Theme: Artistic features of the novel "Bleak House"by Charles Dickens

Theme: Artistic features of the novel "Bleak House"by Charles Dickens
Plan:
Introduction…………………………….…………………….3
Chapter I ……………………………………….…………….4
1.1 About Legacy of Charles Dickens's Bleak House …….……………. …..4
1.2. Critical Essay Technique and Style in Bleak House …………………..11
1.3. Critical Essays Setting of Bleak House ………………………14
Chapter II …………………………………………………..20
2.1. Critical Essays Symbolism in Bleak House ………………….……20
2.2 Summary of Charles Dickens's Bleak House..………………..25
Conclusion ……..……………………………………………32
Reference ………….………………………………………..34

1.1. About Legacy of Charles Dickens's Bleak House

Dickens began writing Bleak House in November 1851, towards the end of the year of the Great Exhibition, that symbol of the high-water mark of Victorian Britain. Looking back on the year, the Manchester Guardian asserted that were ‘good grounds for satisfaction, for hope, and for self-approval’. Dickens did not concur. The period during which Bleak House was written and serialized, Dickens was involved in what was, even for him, a remarkably energetic whirl of activities – not only literary, but much of it concerned with social reform. During the first three years of the 1850s, Dickens was editing the weekly literary magazine Household Words, launched in March 1850, writing his A Child’s History of England, and touring the country with theatrical productions. At the same time he was deeply involved in reforming causes. He was actively engaged in the running of Urania Cottage, the home for homeless women that he had set up with Angela Burdett Coutts in Shepherd’s Bush in 1847; he was an active supporter of the Ragged School movement; and he promoted reforming causes through public speaking and a stream of articles in Household Words. Inevitably, these interests found their way into the new book he was writing, one whose darkness of tone was at odds with the national mood of complacency and self-congratulation. The sombre mood of Bleak House no doubt derived, too, from the tragedies that Dickens experienced in his personal life at this time: the death of his father, followed only two weeks later by the death of his infant daughter Dora. The novel brings us to Bleak House, a metaphor for cosy Victorian England, a home ruined by the machinations of a legal system that had become ‘a by-word for delay, slow agony of mind, despair, impoverishment, trickery, confusion, and insupportable injustice’ (as Dickens wrote in Household Words). But although Bleak House was once ‘a dreary place’, since being inherited by the generous and good-hearted John Jarndyce it has been transformed into a place of comfort, light and warmth. Jarndyce has inherited the place from his great-uncle Tom who, caught up in the cogs of the endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Chancery, had finally blown his brains out, leaving ‘the signs of his misery upon it’. It had been called, before his time, the Peaks. He gave it its present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and ruined. Yet, despite its ‘light and warmth, and comfort’, and its picturesque qualities, this place of contentment is beset by the ‘east winds’ that Dickens sees swirling through moribund mid-century Britain: the unreformed ills of industrialization, corruption, and smug self-satisfaction. Central to Dickens’ vision in Bleak House is how rich and poor are inextricably bound to one another, and how contagion – both physical and mental – can quickly spread. Though the overall tone is sombre, the novel is illuminated by the satire through which Dickens expresses his anger at social inequality and hypocrisy, and his sympathy for the plight of the poor. All of Dickens novels have relevance today, but Bleak House is probably the one which offers the most wide-ranging, most insightful treatment of themes that remain pertinent: compassion and lack of it; corruption and greed; the inhumane treatment of the poor; the irrelevance of Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics at Westminster; the way in which those responsible for destitution distance themselves from the actions which cause it:
A ruthless set of bloody-minded villains… perfect savage… superlative blackguards…Damn the Tories – they will win here, I am afraid.
– Dickens writing in 1835 to Catherine Hogarth, soon to be his wife.
