Charles Dickens: A Life (43 page)

Spreading his fog, and throwing in a dinosaur for good measure, Dickens makes this the most powerful beginning of all his novels, as he rolls out the dark, dirty English earth and sky to set the theme of the book. It will take on the worst aspects of the legal system – its inhumanity, sloth, corruption and obstruction – as a basis for a larger matter, the bad governance of society as a whole; and it will show the physical sickness of London – its toxic water, rotten housing, bursting graveyards and festering sewerage – as part of the effects of that bad governance. There will be almost none of the high-spirited comedy of the early novels: most of the jokes in
Bleak House
are edged with horror.

Dickens is writing as a poet, taking as much delight in delineating wickedness and dark places as goodness and beauty. His imagination, always bold, now offers scenes as odd and inspired as Shakespeare’s, like half-crazed Miss Flite, whose madness tells the truth, and who keeps linnets and goldfinches caged in her window, giving them names, Hope, Joy, Youth, Ruin, Despair and Madness. The horribly respectable solicitor Vholes, given to entangling his victims like a snake, is shown giving ‘one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of his client’. The Smallweed family, worshippers of the god of Compound Interest, vicious in pursuit of money, despisers of storybooks, fairy-tales, dolls and games, are seen at home meanly doling out stale crusts and drops from the bottoms of used teacups for the supper of their child servant, Charley. She has left her small brother and baby sister locked in a room to keep them safe while she is out working, and she is their sole support. Such things were imagined by Dickens: their factual counterpart can be found in Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
, published in the 1840s.

The second chapter of
Bleak House
sets the plot in motion, as Lady Dedlock, a society beauty married to an elderly landowner, faints when she catches sight of the handwriting on a legal document brought by the family lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn. His curiosity is aroused and he decides to find out why she fainted. Mr Tulkinghorn dislikes women, seeing them as creatures who have secrets and interfere in his relations with his aristocratic male clients, and he is pleased to have a reason to hunt her down. This will be a mystery story, a whodunnit, as well as an account of English society. Dickens believed in entertaining his readers, and giving them a good plot was a way to do it. For him, popularity and high art were not at odds, and
Bleak House
is one of the first detective stories in the language, with a classic three-suspect murder at the climax. It is also a nineteenth-century fairy-tale or pantomime, with good and evil spirits, reversals, discoveries of lost parents and children, comedy and pathos, violent and tragic deaths and triumphs of love.

The third chapter introduces a narrator, Esther, and moves for the first time into the past tense. Throughout the book the author’s narrative remains in the present, while Esther’s account of her experiences is threaded in the past tense, varying the perspective. Esther is self-deprecating and anxious to be loved because she has grown up without parents and been told that she is the child of a sinful mother; happily, when her gloomy female guardian dies, she comes into the care of a benevolent cousin, Mr Jarndyce of Bleak House, who is also taking in two other orphaned cousins, Richard and Ada. They are all wards of Chancery, and its victims too, since the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has been running in the Chancery court for decades, wrecking lives as it goes. The kindly Mr Jarndyce has turned his back on the case and advises them to do the same; Esther becomes his housekeeper at Bleak House, and loves Ada and Richard like a sister.

Readers from Charlotte Brontë on have been irritated by Esther’s tone, always the cheerful little woman and nobly forgetful of self. There were probably more women of her type about in the mid-nineteenth century than now, self-sacrificing to the point of masochism because of the way they had been reared and trained. But she is not stupid, and she can make trenchant remarks. When Miss Flite talks of honours given to good people, it is Esther who observes that ‘it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services … unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.’
⁵
There is a small link with life in that, as suggested in
Chapter 12
, Dickens took her name from Esther Elton, the orphaned girl he helped from 1843 on, who impressed him so strongly with her ‘quiet, unpretending, domestic heroism; of a most affecting and interesting kind’. Her having been her father’s housekeeper, her devotion to her younger sisters and brother and what he called ‘her self-denial in a hundred ways’ – all indicate that she was in his mind as he created the character of Esther Summerson.
⁶

In Honoria, Lady Dedlock, and her sister, there may also be an allusion to the beautiful Sheridan sisters, brought up in society but without any fortune, marrying into the aristocracy in the case of Henrietta and Jane, and in Caroline’s case involved in a scandal. It is situation, not character, he is using here, and Lady Dedlock is defined by her situation, shown as hardly more than a face, a figure and a haughty manner over the secret that threatens her with scandal. Other borrowings from life are well known: the detective Mr Bucket modelled on his friend Chief Inspector Field, and the French lady’s maid Hortense on a notorious Frenchwoman, Mrs Manning, whom Dickens saw hanged. Mr Boythorn, drawn from Walter Savage Landor, appears like him as a good-hearted blusterer, and pleased everyone who knew him. But Leigh Hunt, his family and friends were distressed by the portrait of the aesthete Skimpole, charming of speech and then revealed as a cold-hearted sponger, and although Dickens protested he had not meant to portray him, he was not believed, and the harm was done.

