Bleak House
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
1. Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
Charles
Dickens. Bleak
House.
Supporting References:
- "Bleak House." Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. : Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference. 2011. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
- Birch, Dinah. "Bleak House." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Bleak House.
A novel by Charles
*Dickens, published in monthly parts 1852–3.
This dark and complex book combines a vigorous attack on the abuses
of the old court of Chancery, the delays and costs of which brought
misery and ruin on its suitors, with bitter satire on the callous
neglect of the poor by the rich and powerful, and an intricate
exploration of themes of hidden transgression, obsession, violence,
and exposure. The complex plot centres on the fortunes of Richard
Carstone, an irresolute youth, and his gentle cousin Ada Clare. They
are wards of the court in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
concerned with the distribution of an estate, which has gone on so
long as to become a subject of heartless joking as well as a source
of great profit to those professionally engaged in it. The wards are
taken to live with their kind elderly relative John Jarndyce. They
fall in love and secretly marry. Richard, incapable of sticking to
any profession and lured by the will‐o'‐the‐wisp of the fortune
that is to be his when the case is settled, sinks gradually to ruin
and death, and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes suddenly to an
end on the discovery that the costs have absorbed the whole estate in
dispute.
“When Ada goes to live with John
Jarndyce she is accompanied by Esther Summerson, a supposed orphan,
self‐effacing and loyal, and the narrative is partly supposed to be
from her pen. Sir Leicester Dedlock, a pompous old baronet, is
devotedly attached to his beautiful wife, Lady Dedlock, who hides a
dreadful secret under her haughty exterior. Before her marriage she
has loved a certain Captain Hawdon and has become the mother of a
daughter, whom she believes dead. Hawdon is thought to have perished
at sea. In fact the daughter lives in the person of Esther Summerson,
and Hawdon in that of a penniless scrivener, or professional copyist.
The accidental sight of his handwriting in a legal document reveals
to Lady Dedlock the fact of his existence, and its effect on her
alerts the cunning old lawyer Tulkinghorn to the existence of a
mystery. Lady Dedlock's enquiries bring her, through the medium of
the crossing‐sweeper, Jo, a poverty‐bitten and illiterate child,
to the burial ground where her former lover's miserable career has
just ended. Jo's unguarded revelation of his singular experience with
this veiled lady sets Tulkinghorn on the track, until he possesses
all the facts and tells Lady Dedlock that he is going to expose her
next day to her husband. That night Tulkinghorn is murdered. Bucket,
the detective who unfolds the mysteries at the heart of the novel,
presently reveals to the baronet what Tulkinghorn had discovered, and
arrests a former French maid of Lady Dedlock, a violent woman, who
has committed the murder. Lady Dedlock, learning that her husband
knows her secret, flies from the house in despair, and is found dead
near the grave of her lover, in spite of the efforts of her husband
and Esther to save her.
“Much of the story is occupied with
Esther's devotion to John Jarndyce; her acceptance of his offer of
marriage from a sense of duty and gratitude, though she loves a young
doctor, Woodcourt; Jarndyce's discovery of the state of her heart;
and his surrender of her to Woodcourt.
“There are a host of animated minor
characters, including Harold Skimpole (drawn ‘in the light
externals of character’ from Leigh
*Hunt), who disguises his utter selfishness
under an assumption of childish irresponsibility; Mrs Jellyby, who
sacrifices her family to her selfish addiction to professional
philanthropy; Jo, the crossing‐sweeper, who is chivvied by the
police to his death; Chadband, the pious, eloquent humbug;
Turveydrop, the model of deportment; Krook, the ‘chancellor’ of
the rag and bone department, who dies of spontaneous combustion;
Guppy, the lawyer's clerk; Guster, the poor slavey; the law‐stationer
Snagsby; Miss Flite, the little lunatic lady who haunts the Chancery
courts; and Jarndyce's friend, the irascible and generous Boythorn
(drawn from Walter
Savage *Landor).
“For many of Dickens's
contemporaries, this novel marked a decline in his reputation;
individual characters (notably Jo and Bucket) were praised, but it
was charged with verbosity and ‘absolute want of construction’.
Later readers, including George
Bernard *Shaw, G.
K. *Chesterton, Joseph
*Conrad, and Lionel
*Trilling, saw it as one of the high points of
his achievement, and the herald of his last great phase. Its critical
reputation remains high, and it is among the most intensively
examined novels of the Victorian period. See Elliot Gilbert (ed.),
Critical Essays on Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1989).”
- Birch, Dinah. "Dickens, Charles." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The following references the author of
the text and not the text specifically.
