Bleak House. |
|
Charles
Dickens |
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. |