by Jane Smiley
The overarching metaphor of the novel is the ancient and costly Chancery suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and the location of much of the action is the area of London around the Inns of Court. In the very first chapter of the novel, Dickens ramifies the influence of the court of Chancery throughout England:
. . . the court of Chancery . . . has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire . . . its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance.
Thereafter, the novel demonstrates the truth of this assertion—every character, no matter how highborn or lowborn, is connected to the suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. In some instances, the connections seem gratuitous but turn out to be essential. The suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is in fact an enormous family in which, try as any individual might, he or she cannot but experience his or her entangling relationship to the others. Against the background of the suit, individuals work out their fates by accepting their responsibilities, and their responsibilities are prescribed according to a familial model. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is like an ecosystem where some degree of scarcity prevails. Only by husbanding the limited resources can everyone work out his or her fate to advantage, but the natural entropy of the system always threatens to overwhelm individual energies. And no single character’s fate is of much greater interest than any other’s. The novel is written on a large pattern; the pattern works itself out. The reality of connection is foregrounded, rather than the significance of individuals. The court of Chancery was not the boldest institution Dickens might have satirized—reviewers at the time pointed out that criticism was common and reform of the system was already taking place—but artistically, the fact that Dickens began with the institution rather than with individuals allowed him to create a larger world and to coordinate its parts more successfully than he had ever done.
Reviewers noted the impersonality of the novel. Forster didn’t like it much, and Esther didn’t go over well with anyone. Critics since then have argued whether Esther is a failure or not, and certainly her voice can seem coy and insincere, especially when she is reporting, only to discount, praises of herself. In subsequent years, Georgina Hogarth was willing to admit that Esther’s character was based on hers (by contrast, she did not believe that Agnes Wickfield was based on her), and it must be the case that if Dickens was attempting to use someone he loved and honored as a model, he felt less free to depict her ironically, as he always felt free in depicting himself. The third-person narrative of Bleak House is exceptionally ironic in tone, even by Dickens’s standard, and so the contrast makes Esther’s narrative seem even stranger. And if Esther is Georgina, then John Jarndyce’s relationship to her makes him a representation of Dickens himself—the guardian who pays for everything and takes care of everyone, yet who needs Esther as an intermediary between himself and the objects of his benevolence.
The second overarching metaphor that works with the first to bolster connection is the metaphor of disease. The theme of public sanitation had been important to Dickens at least since he was writing Oliver Twist, when he frequented the impoverished neighborhoods of Saffron Hill that stood right beside the house in Doughty Street where he lived with his family while writing the novel. Coincidentally, as he was writing Bleak House, he was also having workmen refurbish Tavistock House, including the plumbing and the drains; so waste management was on his mind. The problems mentioned in chapter 2, of a large population in a limited urban area, had not been solved by Parliament or the City of London, and would not be almost until Dickens’s death. The figure of Jo embodied his old images of Ignorance and Want, always moving on, as Jo says of himself, but leaving behind a wake of death and destruction.
Bleak House is the most unhopeful of Dickens’s novels. Characters such as Esther and Jarndyce at best succeed in holding off decay rather than transcending it or creating something from it. Every character is bound by his or her past, and the past cannot be escaped (as, for example, the Micawbers and Little Em’ly go off to Australia seeking a new life). Esther finds love and purpose in family life, but Allan Woodcourt is such a shadowy figure that their marriage is of no intrinsic interest. The comic side of Dickens’s sensibility, the part of him that intuitively envisions integration and social redemption through laughter, is largely missing—here are no figures like Miss Tox and Mr. Chick, in Dombey and Son, or Barkis, Traddles, or Mr. Dick, in Copperfield, who are simultaneously ridiculous and benevolent and serve to connect the main characters in incidental but important ways. Harold Skimpole is a good example of a character whose foibles might have been treated more forgivingly in an earlier novel, but who comes to appear almost vicious by the end of Bleak House.
The stylistic felicity that marked Dombey and David Copperfield from beginning to end is more problematic in Bleak House, in large part because of Esther’s narrative. David could easily narrate with Dickens’s vision and, of course, was intended to do so—Dickens found a comfortable authorial distance from which he could both enter into David’s mind and observe his growth—but Dickens cannot find a comfortable distance from Esther. Her voice is inconsistent—sometimes sharp-witted and sardonic, other times vapid. Finally, confining himself to her consciousness is difficult for the author. On the other hand, the third-person narrative suffers from too much irony—the famous first paragraph, about London fog, is telling but not subtle. Similarly to Martin Chuzzlewit, though to a lesser degree, Dickens has a point to make and wants to be sure the reader understands it clearly. During the 1850s, Dickens wrote to a correspondent that he did not write merely to entertain, but always with an improving object in mind, and this is evident in all of the works of that decade. Modern critics have rehabilitated Bleak House, admired its architecture and seriousness, as well as Dickens’s attempts to negotiate a new kind of novel. Some critics have even forgiven the experiment of Esther’s narrative on the grounds that she helps keep the extremely diverse story line under control.