Bleak House
contains few happy families and many single people, broken relationships and children orphaned or divided from parents. Esther, Ada, Richard, Charley Neckett and her siblings, Phil Squod, Guster and Jo have all lost their parents. Jarndyce, Boythorn, Krook, George Rouncewell, Gridley and Tulkinghorn are bachelors, and Skimpole, who has a wife and children, scarcely allows them to impinge on his life. Miss Flite is a spinster. Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are seemingly childless, and Lady Dedlock prefers death to the social stigma of being revealed as the mother of an illegitimate child. The Snagsbys are childless, although Mrs Snagsby suspects her husband of having fathered the street boy Jo. Mrs Jellyby has a family she neglects and a husband she reduces to bankruptcy. And so on. The Smallweeds are a close family, joined by mutual dislike and mistrust. Only the Bagnets present a warm and united group, the father an Army man, the mother indomitable, the son and daughters good and well behaved.

Child workers always caught Dickens’s attention, and in this book there are several: Jo, the ignorant and solitary boy who sweeps crossings; Charley, a ‘very little girl’ who claims to be over thirteen, lives alone with her younger brother and baby sister, and goes out to earn their keep by washing for the Smallweed family and others. Guster, a slavey who came from the workhouse and has fits, is now over twenty, but has clearly grown up working for her employers; and Phil Squod, a crippled and disfigured adult who doesn’t know his own age, describes how he started his working life at the age of eight, assisting a tinker. They are all reminders of what Dickens wrote in the proof of
The Old Curiosity Shop
, ‘the poor have no childhood. It must be bought and paid for.’
⁷
His imagined children stand in parallel to the real girls he was currently interviewing for the Home at Shepherd’s Bush, most of them half starved, detached from any families they ever had, some from the workhouse, some from prison, needlewomen, dressmakers or artificial-flower makers, casual or reluctant prostitutes: in the letter to Miss Coutts in which he discussed details of several of them, he told her, ‘I have been so busy, leading up to the great turning idea of the
Bleak House
story, that I have lived this last week or ten days in a perpetual scald and boil.’
⁸

In the book, Caddy Jellyby has been forced to work for her mother and denied a natural, cheerful childhood; and Esther, although kindly treated at her boarding school and happy enough there, works as a pupil teacher and trains herself to put the service of others before her own desires always. Each shows courage and ingenuity, and goodness too. Guster gives her supper to Jo, Squod helps to nurse him. Caddy, once escaped from her mother and married, looks after her preposterously selfish father-in-law and helps her dancing-master husband; Esther is loved by the girls she teaches. Charley remains as good as ever when she is promoted by Mr Jarndyce to become Esther’s maid; only poor Jo, always moved on and too starved and neglected to fight for his life, gives up and dies. He became the most admired and popular figure in the book, taken to the hearts of all the readers who were moved to read of the deaths of children. Dickens has Jo repeating the first few words of the Lord’s Prayer on his deathbed. They mean nothing to him, but he likes ‘Our Father’ – ‘yes, that’s wery good, sir’ – and feels for the hand of the doctor beside him as he says them. Some find this a sentimental presentation, but when it comes to Dickens’s outburst of rage and sorrow that follows Jo’s death there is no doubt that it is linked to a reality well known to him, and he is writing from head as well as heart: ‘Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.’
⁹
There is no talk of angels here, or suffering turning to happiness for Jo.