The novel’s opening must be one of the greatest in literature: the fog that envelops London being Dickens’ metaphor for the state of British society and, in particular, his main target – the Court of Chancery, with its labyrinthine practices that bring misery and ruin to its victims and riches to unscrupulous lawyers who feed upon its outmoded procedures London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. G K Chesterton wrote of the opening paragraphs of Bleak House that ‘Dickens’s openings are almost always good; but the opening of Bleak House is good in a quite new and striking sense’: The description of the fog in the first chapter of Bleak House is good in itself; but it is not merely good in itself … Dickens begins in the Chancery fog because he means to end in the Chancery fog. … The beginning is alpha and omega: the beginning and the end. He means that all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour. … Almost everything is calculated to assert and re-assert the savage morality of Dickens’s protest against a particular social evil. …The fog of the first chapter never lifts. Another thing about that opening: its grammatical modernity that intensifies the atmosphere of constant action and movement, the swirl of juxtaposed activities in the big city fog. Beginning with a verb-less, one word sentence. The absence of finite verbs. The insistent dangling participles that convey a feeling of continuous action. The unusual present tense narration which invests vividness and immediacy, suggesting that things are happening right now – as we watch. As we read on we become aware, too, that Dickens has employed a unique narrative structure. The story is told both by an omniscient, third-person narrator and a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson. The third-person narrator speaks in the present tense, ranging widely across geographic and social space (from the aristocratic Dedlock estate to the desperately poor Tom-All-Alone’s in London), and gives full rein to Dickens’s desire to satirise the English chancery system. Esther Summerson tells her own story in the past tense (like David in David Copperfield or Pip in Great Expectations), and her narrative voice is characterised by modesty (‘I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever’), consciousness of her own limits, and willingness to disclose to us her own thoughts and feelings. Yet, as her narrative develops, she displays astute moral judgement and satiric observation.
The front cover of No. 1, March 1852 Satire and social criticism is at the heart of Bleak House. Re-reading it made me realise that it was this element of overt satire that was missing from John Lanchester’s novel Capital, a few years back. Set against the background of the imminent banking collapse of 2008, it was often described as ‘Dickensian’ for the social range of its characters. What it lacked, however, was Dickens’ savage satire. And Dickens is at his most savagely satirical in his portrayal of Chancery – the court that adjudicated in disputes over land-ownership, debts, inheritance and trusts, which by the 19th century had become synonymous with expense, delay and inconclusiveness. There had been repeated parliamentary inquiries, but no reform. Instead, its bureaucratic culture and exploitative court fees continued to blight many innocent lives. Dickens had himself experienced Chancery’s corruption in 1844 when, having successfully blocked publication of a pirate edition of A Christmas Carol, instead of damages he was faced with costs of £700. The overarching metaphor of the novel is the suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce whose costs are steadily beggaring its litigants. It’s a metaphor for corruption and decay not confined to the area of London around the Inns of Court but spreading throughout the land: The Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!” In another passage we feel the full force of Dickens’ satirical anger: The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble. The names of the birds kept by the Chancery supplicant Miss Flight are another expressive metaphor for the blight which afflicted litigants at the court: 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. Krook’s Rag and Bottle Warehouse – the site of the novel’s most memorable episode, Krook’s spontaneous combustion – offers yet another metaphor for Chancery, this time as parody. In his shop Krook collects junk and old paper. The neighbours call him the Lord Chancellor, and his shop, the Court of Chancery. The shop is described as being cluttered with sacks of old rags, piles of parchment scrolls and heaps of mouldering, discoloured dog-eared law papers. Any old rubbish is bought by Crook, not least waste paper: Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold there. […] The shop had in several little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the law. It is here Lady Dedlock’s letters to Esther’s father turn up, and where he dies. Upstairs, Miss Flite keeps her captive birds that will be released only when the case is closed. The illiterate Krook hoards documents but cannot read them, a parody on the court that wastes interminable amounts of time on legal briefs, only to become more and more confused by them. At the court, huge sacks of papers are carried out of at the conclusion of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, echoing the mounds of junk in Krook’s shop. At the end of the first chapter, the narrator observes, as a case in Chancery is adjourned:
A battery of blue bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre – why so much the better.
