Nabokov's notes on the characters in his teaching copy of Bleak House
Here are some of the things to notice while reading the book:
1. One of the novel's most striking themes refers to children—their troubles, insecurity, humble joys, and the joy they give, but mainly their misery. "I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made," to quote Housman. Also, parent-child relations are of interest, involving as they do the theme of "orphans": either the parent or the child is lost. The good mother nurses a dead child or dies herself. And children who are the attendants of other children. I have a sneaking fondness for the story about Dickens in his difficult London youth one day walking behind a workingman who was carrying a big-headed child across his shoulder. As the man walked on, without turning, with Dickens behind him, the child across the man's shoulders looked at Dickens, and Dickens, who was eating cherries out of a paper bag as he walked, silently popped one cherry after another into the silent child's mouth without anybody being the wiser.
2. Chancery—fog—madness: this is another theme.
3. Every character has his attribute, a kind of colored shadow that appears whenever the person appears.
4. Things participate—pictures, houses, carriages.
5. The sociological side, brilliantly stressed for example by Edmund Wilson in his collection of essays The Wound and the Bow, is neither interesting nor important.
6. The whodunit plot (with a kind of pre-Sherlock sleuth) of the second part of the book.
7. The dualism permeating the whole work, evil almost as strong as the good, embodied in Chancery, as a kind of Hell, with its emissary devils Tulkinghorn and Vholes, and a host of smaller devils, even to their clothes, black and shabby. On the good side we have Jarndyce, Esther, Woodcourt, Ada, Mrs. Bagnet; in between are the tempted ones, sometimes redeemed by love as in Sir Leicester, where love conquers rather artificially his vanity and prejudices. Richard, too, is saved, for though he has erred he is essentially good. Lady Dedlock is redeemed by suffering, and Dostoevski is wildly gesticulating in the background. Even the smallest act of goodness may bring salvation. Skimpole and, of course, the Smallweeds and Krook are completely the devil's allies. And so are the philanthropists, Mrs. Jellyby for instance, who spread misery around them while deceiving themselves that they are doing good though actually indulging their selfish instincts. The whole idea is that these people—Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle, etc.—are giving their time and energy to all kinds of fanciful affairs (paralleling the Chancery theme of uselessness, perfect for the lawyers but misery for the victims) when their children are abandoned and miserable. There may be hope for Bucket and "Coavinses" (doing their duty without unnecessary cruelty) but none for the false missionaries, the Chadbands, etc. The "good" ones are often victims of the "evil" ones, but therein lies salvation for the former, perdition for the latter. All these forces and people in conflict (often wrapped up in the Chancery theme) are symbols of greater, more universal forces, even to the death of Krook by fire (self-generated), the devil's natural medium. Such conflicts are the "skeleton" of the book, but Dickens was too much of an artist to make all this obtrusive or obvious. His people are alive, not merely clothed ideas or symbols.
Nabokov's diagram of the main themes in Bleak House
Bleak House consists of three main themes:
1. The Court of Chancery theme revolving around the dreary suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, emblemized by London's foul fog and Miss Flite's caged, birds. Lawyers and mad suitors are its representatives.
2. The theme of miserable children and their relationships with those they help and with, their parents, most of whom are frauds or freaks. The most unhappy child of all is the homeless Jo, who vegetates in the foul shadow of Chancery and is an unconscious agent in the mystery plot.
3. The mystery theme, a romantic tangle of trails followed in turn by three sleuths, Guppy, Tulkinghorn, Bucket, and their helpers, and leading to the unfortunate Lady Dedlock, mother of Esther born out of wedlock.
The magic trick Dickens is out to perform implies balancing these three globes, juggling with them, keeping them in a state of coherent unity, maintaining these three balloons in the air without getting their strings snarled.
I have tried to show by means of connecting lines in my diagram the variety of ways in which these three themes and their agents are linked up in the meandering course of the story. Only a few of the characters are noticed here, but their list is huge: of the children alone there are about thirty specimens. I should perhaps have connected Rachael, Esther's former nurse who knows the secret of her birth, with one of the frauds, the Reverend Chadband whom Rachael married. Hawdon is Lady Dedlock's former lover (also called Nemo in the book), Esther's father. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock's solicitor, and Ducket the detective are the sleuths who try, not unsuccessfully, to unravel that little mystery, driving, incidentally, Lady Dedlock to her death. These sleuths find various helps such as my lady's French maid Hortense and the old scoundrel Smallweed, who is the brother-in-law of the weirdest, most foglike character in the book, Krook.
