by F. R. Leavis
‘I began to keep the little creatures,’ she said, ‘with an object that the wards will readily comprehend. With the intention of restoring them to liberty. When my judgement should be given. Ye-es! They die in prison, though. Their lives, poor silly things, are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings, that, one by one, the whole collection has died, over and over again. I doubt, do you know, whether one of these, though they are all young, will live to be free! Ve-ry mortifying, is it not?’
This is spine-chilling. Yet Miss Flite’s peculiar tone, idiom and speech-habits are never forgotten. The Shakespearean poetic – for if this is prose it is prose which serves the purposes of poetry – continues throughout the chapter. Miss Flite explains that she ‘“can’t allow them to sing much for (you’ll think this curious) I find my mind confused by the idea that they are singing, while I am following the argument in Court. And my mind requires to be so very clear, you know!”’ This is self-explanatory (though not allegorical but having a more subtle suggestiveness of another level of meaning). More sinister aspects of the Chancery society are then introduced to us:
‘I cannot admit the air freely,’ said the little old lady; the room was close, and would have been the better for it; ‘because the cat you saw downstairs – called Lady Jane – is greedy for their lives. She crouches on the parapet outside for hours and hours. I have discovered’ whispering mysteriously, ‘that her natural cruelty is sharpened by a jealous fear of their regaining their liberty. She is sly and full of malice. I half believe that she is no cat, but the wolf of the old saying. It is so very difficult to keep her from the door.’
The last touch of horror is added when Krook himself (nicknamed the Lord Chancellor and his rag-and-bone shop the Court of Chancery) adds:
‘When my noble and learned brother gives his judgement they’re to be let go free,’ winking at us again. ‘And then,’ he added, whispering and grinning, ‘if that ever was to happen – which it won’t – the birds that have never been caged would kill ’em.’
This casts a meaningful light back on Richard’s ‘cheerful’ voice just previously saying to Ada: ‘So, cousin, we are never to get out of Chancery!’ when they found themselves by accident back at their meeting-place of the day before. Krook’s pleasure (‘grinning’) at the idea that the wild birds would kill the caged ones if they ever got out, proves that this is true of the human species too: this seems to rule out any hope in Nature or human nature – Dickens was not at all inclined to take comfort in the belief that savagery may have something to teach civilization, he had no weakness for man in a state of nature. His hope for mankind is intimated in the novel, and is his faith in the human spirit which can show such other traits pitifully struggling for survival in those as battered by existence as Miss Flite, Jenny and Liz, and Jo of Tom-all-Alone’s who though he don’t know nothink can feel gratitude and so is ‘not quite in outer darkness’. We may reflect that Miss Flite’s name doesn’t merely suggest madness (‘flighty’) but is related to the ‘flight’-of birds.6 Flying is after all what characterizes birds, and the bird is an ancient symbol for the soul. The devoted enemy of the birds, the cat of the twin Lord Chancellor, is of course the Law, and we are confirmed in, or reminded of, this identification when we get to Mr Vholes who, when preying on Richard, ‘glances at the official cat who is patiently watching a mouse’s hole’ with his (Vholes’s) ‘hungry eyes’ – ‘official’ is good!
The purpose of these experiences of Chancery London is that the three young novices shall ponder them. They are all orphans, and Esther something more forlorn, illegitimate; so they are appropriate material for Dickens to choose for exposing to the mercies of life in his time (succeeding Oliver Twist, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield but – no longer children). An important part of these new experiences has been Krook’s account of the sufferings in Chancery and the consequent suicide of Tom Jarndyce, Ada and Richard’s grandfather, to which, says Esther, ‘“We listened with horror … to hearts so fresh and untried, it was a shock to come into the inheritance of a protracted misery”’ – to realize, in short, the human lot. The cousins’ summing up in this dialogue is central to the theme of the novel:
‘Quite an adventure for a morning in London!’ said Richard, with a sigh. ‘Ah, cousin, cousin, it’s a weary word, this Chancery!’