Krook’s spontaneous combustion: illustration by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne)
In the novel’s terrifying symbolic scene it is Krook, the ‘Chancellor’, who is consumed by fire, his spontaneous combustion described as The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally – inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only – spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died. Jo and Lady Dedlock at the graveyard, by Phiz But Dickens’ indictment of British society ranges much wider than Chancery. Targets in the novel include ‘telescopic’ philanthropists who sanctimoniously do good abroad whilst being blind to the condition of the poor at home (Mrs. Jellyby); slum housing (Tom All-Alone’s where Jo the crossing-sweeper lives); overcrowded and insanitary urban graveyards (such as the one to which Jo leads Lady Dedlock); neglect of contagious disease (the brick-makers’ hovels); electoral corruption (the Coodle and Doodle campaign); pompous, hypocritical preachers (Mr Chadband); scheming, exploitative lawyers (Tulkinghorn et al); class divisions (a host of impressions from the huge cast of characters – from the landed aristocracy of the Dedlocks of Chesney Wold, to the noveau-riche iron-master Roundwell, to the brick-makers and their wives and, ultimately, Jo the crossing-sweeper); and the educational needs of the poor (Krook copying words which he does not understand, or Jo, again): Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. HE can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? Knows a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie. Don’t recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows both. Tom-All-Alone’s: illustration by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) Some readers, including Dickens’ friend and future biographer John Forster, were disturbed by the outspoken nature of Dickens’ attack on social ills. Nevertheless, sales of the serialized parts were higher than for David Copperfield, helping to make him one of the richest men in Britain. The novel not only presents a social critique; it also emphasises the interconnectedness of rich and poor, the way that rich and poor lived in close conjunction, walking the same streets, sharing the same malodorous air. In Household Words, Dickens had written of ‘the startling depths of mental ignorance and neglect concealed beneath our hollow shows of civilisation’. All of this is brought together in the pitiful figure of the illiterate crossing sweeper, Jo who lives in the neglected, decaying and disease-ridden slum Tom-All-Alone’s. Although Dickens’s description of the poverty and unsanitary conditions in Tom-All-Alone’s is fictional, it was all true, based on his reading of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1851, the year in which Dickens began Bleak House: Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings. From the enormous cast of characters that populate the social landscape delineated by Dickens in Bleak House, I will just pick out the figure of Inspector Bucket of the Detective, since Bleak House is been cited as the first novel in which a detective plays a significant role.
England’s first Detective division had been founded in 1842, just a decade before the novel’s publication. Bucket was based on a real detective, a friend of Dickens, Charles Field. He had been one of the first detectives recruited, and had taken over management of the division in 1846. During his fourteen year stint as Chief of the Detective Branch, Field would often accompany Dickens on his late night walks around London. Fields retired in 1852 and worked as a private investigator until 1865. Bucket is, perhaps, the only figure in Bleak House able to see through the impenetrable fog that envelops its characters. With his ‘attentive face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him’, he notices absolutely everything. Bucket can fade right into the background, whether as an observer or as a ‘composed and quiet listener’, sometimes lurking in the street ‘in the guise of a pedestrian’. He has an often-noted characteristic: a large index finger, often ‘in an impressive state of action’: Mr Bucket and his fat forefinger are much in consultation together…. When Mr Bucket has a matter of this pressing interest under his consideration, the fat forefinger seems to rise, to the dignity of a familiar demon. He puts it to his ears, and it whispers information; he puts it to his lips, and it enjoins him to secrecy; he rubs it over his nose, and it sharpens his scent; he shakes it before a guilty man, and it charms him to his destruction. The Augurs of the Detective Temple invariably predict that when Mr Bucket and that finger are in much conference, a terrible avenger will be heard of before long. Frontispiece and title-page of Bleak House Taking an overview of the novel in his study Dickens, Peter Ackroyd argued that despite some talk of Bleak House inaugurating Dickens’ ‘dark period’, the novel is not significantly different in tone to episodes in earlier books, such as Oliver Twist. What is different, he writes, is ‘the way in which he closely packs together all the aspects of his vision’. Bleak House is ‘more closely written than its predecessors’ conjuring forth A world in which people are tightly bound together – in ties of duty, ties of love, ties of charity, ties of relationship, ties of debt so that the novel grows dark with the mass of lives fluttering together within it.
For Ackroyd, Dickens’ writing in Bleak House is ‘filled with power, containing the language of sentiment as well as the rhetoric of political satire, the cadence of polemic and the expression of wonder.’ In her survey of Dickens’ work, Jane Smiley writes that in Bleak House, He created a new sort of English novel, one that explores and questions the construction of English culture and society as a whole rather than merely certain institutions. Smiley observes how Dickens locates the tragedies of his characters ‘in institutions outside of their control and then analyses how some characters fail while others manage to cope.’ Overall, Jane Smiley casts Bleak House in a darker light than Ackroyd: Bleak House is the most unhopeful of Dickens’ novels. Characters such as Esther and Jarndyce at best succeed in holding off decay rather than transcending it, as characters in earlier books succeeded in doing (such as the Micawbers going off to a new life in Australia in David Copperfield).