One interesting feature of Bleak House is the character of Jo as analogous to the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Dickens is known to have read while he was writing Bleak House. Jo, like Topsy, is an unreared child, Jo the mysterious product of unknown parents, Topsy the product of a slave-breeding operation. Both know nothing of their origins or of any conventional bits of knowledge, including religion. What is notable is that both authors, one writing the most popular novel in England and the other writing the most popular novel in America, were highlighting the “domestic” issue of how children develop a conscience and a sense of themselves through connection to others. Both show models of the relationship between well-regulated domestic life and well-regulated public life, a key part of that model being orderly relationships between responsible men and women living in the same households. The contrast between the fate of Topsy and the fate of Jo is especially illuminating—whereas Jo connects only to destroy, by carrying disease into the Jarndyce household, and then himself dies, a warning to the complacent classes, Topsy is reclaimed through systematic training and love. To Dickens, what Jo means is his main role in the novel; to Stowe, how Topsy gains a moral life is the important question.
Dickens was very happy with the sales of Bleak House. It sold about thirty-four thousand copies every number, beginning with the first number, and he profited by some £11,000. Sales were higher than David Copperfield by about fourteen thousand copies, and though reviews were mixed, public reception was enthusiastic. Dickens was now a rich man, as the purchase of Tavistock House demonstrated, and his contracts were always favorable to his interests. When his agreement with Bradbury and Evans came to be renewed at the end of Bleak House, it was renewed without fuss. Nevertheless, completing the novel was extremely taxing, and not only because it was a huge, complicated project. Ackroyd details the speeches, dinners, editorial work, outings, travels, house refurbishings, domestic duties
(Dickens discovered that one of his sons had a stutter and commenced to train him out of it with a session in his study every morning), and correspondence that interfered with the production of the monthly numbers, and it is no surprise that at the completion of the novel, Dickens decided not to start another for at least a year.
In February 1852, Dickens turned forty years old. A month later, his tenth child and seventh son, Edward, was born. In one decade, the hopeful young man who had set sail for America had been transformed, in some sense, beyond recognition. His work was complex, dark, mature. Acquaintances no longer commented upon his boyishness. While he was still energetic and restless, and still capable of laughing frequently and uproariously, the duties he had taken on in his family, in his editorial capacity, in his role as social critic, and in his charitable work had made him a serious and even intimidating presence in English life. Reviewers who took issue with various aspects of Bleak House did so in the context of Dickens’s mastery. His work was a known quantity; experimentation only reconfirmed that he always had something to say, always said it vastly and with vivid, melodramatic effects, with wit, invention, and “true and original genius” (as George Brimley noted in the Spectator). In spite of critics (even his friends Carlyle and Forster, for whom Dickens showed a great deal of respect, had reservations and suggestions) and in spite of the vagaries of commercial success, Dickens was always true, in larger matters and in details of character drawing and style, to his idiosyncratic conception of things. And his ideas and their development became public almost as soon as he had them.
A strongly marked feature of this phase of Dickens’s life, and one that would last until he died, was the craving for movement and escape, even a sort of hiding out. The ostensible reason for getting away was often frustration at the interference of business and social engagements in the completion of work, but his penchant for travel was so consistent that it is not always clear who or what he was trying to get away from. In an effort to get away from London and England, he took his family to Boulogne for the summer; in an effort to get away from his family, he took a long trip to France and Switzerland with friends in the fall; as soon as he settled in a place, he went on excursions to see the sights. Ackroyd points out that Dickens frequently took rooms where he could finish projects and find some privacy, and from those rooms he frequently took long walks. It is tempting, but risky, of course, to apply diagnoses, such as bipolar disorder, that are current in our time, to persons living in earlier times, and certainly Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. Dickens himself was exhausted by it—in May 1853, as he was nearing the end of Bleak House, he came down with an agonizing kidney ailment, similar to ailments he had had as a boy and reminiscent of the problems that killed his father. In spite of the pain and the rudimentary medical care, he was back at work in six days. Whether we can diagnose Dickens or not, at least we may say, from the evidence of his activities, his letters, and his works, that he was not at peace, and that there are not even any images of peace to be found. A good life is a busy one; an idle life is both boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger every day that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine. But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.