‘It is to me, and has been ever since I can remember,’ returned Ada. ‘I am grieved that I should be the enemy – as I suppose I am – of a great number of relations and others; and they should be my enemies – as I suppose they are; and that we should all be ruining one another, without knowing how or why, and be in constant doubt and discord all our lives. It seems very strange, as there must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to find out through all these years where it is.’
‘Ah, cousin!’ said Richard. ‘Strange, indeed! all this wasteful wanton chess-playing is very strange. To see that composed Court yesterday jogging on so serenely, and to think of the wretchedness of the pieces on the board gave me the headache and the heartache both together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be either. But … at all events, Chancery will work none of its bad influences on us.’
It is not therefore the Law as such, but the laws of human nature and the society that man’s nature has produced as the expression of our impulses, that constitute what John Jarndyce calls ‘the family misfortune’. What rightly distresses Ada is the realization that merely by being born they are enemies in the struggle for existence – which the laissez-faire society of course did nothing to mitigate; hence the stress laid on the fact that the wide variety of people concerned in the Jarndyce case have been born into it willy-nilly, and, like Miss Flite’s symbolic birds, ‘die in prison’. When Richard dies on learning that the Jarndyce case has collapsed because the costs have absorbed the whole estate (this is Equity!) Miss Flite, ‘weeping’, ‘gives her birds their liberty’. The point presumably is that she has given up expecting a Judgment in her favour – the occasion on which she had intended to release the birds – realizing now that she will have to wait for that till the Day of Judgment (which she has hitherto confused, being mad, with the court judgment) because there is no justice obtainable in this world.
The idea of Justice in this higher than legal sense of Equity is seen in Bleak House as the overwhelming desire of all men who are not base and which transcends all other considerations – Miss Flite has been driven mad by it and Gridley is killed by his frantic determination to have justice in this world, instead of resigning himself to suffering injustice but practising charity like the wiser John Jarndyce. Gridley’s demands for justice had led to his being imprisoned for contempt of court. He seems ‘a mad bull’ to the ordinary man and to the lawyers a joke, but he is presented in heroic terms by Dickens: he is given a dying testament which sounds like that of the heroes of Pilgrim’s Progress because he would not accept that injustice is the law of the land and has worn himself out in fighting the inertia that maintains injustice:
‘But you know I made a good fight for it, you know I stood up with my single hand against them all, you know I told them the ‘truth to the last, and told them what they were, and what they had done to me.’
He had explained earlier:
‘It is only by resenting them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together … If I did restrain myself, I should have become imbecile.’
This is akin to the later statement by Daniel Doyce explaining why he does not give up the invention he can’t get the government to take up:
‘It’s not put into a man’s head to be buried. It’s put into his head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms.’
Dickens was also an angry man in the face of the system, and while he recog
nizes, by way of Gridley’s case, that his anger and heat may be looked askance at, he knows that like Gridley it keeps him from being an ‘imbecile’ in the sense that a Skimpole or a Conversation Kenge is one, and that to struggle hard to defend your knowledge of what is valuable is not the litigating spirit but its opposite, the defence of values. Richard goes on repeating that ‘there must be truth and justice somewhere’‚ but his mistake is in expecting to find it in the company of lawyers, who instigate litigation. Nevertheless, Richard also is a kind of tragic hero, for Dickens is saying that it is only by keeping alive the belief in justice that we can be fully human (that there is ‘such a thing as principle’). Hence Miss Flite’s anguished cry: ‘“There’s a cruel attraction in the place. You can’t leave it. And you must expect.”’ Man lives in the ‘expectation’ of justice and his desire for it has created the law, but human nature being what it is, this has in practice produced (typically) lawyers with their (inevitable) vested interests and Wiglomeration, represented by the Lord High Chancellor ‘in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog’.