As well as having seen and thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Davies’ BBC TV dramatisation, this is my third reading of Bleak House. It remains a favourite of mine. Maybe the fascination that the novel has had for me has something to do with early childhood experience. I grew up in the middle house in a terraced row of cottages in a Cheshire village. If I turned right out of the front door I would cross an unadopted and unsurfaced lane that petered out in fields, now lost beneath tracts of suburban houses. At the bottom of that lane, behind high hedges, stood a dark and mysterious house, reputedly inhabited by a lady who lived alone and was rarely seen. The name on the gate was ‘Bleak House’. On the bookshelf at home was a row of the complete works of Dickens, bound in red and engraved with gold lettering, published around 1910. As a very young child, knowing the house just along the road, I would stare at the title on the spine – Bleak House – and wonder what mystery was contained within its covers. Legal corruption permeates this novel like a disease, issuing in particular from the Byzantine lawsuit with which all the book’s characters have a connection. Dickens provides his customary witty dissection of the layers of Victorian society. Characters—from the wearyingly earnest to the brilliantly shallow, from the foolish and foppish to the vampiristic and dangerous—are all illuminated in the darkness of Dickens’s outraged urbane opus. In reality, it is the public sphere as a whole that is satirized in Bleak House. Everything resembles Chancery: Parliament, the provincial aristocracy, and even Christian philanthropy is caricatured as moribund and self-serving. The narrative, which is split between the third person and Esther, concerns moral disposition as much as social criticism. The novel has also been hailed as a progenitor of the genre of detective fiction, with the methodical and dogged Inspector Bucket as the first police detective hero in English literature.
1.2. Critical Essay Technique and Style in Bleak House
Bleak House was written about a century and a half ago. Prose style, like almost everything else, has changed. Naturally today's reader may find Dickens' manner rather unfamiliar and in some ways a bit difficult. In order to see Bleak House in the right perspective, it is necessary to pursue this point. Many people today are no longer well-practiced readers. Television and film are the preferred pastimes, and what people do read is more likely to be journalism (or the captions under pictures) than the prose of a literary artist like Dickens. Dickens wrote for an audience that loved to read and was unafraid to tackle a work of serious literature. Such a receptive and well prepared, or at least cooperative, audience freed Dickens to pitch his writing at a level that satisfied his artistic conscience. Bleak House was written about a century and a half ago. Prose style, like almost everything else, has changed. Naturally today's reader may find Dickens' manner rather unfamiliar and in some ways a bit difficult. In order to see Bleak House in the right perspective, it is necessary to pursue this point. Many people today are no longer well-practiced readers. Television and film are the preferred pastimes, and what people do read is more likely to be journalism (or the captions under pictures) than the prose of a literary artist like Dickens. Dickens wrote for an audience that loved to read and was unafraid to tackle a work of serious literature. Such a receptive and well prepared, or at least cooperative, audience freed Dickens to pitch his writing at a level that satisfied his artistic conscience. In other words, Dickens was not forced to use only a very limited vocabulary or to forego subtleties of tone and emphasis; nor did he feel obliged to keep all his sentences short and simply constructed when emotion or the complexity of an idea cried out for longer or more complicated ones. He also knew that his readers were responsive to playfulness in words and hence would not insist that he keep coming bluntly to the point and "get on with things"; and so he was free to play one of his favorite roles: the entertainer — here a verbal entertainer, as elsewhere a mimic or theatrical entertainer (Dickens was an active public reader, actor, and practical joker as well as an author). In Bleak House, Dickens turns a "classical allusion" into a joke — but only because his readers, far more literate than today's readers, would recognize the allusion and therefore appreciate the twist. When we read Dickens (or any nineteenth-century writer), we need to remember this fortunate, productive relationship between the author and the reading public. Despite their strong streak of puritanism and the limitations inherent in their middle-class outlook, Dickens' readers, far from demanding that the author write down to their level, were generally eager to have a book that helped them up to a higher level. They wanted guidance on the issues of the times and they also wanted to "progress" personally by becoming more knowledgeable (about sundry matters) and more skilled in language. Nineteenth-century society considered skill in writing and reading necessary for anyone who aspired to be genteel — or even civilized. In a great many households and throughout the educational system, the promotion of these skills had the power of moral force. In short, a writer in Dickens' era had great respect for his audience and a strong rapport with it — an exciting situation to be in!