My plan is to follow each of these three themes, starting with the Chancery—fog—bird—mad-suitor one; and among other things and creatures a little mad woman, Miss Flite, and the eerie Krook will be discussed as representatives of that theme. I shall then pick up the child theme in all its details and show poor Jo at his best, and also a very repulsive fraud, the false child Mr. Skimpole. The mystery theme will be treated next. Please mark that Dickens is an enchanter, an artist, in his dealings with the Chancery fog, a crusader combined with an artist in the child theme, and a very clever storyteller in the mystery theme that propels and directs the story. It is the artist that attracts us; so, after outlining the three main themes and the personalities of some of their agents, I shall analyze the form of the book, its structure, its style, its imagery, its verbal magic. We shall have a good deal of fun with Esther and her lovers, the impossibly good Woodcourt and the very convincing quixotic John Jarndyce, as well as with such worthies as Sir Leicester Dedlock and others.
The basic situation in Bleak House in regard to the Chancery theme is quite simple. A lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is dragging on for years. Numerous suitors expect fortunes that never come. One of the Jarndyces—John Jarndyce—is a good man who takes the whole affair calmly and does not expect anything from the suit, which he believes will scarcely be terminated in his lifetime. He has a young ward Esther Summerson, who is not directly concerned with the Chancery business but is the sifting agent of the book. John Jarndyce is also the guardian of Ada and Richard, who are cousins and on the opposite side of the suit. Richard gets tremendously involved psychologically in the lawsuit and goes crazy. Two other suitors, old Miss Flite and a Mr. Gridley, are mad already.
The Chancery theme is the one with which the book opens, but before looking into it let me draw attention to one of the niceties of the Dickensian method. The interminable suit and the Lord Chancellor are described: "How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading; no man's nature has been made the better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good....
"Thus in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery."
Now let us go back to the very first paragraph in the book: "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.... Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splas
hed 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." Accumulating at compound interest, a metaphor which links the real mud and mist to the mud and muddle of Chancery. Sitting in the midst of the mist and the mud and the muddle, the Lord Chancellor is addressed by Mr. Tangle as "Mlud" At the heart of the mud and fog, "My Lord" is himself reduced to "Mud" if we remove the lawyer's slight lisp. My Lord, Mlud, Mud. We shall mark at once, at the very beginning of our inquiry, that this is a typical Dickensian device: wordplay, making inanimate words not only live but perform tricks transcending their immediate sense.
There is another example of a verbal link in these first pages. In the initial paragraph, the smoke lowering down from the chimney pots is compared to "a soft black drizzle." Much later in the book the man Krook will dissolve in this black drizzle. But more immediately, in the paragraph about Chancery and the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce one finds the emblematic names of solicitors in Chancery "Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise [who] have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of office." Chizzle, Mizzle, Drizzle, a dismal alliteration. And then, right after, "Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause...." Shirking and sharking means to live by stratagems as those lawyers live in the mud and drizzle of Chancery, and, if we go back to the first paragraph again, we find that shirking and sharking is a companion alliteration and an echo of the slipping and sliding of the pedestrians in the mud.
Let us now follow in the footsteps of the mad little woman Miss Flite, who appears as a fantastic suitor at the very beginning and marches off when the empty court is closed up for the day. Very shortly the three young people of the book, Richard (whose destiny is going to be linked up in a singular way with the mad woman's), his Ada (the cousin whom he will marry), and Esther—these three young people visit the Lord Chancellor and under the colonnade meet Miss Elite: "a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet, and carrying a reticule, came curtseying and smiling up to us, with an air of great ceremony.
" 'Oh!' said she. The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty, when they find themselves in this place, and don't know what's to come of it.'
" 'Mad!' whispered Richard, not thinking she could hear him.
" 'Right! Mad, young gentleman,' she returned so quickly that he was quite abashed. 'I was a ward myself. I was not mad at that time,' curtseying low, and smiling between every little sentence. 'I had youth and hope. I believe, beauty. It matters very little now. Neither of the three served, or saved me. I have the honour to attend Court regularly. With my documents. I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment.... Pray accept my blessing.'
"As Ada was a little frightened, I said to humour the poor old lady, that we were much obliged to her.
" 'Ye-es!' she said mincingly. 'I imagine so. And here is Conversation Kenge. With his documents! How does your honourable worship do?'
" 'Quite well, quite well! Now don't be troublesome, that's a good soul!' said Mr. Kenge, leading the way back.