The conception of England in Dombey and Son as mercantile London and Commercial Man, or of Utility England and Economic Man in Hard Times, is altogether less sinister than Dickens’s vision of the Bleak House that man the litigating animal has built himself and must live in (‘Bleak House has an exposed sound’). For litigating is shown to be the primary instinct, leading us, as Ada saw, to ‘our all ruining one another without knowing how or why’ since everyone’s interests place him in enmity to everyone else, even though we are all relations. Thus it will be seen that practically everyone in the novel (down to the wretched inhabitants of Tom-all-Alone’s – which is in Chancery and can’t be knocked down and rebuilt because of the Jarndyce Case) is in some way involved in it through no fault of his own, apart from the lawyers who are involved in it willingly because they make their living by keeping the system going and so are more completely of it than anyone else. But an important point in Dickens’s parable is that those who are not involved willy-nilly in the Jarndyce case are gratuitously involved in litigation, either literal or metaphorical, of their own making.
Hence ‘The Boythorn and Dedlock Wars’ – two neighbours, Mr Boythorn and Sir Leicester Dedlock, each of whom has ample means to live happily at peace with mankind, are engaged in private litigation over a trifling piece of land that neither wants, on principle since it is a right of way; that is, merely as an expression of their instinct of antagonism. And not only will neither yield to reason nor allow arbitration, both are determined to fight it out regardless of expense and the fact that they are as neighbours habitually put to social embarrassment and to un-Christian encounters in Church. In chapter XVIII Esther describes in detail Mr Boythorn’s delectable home (‘formerly the Parsonage-house’) and Paradisal garden alongside which is, we are told, ‘the terrible piece of ground in dispute where Mr Boythorn maintained a sentry’, also a fierce bulldog, man-traps and spring-guns; he threatens trespassers with personal chastisement and legal prosecution. (What in the last novel was invented to endow Miss Trotwood with an amusing eccentricity has, by a characteristic development of Dickens’s process of working out ideas, become part of a serious and central argument.)
Mr Boythorn, though chivalrous, high-minded and personally gentle, is given to a ferocious mode of talking. This appears when he first comes on the scene as not inappropriate in expressing his detestation of Chancery, yet
‘But how do you and your neighbour get on about the disputed right of way?’ said Mr Jarndyce. ‘You are not free from the toils of the law yourself.’
‘The fellow has brought actions against me for trespass, and I have brought actions against him for trespass’ returned Mr Boythorn. ‘By Heavens! …’
Each of the antagonists, with all his virtues, prides himself on his strength of character, a form of egotism which Dickens identifies in the course of the novel as the mainspring of the litigating impulse. Thus we see that litigation is the essential characteristic of fallen mankind (the legal system is as old established as England itself, says Conversation Kenge), the form that Original Sin may be said to take in the condition of mankind described by Malthus and later to be elaborated and extended by Darwin as the struggle for existence.
Richard has concluded that they are like pieces on a chess-board, helpless and moved about in ‘wretchedness’, though, he says, that would be understandable only if men were either fools or rascals and he cannot bear to believe that they are either. But this is in his generous and hopeful youth – he is straight from school when the novel opens; his own history is to show how of his own free will (Dickens believes we have some measure of free will and therefore moral responsibility) he is involved in Chancery toils – degraded to its nature, thinking in accordance with its perverted logic, allowing its system which denies disinterestedness in any man to determine his conduct (‘Don’t you see he is an interested party? … I must maintain my rights’, he says of John Jarndyce) and to alter ‘all the colours of his mind’ – merely as the inevitable process of growing older and going out into the world. Esther recognizes the change in him by asking sadly: ‘Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?’ when he has explained that in the days when he was friendly with John Jarndyce ‘we were not on natural terms’. He becomes one of Miss Flite’s birds that (‘poor silly things’) die in prison. Even Esther is involved: she observes that Krook’s cat ‘looked so wickedly at me, as if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs’ – she is indeed, for Nemo the law-writer who lodges upstairs is one of them and her unknown father.7 The plot is almost identifiable with the theme in Bleak House, though it is not till Great Expectations that we see Dickens has made an elaborate plot become the complete and wholly necessary exemplification of a theme.