Even in casual conversation, the characters in Bleak House (except for those at or near the very bottom of the social ladder, like Jo) speak rather elaborately. Their grammar (unless Dickens is making fun of some idiosyncrasy of expression) is flawless; they command a sophisticated vocabulary and tend to favor the formal word or phrase; their sentences can become quite involved without becoming unclear. It may be hard for us to believe that people ever really spoke that way. But they did. Correctness, in language as in manners, was a central concern for the typical middle-class person. Correctness and relative formality of expression were part and parcel of a society that was both stratified into classes and strongly influenced by classical education. Bleak House has two oddities of technique — that is, the manner in which the story is presented. First, throughout the novel, there is an alternation in the point of view from which the story is being told. Second, there is a corresponding alternation between present tense and past tense.
Sustained use of present-tense narration is so unusual that, as we read, we hardly know what to expect from moment to moment. Thus there is a sort of suspense in the method itself as well as in the plot. It forces us to be enjoyably alert — and we've already had to become quite alert in order to catch Dickens' persistent verbal irony — that is, his saying one thing but actually meaning something else. This combination of continual irony and present-tense narration gives the writing great intensity. By far the larger part of the story is narrated in this way by the omniscient author." But, surprisingly, Dickens switches every now and then to "Esther's Narrative," allowing Esther Summerson to do some of the telling. This alternation strikes many people as an awkward and highly artificial technique because the reader remains aware that "Esther's Narrative" is still really Dickens' narrative. In other words, the alternation causes the point of view to call attention to itself for no good reason. The simultaneous change from present to past tense makes the awkwardness all the more conspicuous. On the other hand, even if they "come at a price," Esther's narratives are a welcome relief. Present-tense narration is (as noted above) vivid and intense — it is the closest that fiction can get to the intensity of drama, where action is unfolded in the present, as one watches. But for this very reason, relief is needed. In an immensely long work like Bleak House, intensity can become fatiguing.
With the switch to the lower intensity of past tense comes an equally welcome change of tone. Dickens' "omniscient author" narration is almost consistently mocking or satiric in tone. It is a brilliant achievement but it is still basically monochromatic, or one-toned. Esther's narratives provide the contrast. Her outlook is as fresh and innocent as Dickens' is suavely jaded, and she has as many tones as she has responses. Within the omniscient author portion of the book, Dickens makes his presentation as entertaining as possible, going out of his way to create variety and liveliness. He keeps us awake and amused by varying his tempo and the lengths and structures of his sentences; he uses racy colloquialisms, creates original figures of speech, forceful repetitions and parallel constructions, staccato-like fragments, and other attention-getting techniques. Dickens' taste in plot seems to have been influenced by the eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews, 1742; Tom Jones, 1749) than by anyone else. In any event, the typical Dickens plot, like the plots of Fielding, is complicated, loosely constructed, and highly dramatic in the incidents that make it up. The main plot is usually interwoven with a number of subplots that involve numerous incidents and cover a period of several, or many, years. Such multiplicity militates against the possibility of feeling the story's unity distinctly — that is, of holding all the incidents in our mind at once and feeling their connectedness. Plot looseness (looseness of construction) can mean various things. Some of the subplots may not be related to the main plot; one or more of the subplots may be more tightly developed or inherently more interesting than the main plot; creaky devices of highly improbable coincidence may be brought in to get the author out of a jam created by lack of advance planning; or the main plot itself may consist of several self-contained episodes rather than of a central, developing, unified action. The main plot of Bleak House — the story of Lady Dedlock's past unfolding in the present and developing into a new situation that involves the book's other heroine, Esther Summerson — though complicated is artistically controlled, and the subplots are kept subordinate and, for the most part, are woven smoothly into it.