The theme of the book does not need to be tied to a precise year, but the time is stated as being just before the railways arrived in the mid-1830s. This sets Esther’s birth at about 1815, so that her soldier father would have fought at Waterloo, her mother would have been born in the later 1790s and Sir Leicester Dedlock in 1775, which makes a convincing timeline for each of them.
¹⁰
The story it tells is mostly grim, although peopled by comic and curious characters. There are survivors, and promises of happiness for a few, but many are left dead, or damaged.
¹¹
Bleak House
was ignored in the chief critical reviews, the
Edinburgh
, the
Quarterly
and the
Saturday
; and where it was noticed, although many critics allowed that Dickens was popular and possessed of genius, they also expressed disappointment that he had abandoned humour for the grotesque and contemptible, and that it was ill constructed. Even Forster, while praising its structure and declaring that ‘novels as Mr Dickens writes them rise to the dignity of poems’, found much of the book ‘too real to be pleasant’.
¹²
Readers may have moments of impatience when tension slackens and the strain of keeping all the different strands going is felt, but soon the breadth and richness of Dickens’s conception grows clear again, and his superabundance is felt not as a weakness but as a strength.

Forster said that, while Dickens pretended to be indifferent to criticism, he was hurt by it, and ‘believed himself to be entitled to higher tribute than he was always in the habit of receiving’.
¹³
With
Bleak House
the public took no notice of the critics, and the monthly sales surprised Dickens and his publishers, fluctuating between 34,000 and 43,000. The editor of the
International Monthly Magazine
in America offered $2,000 to Bradbury & Evans for advance sheets and was told that Dickens had no new book in mind, after which
Harper’s
sent their man straight to him and he agreed to let them have advance proofs for $1,728 (£360).
¹⁴
Dombey
and
Copperfield
had both sold very well in America and Dickens had made nothing from them, so although there was still no prospect even of an international copyright agrement, he was negotiating again.
¹⁵
Sales in America rose to 118,000 copies monthly and became a valuable medium for advertising, leading to assertions in the press that Dickens was ‘a literary Croesus’. In fact he made about £11,000 in all from
Bleak House.
Robert Patten puts it memorably: ‘This return was not made from an expensive edition with elaborate binding and inflated price; it came from thousands upon thousands of individuals, putting down their shillings month after month in exchange for another thirty-two pages of tightly-packed letter-press – nearly 20,000 words – and two illustrations.’
¹⁶
Dickens spoke to the people, and the people responded, and saw that
Bleak House
is among the greatest of his books.

The writing took him from the winter of 1851/2 until the autumn of 1853, through his fortieth and forty-first birthdays. As the first episode appeared in March, Catherine gave birth to their seventh son, Edward, named for Bulwer but known in the family as Plorn. Shortly before his birth Dickens wrote to a friend that ‘I begin to count the children incorrectly, they are so many; and to find fresh ones coming down to dinner in a perfect procession, when I thought there were no more’ – a lovely joke, although he complained to Miss Coutts after the birth of Plorn that ‘on the whole I could have dispensed with him’ in a letter that was chiefly about plans to build model dwellings for the poor in the East End.
¹⁷
But Plorn became the spoilt baby of the family, sometimes referred to as ‘the J. B. in W.’ by his father – the Jolliest Boy in the World.

The other jolly boy, Charley, was enjoying Eton and was popular with his schoolfellows. Dickens had adored him from the start, believing that ‘he takes arter his father’ and that he was ‘a child of very uncommon capacity indeed’, although in need of encouragement.
¹⁸
He visited him at Eton, taking the train to Slough or Windsor, with hampers from Fortnum & Mason for a summer water party one July, and a more modest picnic of sandwiches and beer the next. But after two years he became dissatisfied with his progress and told Miss Coutts that while ‘Eton would like to keep Charley making Latin verses for another five years’, it did not seem to him ‘rational in such a case’.
¹⁹
He decided to remove him as soon as he could, although he was only sixteen, and asked him to decide on a career. When Charley said he would like to become an Army officer, which Miss Coutts would certainly have funded by buying him a commission, his father talked him out of the idea at once, with great firmness, and persuaded him that a career in business would be the thing. Charley had little option but to agree, and he was promptly removed from Eton and packed off to Leipzig to learn German and start acquiring commercial skills. After nine months there his German teacher told Dickens that the dear boy had learnt the language pretty well but advised against commercial school, because severe discipline would not suit him, and besides he showed little interest in becoming a merchant. The hapless Charley, keen to please his father but with no interest at all in commerce, went home to be lectured further. Dickens reported to Miss Coutts that he suffered from ‘lassitude of character, a very serious thing in a man’ and that he had ‘less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son’.
²⁰
He tried telling him about his own hard-working youth, and was dismayed by Charley’s response, which was to wonder at his father and show no inclination to emulate his habits.