FINALLY! AT LAST! I've finished Charles Dickens's
Bleak House. Lots of dog-eared pages, but I'll start with a question. Esther Summerson, the heroine and sometimes narrator, comes down with a serious disease. She survives, but her face is disfigured. The disease is never named; her face is never described. I assume it's some form of pox, but I'm curious about what type. A plague isn’t raging; only one other character has it, the young man who gave it to Esther after a brief and casual meeting. Any ideas as to what the disease was?
And onto pages. Actually there are so many this time that I'm going to divide them into categories.
Admired writing:
1) In a courtroom "(E)ighteen of Mr. Tanglewood's learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity." (page 6) Cool imagery, nice symmetry—and the fact that writers were paid by the word isn't yet bothering me.
2) "One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow." (page 477) Wow! Do you think that sentence came to Dickens fully formed or did he have to plan it out, word by word? Either way, there's a good chance I'll never whisper again.
3) "It wont do to have truth and justice on his side ; he must have law and lawyers." (page 788) How little some things have changed!
Characters and characterization
1) "Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to the neighbors' thinking, one voice too. That voice, appearing to proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook's Court very often." (page 136) Those two sentences, IMHO, reveal lots about each of the Snagsbys—and their relationship.
2) "Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell." (page 156) I know people like that.
3) A minor character named Judy is in the flower business. "One might infer, from Judy's appearance, that her business rather lay with the thorns than the flowers." (page 310) Character nailed!
4) A supporting character, Mrs. Jellyby, is IMHO the most memorable character in the book. Always she is working for the poor in far off lands, staying so busy that her own family is habitually neglected. Her husband, who speaks infrequently, offers his daughter one piece of advice regarding marriage: "Never have a Mission, my dear child." (page 445)
5) "He is a very good speaker. Plain and emphatic." (page 603) Words to warm this old speech teacher's heart.
6) "A habit in him of speaking to the poor, and of avoiding patronage or condescension (which is the favorite device, many deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books) …" (page 663) Words reminding me of elementary teachers who would take a college speech course during their summer break. Oh, the horror of listening to speeches in a style and tone appropriate for third graders!
7) Then there's the character description that explains why I wound up smart--if I did. "… with his wits sharpened, as I have no doubt they are, by the loss of the use of his limbs, which occasions his animation to mount up into his head …" (page 775) Gee. Think that means that if I ever get out of the wheelchair, I won't be able to banter with you guys?
8) At one point Esther goes to have a serious talk with a man who ignores all practical aspects of living. He says, "Why should you allude to anything that is not a pleasant matter? I never do. And you are a much pleasanter creature, in every point of view, than I. Then if I never allude to an unpleasant matter, how much less should you !. So that’s disposed of, and we will talk of something else." (page 872) Sad to say, his reasoning doesn't work and the man is forced to take Esther's message seriously.
Changing language, grammar and punctuation
1) Two sentences on page 151 caught my attention: "Ah, to be sure, so there is !" and "… says the surgeon ;" Yes, there are spaces before the exclamation point and the semicolon. At first I thought they were printing errors, so I watched and watched. Consistent throughout the book. Used only by the publisher of this edition (Thomas Nelson and Sons) or has the space vanished over the years? Any ideas?
2) "Pot-liquor," a term I never encountered until I moved to the South, was around in Dickens's day. (page 408)
3) "He was only passing by and he stopped to prose." (page 473) "Prose" was once a verb?
4) How de do?" was around then. (page 505) I thought we 'Merkins were the only ones to mangle the king's English.
5) A character is being arrested. The officer says, "It's my duty to inform you that any observations you may make will be liable to be used against you." (page 715) Dang! I didn't realize the Miranda warning had been around that long.
6) Bureaucracy also ran rampant in those days. "One official sent her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in evading their duties rather than performing them." (page 456) And just think: that was before phones and being put on hold and pressing number one if you speak English, etc. Dickens's characters would have felt right at home today.
Plotting
1) I like the following because it seems to sum up a thread/thesis that runs through all the Dickens novels I have read. "What connection can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo, the outlaw with the broom …. What connection can there have been many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who from opposite sides of great gulfs, have nevertheless been very curiously brought together?" (page 232) I remember reading
Great Expectations in the eighth grade. A group of us saw how Dickens was going to have all the characters related, and we started guessing what the remaining relationships would be. Happy to say, we got most of them. BTW, I liked
Great Expectations much better than
Bleak House.
2) Thematically, lawyers and law suits take a beating in
Bleak House. At one point a peripheral character, a woman who's a bit crazy from spending all her time in court following one case, adds two birds to her collection. "I call them the Wards in Jarndyce (member of a law firm). They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach." (page 864) Yep. The law and lawyers can pretty much take over a life.
Three final thoughts.
1) The physical book I was reading was one that had been in my father's library for as long as I can remember. While reading, memories of a distant conversation came to mind. First, I've always been a fan of bleak—weather, houses, Edward Gorey drawings, what have you. Anything bleak has a cold, austere feel that I like. So I was fascinated by the title
Bleak House. Once I asked my father, a diehard Dickens fan, if it was a good book. He shook his head and said, "It's not one of his best." Now, many years and many pages later, I have to admit I agree.
2) I was disappointed in the characters. IMHO, Dickens is known for his characters. In fact, a passing reference to the woman who was so involved in her Mission that she neglected her family was one of the things that led me to read
Bleak House now. But she wasn't simply mentioned by name as many Dickens characters are. Mrs. Jellyby hasn't become symbolic of a type of person the way Scrooge, Tiny Tim or Miss Havisham have.
3) Speaking of why I read
Bleak House: It was mentioned in the book I read about cholera in England in the 1800s, saying it gave a good picture of life at that time. I disagree. IMHO Dickens presents a much clearer—and shorter—view of London then with the places Scrooge visits during
A Christmas Carol, which now goes on the reading list for Christmas 2009.