Dickens' taste in plot seems to have been influenced by the eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews, 1742; Tom Jones, 1749) than by anyone else. In any event, the typical Dickens plot, like the plots of Fielding, is complicated, loosely constructed, and highly dramatic in the incidents that make it up. The main plot is usually interwoven with a number of subplots that involve numerous incidents and cover a period of several, or many, years. Such multiplicity militates against the possibility of feeling the story's unity distinctly — that is, of holding all the incidents in our mind at once and feeling their connectedness. Plot looseness (looseness of construction) can mean various things. Some of the subplots may not be related to the main plot; one or more of the subplots may be more tightly developed or inherently more interesting than the main plot; creaky devices of highly improbable coincidence may be brought in to get the author out of a jam created by lack of advance planning; or the main plot itself may consist of several self-contained episodes rather than of a central, developing, unified action. The main plot of Bleak House — the story of Lady Dedlock's past unfolding in the present and developing into a new situation that involves the book's other heroine, Esther Summerson — though complicated is artistically controlled, and the subplots are kept subordinate and, for the most part, are woven smoothly into it. Plot, in the sense of meaningfully related mental and physical actions, implies directed movement and change. It therefore possesses inherent energy, dynamism. Dickens, an energetic, ambitious, relatively extroverted artist, a born entertainer and lover of vivacity, could be expected to put much of his novelistic stock in plot. This disposition alone would also explain the fact that Dickens' books feature highly dramatic — sometimes melodramatic — sentences. Dickens loved histrionic, action-crammed theatre. He haunted London's theatres, wrote and acted in several plays himself, and loved to give dramatic readings. It isn't surprising that he allowed theatre itself to influence his fiction. In the twentieth century, the deliberately "plotless" novel has had a certain vogue. A number of talented and not-so-talented writers (Virginia Woolf, among the former) decided that since life itself from hour to hour and day to day is seldom dramatic and (worse yet!) sometimes not even noticeably meaningful, truly lifelike (realistic) fiction could forego the luxury of plot. Taking its cue from such writers and their admiring critics, classroom teaching of literature has shown a tendency to think that only bumpkins insist on plot. The same indifference to, or contempt for plot has been shown by writers who proffer, and critics and teachers who want, a social-political (ideological) message more than anything else. Finally, as the stock of writers' and critics' psychological or psychiatric probing of characters has gone up, the value of plot has gone correspondingly down. It may be worthwhile to note that meaningful action, whether physical or mental, does have a certain charm. In fact, at least outside the English classroom and the critical essay, it is common knowledge that of all the kinds of material that may be presented to us, meaningful action is the kind most likely to hold our interest and generate excitement. Whatever literary critics "in the know" may claim, the fact is that the human species has an insatiable thirst for directed action, whether physical as at Wimbledon or mental as in Elsinore. It is also a fact that virtually all of the stories and plays that have come to be regarded as classics, from the Iliad to Kim, have been "full of plot."
1.3. Critical Essays Setting of Bleak House
Most of the action of Bleak House takes place in or near London, around 1850. The London street scenes are in the Holborn district (on the north bank of the Thames and very close to the river). The depictions of neighborhoods, streets, buildings, working conditions, lighting, weather, dress and deportment of persons, etc., are completely authentic. The fog remains the most famous fog in all literature. Dense, long-lasting blankets of it, yellowish or yellow-brown with pollutants, were common in the coal-burning London of Dickens' time — and later. The descriptions of the goings-on at the Chancery Court are equally authentic, although Dickens provides only those details that support his point. Most of the action of Bleak House takes place in or near London, around 1850. The London street scenes are in the Holborn district (on the north bank of the Thames and very close to the river). The depictions of neighborhoods, streets, buildings, working conditions, lighting, weather, dress and deportment of persons, etc., are completely authentic. The fog remains the most famous fog in all literature. Dense, long-lasting blankets of it, yellowish or yellow-brown with pollutants, were common in the coal-burning London of Dickens' time — and later. The descriptions of the goings-on at the Chancery Court are equally authentic, although Dickens provides only those details that support his point. The Dedlocks' country estate at Chesney Wold is about 150 miles from London, in Lincolnshire, a large agricultural county in east-central England. St. Albans, where John Jarndyce's Bleak House stands, is a small town; in 1850, it would have been about twenty miles from the northern outskirts of London. Esther Summerson was born at Windsor (site of Windsor Palace), about twenty miles straight west of London. Fifteen miles farther west is the much larger city of Reading (pronounced "Redding"), where Esther went to school. Richard Carstone attended school at Winchester (famous for its huge, ancient cathedral), some fifty miles south of Reading and close to the English Channel. The new Bleak House that Mr. Jarndyce builds for Esther and Allan Woodcourt is in Yorkshire (England's largest county), north of Lincolnshire. This new house would be 175-200 miles northeast of London.
