victorian People, ch. 2), and Dickens himself no admirer of the Exhibition, was in fact probably more concerned with a speech which he made in the same year on behalf of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, during the course of which he proclaimed:

  That no man can estimate the amount of mischief grown in dirt, - that no man can say the evil stops here or stops there, either in its moral or physical effects, or can deny that it begins in the cradle and is not at rest in the miserable grave, is as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried by an easterly wind into Mayfair, or that the furious pestilence raging in St Giles's no mortal list of Lady patronesses can keep out of Almack's. (Quoted in Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work, 1957, p. 191)

  In Bleak House Esther Summerson catches smallpox from the crossing-sweeper, Jo; her aristocratic mother dies at the gate of the poison-infested burying-ground close by Tom All-Alone's. The all- embracing nature of social evil in Bleak House is thus made explicit through a symbolism born of Dickens's immediate social concerns. Richard Carstone, the doomed ward of the Court of Chancery, says of that court's operations:

  'My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor rascals and my heart ached to think that they could possibly be either. . . .' (ch. 5)

The comment applies not just to Chancery itself but by extension to the social system of which it is presented as the representative institution in the novel.

  To emphasize the extent of his social preoccupations in Bleak House Dickens deliberately contrived a dual-narrative in which the life-story of his heroine, Esther Summerson, related as a first-person narrative, is interwoven with an extensive range of imaginative social documentation provided by the author himself. The effect is a subtle one - the novel gains stability from the progressive unravelling of Esther's story, while leaving Dickens free to expatiate on various examples of social abuse in the manner of his earlier picaresque method. The evils which he attacks, ranging from slum-dwelling to misguided philanthropy and including every form of exploitation, are indeed related to the main plot, but the fact that the novel is deliberately compartmentalized in this way allows Dickens to extend his social criticism without limitation.

There is, however, a further effect of the narrative method that is vital to an understanding of Bleak House. If Dickens supplies his analysis in what might loosely be called the picaresque section of the novel, his remedy is contained in the 'linear' narrative of Esther's life-story, and in particular in its account of her relationship with Jarndyce, the father-figure of the novel, who knows the ways of Chancery and constantly asserts the futility of opposition. Jarndyce's method of alleviation is a simple one springing from his inexhaustible bank-account, and, in fact, all that Dickens can offer against the realistic depredations of the social system is charity of improbably mythic proportions. The inadequacy of such a solution is best demonstrated by the way in which Jarndyce, a descendant of the Cheerybles of Nicholas NicklebyOliver Twist, is presented as a figure of semi-divine potential. At the climax of Bleak House, when he has made Esther a present of not only her home but also her husband, she describes her reaction:

I was cold, and I trembled violently; but not a word he uttered was lost. As I sat looking fixedly at him, and the sun's rays descended, softly shining through the leaves upon his bare head, I felt as if the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the Angels. (ch. 64)

The unrealistic nature of Jarndyce's role in Bleak House, far from providing an answer to the social evil documented in the novel, is, in fact, an expression of pessimism about the prospects of social change as intense as any expressed by the social analysis itself; in that Esther's narrative is ostensibly optimistic, the dual-narrative method can be seen as enabling Dickens to put forward a solution to the problems outlined in the novel which he could scarcely have endorsed in rational terms.

  The pessimism implicit in Bleak House finds overt expression in Little Dorrit, written some five years later. Here Dickens reverts to the world of Dombey and Son in that the novel is given a specifically commercial setting: the inter-relationship between financial preoccupations and selfishness is emphasized not only by the thwarted life of the hero Arthur Clennam, a Paul Dombey who managed to survive, but also, in parody, through the social pretensions of William Dorrit, the Father of the Marshalsea, existing in fantasy when he is imprisoned and in fact after his release. The theme is given a fuller social perspective by the career of the financier, Merdle, surrounded by pillars of the establishment until he is exposed as 'the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows' (Bk II, ch. 25). The structure of Little Dorrit is a simple one compared with the ingenuity of Bleak House; the real issue is not, as Dickens himself was forced to enquire in a memorandum, how the Clennams are related to the Dorrits, but how the course of their lives demonstrates the hopelessness of existence in the prison-world that the novel portrays. The prison-symbolism of Little Dorrit has received ample comment: one need only remark here on the way in which the actual prisons of the novel and life itself as it is portrayed there become interchangeable. Dorrit released is Dorrit enchained: Clennam imprisoned is Clennam liberated, at. least temporarily, from the pressures of the outside world. Little Dorrit ends with the marriage of Clennam to the heroine, Amy Dorrit, but the sense of release that this convention had given in the earlier novels is never attempted.