" 'By no means,' said the poor old lady, keeping up with Ada and me. 'Anything but troublesome. I shall confer estates on both,—which is not being troublesome, I trust? I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. This is a good omen for you. Accept my blessing!'
"She stopped at the bottom of the steep, broad flight of stairs; but we looked back as we went up, and she was still there, saying, still with a curtsey and a smile between every little sentence, 'Youth. Arid hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray accept my blessing!' "
The words—youth, hope, beauty—that she keeps repeating are important words, as we shall see farther on. The next day during their walk in London the three young people, and a fourth young person, come again across Miss Flite. Here a new theme is gradually introduced into her speech—this is the bird theme—song, wings, flight. Miss Flite is interested in flight and song, in the melodious birds of the garden of Lincoln's Inn. We then visit her lodgings, above those of Krook. There is also another lodger, Nemo, of whom more later, also one of the most important figures in the book. Miss Flite shows off some twenty cages of birds. " '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 judgment 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?' "
She lets in the light so that the birds will sing for her visitors, but she will not tell their names. The sentence "Another time, I'll tell you their names" is very significant: there is a pathetic mystery here. She again repeats the words youth, hope, beauty. These words are now linked with the birds, and the bars of their cages seem to throw their shadow, seem already to bar with their shadows the symbols of youth, beauty, hope. To see still better how nicely Miss Flite is connected with Esther, you may mark when Esther in her early teens is leaving home for school with her only companion a bird in a cage. I want to remind you very forcibly at this point of another caged bird that I mentioned in connection with Mansfield Park when I referred to a passage from Sterne's Sentimental Journey about a starling—and about liberty and about captivity. Here we are again following the same thematic line. Cages, bird cages, their bars, the shadow of their bars striking out, as it were, all happiness. Miss Flite's birds, we should notice finally, are larks, linnets, and goldfinches, which correspond to lark-youth, linnet-hope, goldfinch-beauty.
When her visitors passed the door of the strange lodger Nemo, Miss Flite had warned them, hush, hush. Then this strange lodger is hushed, is dead, and by his own hand, and Miss Flite is sent for a doctor, and later stands trembling inside his door. This dead lodger, we shall learn, was connected with Esther, whose father he was, and with Lady Dedlock, whose lover he was. Such thematic lines as the Miss Flite one are very fascinating and instructive. A little later another poor child, another captive child, one of the many poor captive children of the book, the girl Caddy Jellyby, is mentioned as meeting her lover, Prince, in Miss Flite's room. Still later, on a visit by the young people, accompanied by Mr. Jarndyce, we learn from Krook's mouth the names of the birds: 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. But old Krook leaves out >Beauty—beauty which, incidentally, Esther loses in the course of the novel when she falls ill.
The thematic link between Richard and Miss Flite, between his madness and hers, is started when he becomes infatuated with the suit. This is a very important passage: "He had got at the core of that mystery now, he told us; and nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to take, I don't know how many thousands of pounds, must be finally established, if there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery ... and that this happy conclusion could not be much longer delayed. He proved this to himself by all the weary arguments on that side he had read, and every one of them sunk him deeper in the infatuation. He had even begun to haunt the Court. He told us how he saw Miss Flite there daily; how they talked together, and how he did her little kindnesses; and how, while he laughed at her, he pitied her from his heart. But he never thought—never, my poor, dear, sanguine Richard, capable
of so much happiness then, and with such better things before him!—what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind."
Miss Flite is acquainted with another mad suitor, Mr. Gridley, who is also introduced at the very start: "Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out 'My Lord!' in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal weather a little." Later on this Mr. Gridley has a lengthy tirade about his situation addressed to Mr. Jarndyce. He has been ruined by a suit about a legacy in which the costs have eaten up three times the whole amount, and the suit is as yet unsettled. His sense of injury has been elevated to a principle which he will not abandon: "I have been in prison for contempt of Court. I have been in prison for threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them—though they have found it amusing, too, to see me committed into custody, and brought up in custody, and all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself. I tell them, that if I did restrain myself, I should become imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in my part of the country say they remember me so; but, now, I must have this vent under my sense of injury, or nothing could hold my wits together.... Besides,' he added, breaking fiercely out, 'I'll shame them. To the last, I'll show myself in that Court to its shame.' " As Esther remarks, "His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage without seeing it." But he dies in Mr. George's place, attended by the trooper, by Bucket, Esther and Richard, and by Miss Flite. As he dies, " 'O no, Gridley!' she cried, as he fell heavily and calmly back from before her, 'not without my blessing. After so many years!' "
Lectures on Literature Page 11