There are several rural scenes, as Dickens enjoys England's "green and pleasant land," yet the countryside fails to kindle his imagination the way the city does. Hating city smoke as much as anyone, Dickens nevertheless lapses into conventionality when he breathes the country air. A literary work does not necessarily become depressing or morbid simply because some of its subjects are gloomy, painful, or even grisly. Shakespeare's Macbeth gives us scene after scene of dark atmospheres, crime, natural and supernatural evil, horror, and insanity, yet the play has remained immensely popular for four centuries. Everything depends not on the subject itself but on the writer's treatment of it, meaning technique (manner of presenting the story) and prose style (choices in word, phrase, and sentence). A literary work does not necessarily become depressing or morbid simply because some of its subjects are gloomy, painful, or even grisly. Shakespeare's Macbeth gives us scene after scene of dark atmospheres, crime, natural and supernatural evil, horror, and insanity, yet the play has remained immensely popular for four centuries. Everything depends not on the subject itself but on the writer's treatment of it, meaning technique (manner of presenting the story) and prose style (choices in word, phrase, and sentence). Heavy, persistent fog is not something that tends to lift spirits and brighten faces. In a story, such a fog may even serve as a symbol of institutional oppression and human confusion and misery. The fog that Dickens creates for Bleak House serves him in exactly that way. And yet it is not, after all, a real-life fog, but a verbal description of the real-life thing. How that depiction is managed — in other words, "expression" — becomes the crucial point, the real issue. If, by plunging us again and again into the London fog, Dickens is trying to depress us, he is on shaky ground: All of us tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain. If the writing — taken up with an open mind and given a fair trial — really depresses us, we are quite likely to stop reading and declare Dickens an impossible, unreadable author. But if we examine our actual response to the densely foggy and otherwise "implacable November weather" Dickens describes, we will find it to be something different from sheer depression or enervation. Our response — the one Dickens wants us to have — is probably complex and ambivalent. True, Dickens sees the foggy mire of the London streets as a nuisance, an unpleasantness, a source of vexation and dispiritedness. But he also finds such an extreme condition interesting: Because they are rare or unusual, extremes in almost anything tend to generate interest. The fog is striking, piquant; it even has something of the glamour of the mysterious. In short, Dickens is an artist who delights in imagination and who is in charge of his material as he imagines and writes things down — he is enjoying the fog he creates, and that enjoyment is inevitably conveyed to us as we read. In fact, part of what Dickens delights in as he puts the fog together word by word is his very ability to describe so interestingly. We, in turn, admire (if only unconsciously) Dickens' mastery of the craft of writing — and admiration is a far from unpleasant thing for us to experience.
There are even more obvious elements of the positive in Dickens' clear paragraphs about the fog. There are witticisms and jesting figures of speech, as in the idea of meeting up with a "Megalosaurus" or of the soot being like snowflakes "gone into mourning . . . for the death of the sun." In sum, though Dickens certainly does make his fog symbolize muddles and miseries, and thus tie it in with his themes of social criticism, that isn't the whole story. In the final analysis, our experience as we read is an experience not of fog itself, but of "expression — of the words that create the fog." We find the fog not so much depressing as interesting and admirable. It's a vivid creation, and the sentences and phrases that create it crackle with imagination, alertness, and energy.

2.1. Critical Essays Symbolism in Bleak House

Themes or motifs are often presented through symbols — that is, images used in such a way as to suggest a meaning beyond the physical facts of the images themselves.Themes or motifs are often presented through symbols — that is, images used in such a way as to suggest a meaning beyond the physical facts of the images themselves.Two quite effective symbols in Bleak House are the fog and "the Roman" who points down from Mr. Tulkinghorn's ceiling and symbolizes the theme of retribution, of evil ultimately bringing ruin upon itself. Skillfully handled, symbolism adds both impact and unity to a literary work — or, for that matter, to any piece of writing. It has the impact (also called "power") of the concrete, and it helps unify because it repeats in a different form the motifs that are being presented through plot and character portrayal. Symbolism is commonly called a "device" or "technique," but these terms are somewhat misleading because they imply conscious manipulation by the author and also imply that effective symbolism is external and might be learned by anyone in a classroom or from an instruction manual on how to write. At its best, symbolism comes straight out of the individual writer's unconscious artistry: It is instinctive and individual and often a mark of genius.
Symbols are often used to foreshadow later events in a story. In turn, the "technique" of foreshadowing lends unity to the story because it prepares us by dealing with things that will be developed later on. The Bleak House fog is a complex symbol that foreshadows several motifs of importance. Richard Carstone, for example, gradually becomes "lost," unable to "see," in the mental and spiritual fog generated by the High Court of Chancery.