“Dickens, Charles
(1812–70). Novelist, born in Portsmouth, the son of a clerk in the
navy pay office. His early boyhood, spent in Chatham, was happy, and
he attended a competent private school in Chatham. This was followed
by a period of intense misery during which his father was imprisoned
for debt in the Marshalsea and he himself (aged 12) worked in a
blacking warehouse. These painful experiences inspired much of his
fiction, notably the early chapters of David
Copperfield. He then worked as an office boy,
studied shorthand, and became reporter of debates in the Commons for
the Morning
Chronicle. He contributed to the Monthly
Magazine (1833–5), the Evening Chronicle (1835), and
other periodicals. These articles, subsequently republished as
Sketches
by Boz, Illustrative of Every‐Day Life
and Every‐Day People (1836–7), attracted much attention. An
approach from *Chapman
and Hall led to the publication in twenty monthly numbers (beginning
April 1836) of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,
published in volume form in 1837 (see Pickwick
Papers). After a slow start the series achieved
immense popularity, and Dickens, with his young wife Catherine
Hogarth, embarked on a promising future, courted by publishers,
admired by the public, and befriended by celebrities. On Christmas
Day 1836 he met John
*Forster, who became a lifelong friend, and his
biographer.
“In 1837 (a year overshadowed by the
death of his much‐loved sister‐in‐law Mary) Oliver
Twist began to appear in monthly numbers in
Bentley's
Miscellany, a new periodical of which Dickens
was the first editor. It was followed by Nicholas
Nickleby, also in monthly numbers. In 1840 a
new weekly was launched, written wholly by Dickens, called Master
Humphrey's Clock; it was originally intended
to carry short sketches as well as instalments of the full‐length
novels The
*Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and his
long‐deliberated Barnaby
Rudge (1841). The novels proved so popular
that the linking by ‘Master Humphrey’ was dropped. In 1842 he
and his wife visited America, where he was rapturously received. His
first impressions were favourable, but disillusion followed and his
American Notes (1842) caused much offence in America, as
did his portrayal of American stereotypes in Martin
Chuzzlewit (1843–4). While in America he
advocated international copyright and the abolition of slavery.
“The sales of Martin Chuzzlewit
were disappointing, but the demands of the public and his own
growing family were met by the success of A
*Christmas Carol (1843), the first of a series
of Christmas books (The
*Chimes, The
*Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of
Life, and The
*Haunted Man), works described by him as ‘a
whimsical sort of masque intended to awaken loving and forebearing
thoughts’. In 1844 he paid a long visit to Italy, which produced
‘Pictures from Italy’ contributed to the Daily
News, a new radical paper founded by Dickens
in 1846 and briefly edited by him. He began Dombey
and Son (1848) during a visit to Switzerland
in 1846. In 1850 he started the weekly periodical Household
Words; in 1859 it was incorporated into All
the Year Round, which he continued to edit until his death. In
this he published much of his later writings, including the
Christmas stories that replaced the Christmas books. David
Copperfield appeared in monthly numbers in 1849–50; Bleak
House in 1852–3; and A Child's History
of England (a work which manifests his own historical bias: his
heroes were Alfred and Cromwell) appeared irregularly, 1851–3.
Hard
Times appeared in 1854, Little
Dorrit in 1855–7, A
*Tale of Two Cities in 1859, Great
Expectations in 1860–61, and Our
Mutual Friend in 1864–5.
“During these years of intense
productivity he also found time for his large family, for a vast
circle of friends, and for philanthropic enterprises, at times
combined with his passion for amateur theatricals; it was a
fund‐raising performance of Wilkie
*Collins's The Frozen Deep in 1857,
in aid of Douglas
*Jerrold's family, that introduced him to the
young actress Ellen Ternan. His admiration for her further strained
his deteriorating relationship with his wife, and he and Catherine
separated in 1858. He defied scandal, protested his own innocence
(and that of his sister‐in‐law Georgina, for many years his
devoted housekeeper, whose name gossip had also linked with his),
and continued to appear in public, distracting himself from domestic
sorrow by throwing his restless energy into public readings of his
own works. These, though immensely successful, were physically and
emotionally exhausting. He revisited America in 1867–8, delivered
a series of readings there, and on his return continued to tour the
provinces. He died suddenly in 1870, leaving unfinished his last
novel, The
*Mystery of Edwin Drood.
“Dickens captured the popular
imagination as no other novelist had done and, despite murmurs
against his sensationalism and sentimentality and his inability to
portray women other than as innocents or grotesques, he was also
held in high critical esteem, admired by contemporaries as varied as
Queen Victoria
and Dostoevsky.
His popularity and fame proved durable, but it was not until the
20th century that he began to attract academic attention; see in
particular George *Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, in Inside the
Whale (1940), Humphry *House, The Dickens World (1941),
and Edmund *Wilson, ‘Dickens: The Two Scrooges’, in The Wound
and the Bow (1941). Later criticism has tended to praise the
complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the
high‐spirited humour and genius for caricature traditionally
labelled ‘Dickensian’. A series of distinguished illustrators
inseparably connected with his work, including Hablot
K. *Browne (‘Phiz’), John
*Leech, George
*Cruikshank, George Cattermole, and Samuel
Luke Fildes, meant that he had a significant impact on the visual
culture of the period. He collaborated with Wilkie Collins in
various stories which appeared in Household Words. See John
Forster, The Life of Dickens (1872–4); Edgar Johnson,
Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952); Paul
Schlicke, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens (1999);
Peter Ackroyd, Charles Dickens (2002). A collected edition of
Dickens's c.14,000 letters, instigated by Humphry House, was
published in twelve volumes under the general editorship of Madeline
House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson (1965–2002).”
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