There are other gratuitous warfares going on in the novel beside the Boythorn–Dedlock affair. Marriage is seen as one form of it as often as not: worthy Mr Snagsby’s prosperous life is made almost intolerable by a suspicious domineering wife (whom he tries to placate, and to persuade into her proper role, by calling her ‘my little woman’), while in the lower orders the men (‘our masters’, the brick-makers’ wives call them) brutalize their wives. At the bottom of society is Jo who expects to be, and is, ‘chivvied’ by everyone. The Smallweed family all hate each other even more than they hate everyone else. Charley and Guster, servants, are victimized by their employers (unlike Dedlock menials) until Charley is rescued by Mr Jarndyce. Lady Dedlock and her sister have been separated by pride; little Esther’s childhood has been made wretched by moral prejudice (‘Morality, Heavenly link!’ as W. S. Gilbert wrote ironically of the spirit of the age); the snobbery of Pedigree makes old Mrs Woodcourt try to stop her son’s love-match with Esther; Mr Tulkinghorn hates women, and all the philanthropists are at loggerheads. The refusal to sentimentalize is a distinctive feature of Bleak House and most remarkably so in an area where Dickens has hitherto been most liable to this weakness: Mrs Blinder of Bell Yard, interviewed by Mr Jarndyce enquiring after Neckett’s orphans, admits that the other lodgers and neighbours (poor but socially sensitive) objected to him, on the grounds that ‘“It is not a genteel calling”’, so that when he died his children didn’t get as kind treatment as they otherwise might have had. ‘“Similarly with Charlotte. Some people won’t employ her because she was a follerer’s child; some people that do employ her cast it at her; some make a merit of having her to work for them, with that and all her drawbacks upon her, and perhaps pay her less and put upon her more.”’ Here is human nature not merely as the struggle for existence has formed it but with an added meanness and where the poor and uneducated show the same odious traits as the genteel. (This social unit of Mrs Blinder’s Bell Yard, which appears only once, is the prototype of Mrs Plornish’s Bleeding Heart Yard, with its fatal hankering after the genteel, and which plays an important part in Little Dorrit, another instance of Dickens’s creative habit of rethinking some casual or minor i
nvention and making it significant in a later context.)
This is how we are inducted into the theme and mode of what I find the most impressive and rewarding of all Dickens’s novels, the most various and consistently lively in style of writing and composition. Bleak House has very little indeed to be written off as below the level of the bulk of it or incompatible with the best of it. What seems to me most remarkable of all, the greatest tribute to Dickens’s creative powers – something more than fertility can account for – is that the Tolstoyan David Copperfield should in a couple of years be succeeded by the Dostoievskian Bleak House. But it was the success of David Copperfield in a new mode that, after the initial drop in sales, made Dickens able to take another and yet higher flight with confidence; it had given him status as well as greater financial reward, and he carried his public upward with him each time. Thus he wrote to a friend: ‘It (Bleak House) is an enormous success; all the prestige of Copperfield [which is very great] falling upon it, and raising its circulation above all my other books. I am very much interested, having just written No. IV – and look forward to good things whereof the foundations are built.’
II
Opting Out
Having established his theme in the first five chapters and begun to show its working out, Dickens then logically proceeds to enquire whether it is possible to opt out of the system or in any other way to vanquish it. How can we preserve ourselves from its corrupting influences? It is pretty obvious that Dickens didn’t think that organized religion in his time offered much help and is anxious to show why (useless I’m afraid for Mr Cockshut to scold him for not being an Anglo-Catholic). Miss Barbary was a devout church-goer of the Evangelical type, sternly puritanical and cruelly misguided (Dickens clearly held) in attributing hereditary guilt to a child, in which she was representative – there are plenty of other such religious characters in Victorian fiction, and the Rev. Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre was identified with his real-life original by many readers. Mr Chadband represents the inner light and Chapel culture,8 Mrs Pardiggle High Anglicanism and the class superiority that went with it; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, like Mrs Jellyby, can see nothing nearer than Africa, and Allan Woodcourt’s well-meant attempt at instructing Jo on his death-bed to repeat as a talisman a prayer Jo can’t possibly understand is not sentimental but ironical in effect and, I think, in intention, since it is followed by the indignant and generous outburst with which Dickens ends the chapter (XLVII). The village church can’t reconcile Mr Boythorn and Sir Leicester who are at war all the week. Dickens, a gospel Christian rather like Tolstoy, as witness his will, looked upon religious institutions as separating men and as hostile to the spirit of Christianity.9