2.2. Summary of Charles Dickens's Bleak House
The story begins in the High Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has gone on for generations and has “become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.” The current issue concerns two young wards of the court, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, who are seeking permission to take up residence with a distant cousin, Mr. John Jarndyce. Later, the lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn stops by the London home of Sir Leicester Dedlock and Lady Honoria Dedlock. She is also connected with the suit, and, as the lawyer goes over affidavits with her, she takes a sudden interest in the handwriting on one of the documents. Esther Summerson is then introduced into the story. She was raised by her unfeeling godmother, who died when Esther was almost 14 years old. She then learned that her godmother was actually her aunt and that Mr. Jarndyce was now her guardian. He paid for her education in a boarding school and then engaged her to be a companion to Ada. The three young people arrive at Jarndyce’s home, Bleak House, to a warm welcome. As the novel goes on, Richard tries and discards several vocational options in the belief that he will inherit a substantial sum when the lawsuit is settled, and he and Ada fall in love. Tulkinghorn learns that the handwriting Lady Dedlock asked about belongs to a copyist named Nemo and that he has died of an opium overdose. The lawyer also meets Jo, a street urchin who declares that Nemo was kind to him. Tulkinghorn subsequently relays this information to Lady Dedlock, and, after disguising herself as her maid, Hortense, she seeks out Jo and asks him to show her every place connected with Nemo. Later Tulkinghorn has a police detective, Inspector Bucket, seek Jo’s help in identifying the woman who was interested in Nemo. Jo recognizes Hortense’s clothing but not Hortense, who has been fired by Lady Dedlock. However, Tulkinghorn has promised to help Hortense find employment in return for her cooperation. Tulkinghorn begins searching for a sample of handwriting from a Captain Hawdon. A lawyer’s clerk, Mr. William Guppy, tells Lady Dedlock that he has learned that Esther’s name is actually Esther Hawdon and that Nemo’s last name was Hawdon. Lady Dedlock realizes that Esther is her daughter from an affair with Captain Hawdon and that her sister, who had told her that the baby died, had taken Esther and secretly raised her. One day Lady Dedlock encounters Esther and reveals to her that she is her mother. During this time Tulkinghorn succeeds in acquiring a sample of Hawdon’s handwriting. Tulkinghorn subsequently reveals to Lady Dedlock that he has learned her secret but promises not to tell Sir Leicester without notice. Later, a furious Hortense confronts Tulkinghorn for not having gotten her a job, and she offers to help him bring Lady Dedlock down, but he dismisses her. Meanwhile, Esther tells Jarndyce the story of her parentage. Not long after, Jarndyce proposes marriage to Esther, and she accepts. Tulkinghorn later decides that he will tell Sir Leicester the secret without consulting Lady Dedlock. That night, however, Tulkinghorn is shot to death, and Bucket arrests George Rouncewell, an estranged son of the Dedlock household’s housekeeper. Jarndyce and Esther ask Mr. Allan Woodcourt, a doctor who works among the poor and is a friend, to look in on Richard, whose obsession with the lawsuit is taking a toll on his health. Ada reveals that she and Richard have married. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Bucket is not convinced that George is guilty of Tulkinghorn’s murder and continues to investigate. Eventually, he tells Sir Leicester about Lady Dedlock’s relationship with Hawdon and the resultant daughter. He then arrests Hortense for the murder, having discovered that she was trying to frame Lady Dedlock. Those attempts led Lady Dedlock to believe that she was suspected of the murder, and she is certain that her humiliating secret will soon be revealed. She writes a letter to her husband denying her involvement in the murder but admitting her past. When Sir Leicester, who has had a stroke from the shock of Bucket’s revelations, reads the letter from his wife, he instructs Bucket to find her and tell her that he fully forgives her. Bucket enlists the aid of Esther, and, after an exhaustive search, they find Lady Dedlock at the gate of Hawdon’s burial ground, dead. After Esther falls ill, Woodcourt tends to her, and one night he tells Esther that he is in love with her. Esther and Jarndyce then decide to set their wedding date for the following month. Bucket reports that a Jarndyce will has been found that is more recent than those involved in the lawsuit. Later Jarndyce gives Woodcourt a house to be called Bleak House and gives Esther his blessing to marry Woodcourt instead of him. The new will finally ends the case in Richard’s favour, but all the money in the estate has already been eaten up in legal costs. Although Richard dies that day, the remaining major characters enjoy happier fates..