In January 1854, some six months after the completion of Bleak House, Dickens realized that the sales of Household Words had fallen precipitously. Bradbury and Evans asked him to compose another serial novel, and he at once began Hard Times. The first number appeared on April 1. The immediate inspiration for this shortest of Dickens’s novels seems to have been a twenty-three-week-old millworkers’ strike in Preston, where Dickens traveled for a look; he then wrote a long piece about the strike for Household Words at the beginning of February. Dickens had a long-standing interest in working conditions and workers’ protests—he had, of course, touched on lower-class unrest in Barnaby Rudge and had intended to write about factories in Nicholas Nickleby. He set out his principles clearly in his essay: “that into the relations between employers and employed, as into all the relations in this life, there must enter something of feeling and sentiment; something of mutual explanation, forbearance, and consideration . . . otherwise those relations are wrong and rotten to the core and will never bear sound fruit.” His general view of a just society as one marked by the recognition of the dignity and worth of every individual continued to express itself with regard to what seemed to be the purest economic issue, and indeed, the opinion he quotes in his essay from a Preston workers’ bill, that the employers “in times of good trade and general prosperity, wrung from their labour a California of gold, which is now being used to crush those who created it,” would in our century be read as an expression of the standard Marxist labor theory of value. Dickens’s further remarks show that he did not understand this but saw the issue entirely as a matter of relationship. And, indeed, when he novelizes his ideas in Hard Times, he can make of them only a depiction of a series of failed relationships between individuals. Mr. Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind, mill owner and educator, both fail in their responsibilities to their workers, wives, children, and students. They abuse their power, not out of intentional unkindness or natural evil, but out of ideology and ignorance. Those they are supposed to direct, and who turn to them for guidance, receive pat ideas, egocentric bluster, or dry theory. Tom Gradgrind and Louisa are provided with no moral compass or method for understanding their feelings. Stephen Blackpool is reduced step by step to hopelessness and drudgery. The overarching symbol for all of this is the pall of ugliness, smoke, and pollution cast over Coketown by the factories at the heart of the city.
Dickens was not Marx or Engels. Though he was perhaps as outraged as they were at conditions around him, he was by nature a novelist, not a philosopher or a political economist or a revolutionary. Novels privilege the idiosyncrasies of individuals and can demonstrate larger ideas only by having characters work them out through action and contemplation. The narrator may attempt to extrapolate the ideas symbolically, or even to address the reader about them, as Dickens does rather more often in Hard Times (rather like Mrs. Stowe, who does the same thing in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) than he had in previous novels, but the requirement of organizing the material by maintaining clear distinctions between characters means that groups never really come alive in novels—uniformity, crowds, and mass movements disintegrate in the linearity of prose. The novelist’s eye can never work successfully as a wide-angle lens but must always move precisely from particular to particular. A novel such as Hard Times, where the characters are acting as examples of ideas, always has the air of a cautionary tale or a parable and relies upon a set of beliefs shared between author and readers. The very brevity of Hard Times was a challenge to its commercial success because rather than developing his ideas incrementally, by a kind of stealthy inertia or narrative weight, the author expresses them openly. As it happened, Dickens’s ideas about education and the proper relations between Capital and Labor were not generally shared, the comic qualities of the novel were not widely appreciated, and Hard Times was a failure.
Nevertheless, the novel came to appeal far more to later critics and is perhaps better known as a representative example of Dickens’s work in our day than it was in his. As with Bleak House, modern readers have accepted social criticism as one of the proper uses of novelistic art; in addition, the darkness of Dickens’s vision of Coketown coincides more with our
own opinions of the ecological and social destructiveness of the Industrial Revolution. Novels since Hard Times that have expanded upon and reiterated some of its ideas have helped modern readers share them enough so that they can fade into the background and the characters, who are actually quite entertaining, can emerge.
Dickens always showed an eagerness to contemplate his own situation by fictionalizing it and giving it to one of his characters, sometimes one who was like him (à la David Copperfield) and sometimes one who was quite unlike him (à la Mr. Dick, in the same novel, who is always writing assiduously, but is deeply frustrated that he can’t prevent King Charles’s head from intruding into his manuscript—perhaps the most perfect image in literature of how a writer comes back and back again to the same concerns in spite of, or because of, how hard he tries to avoid them). In Hard Times, Dickens endows the workman Stephen Blackpool, a man otherwise entirely unlike himself, with a burdensome marriage and a wish to divorce. Stephen consults Bounderby, whose answer indicates that Dickens has done some research on the subject: “Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to enable you to marry again, and it would cost you . . . I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound . . . perhaps twice the money.” Stephen, of course, earns only a few shillings per week. Hard Times, composed in weekly installments like TheOld Curiosity Shop, is open and revealing of Dickens’s state of mind in much the same way. His demons are no longer grotesque, and the fearsome world is no longer so mysterious and strange; rather, it is all too ugly and factual, peopled by those whose imaginations have been starved rather than perverted. But as with The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens is unable to embody a redemption for any of his characters. Both novels seem to assert that the world, whatever it is made of, cannot be lived in. The longer, more carefully composed novels are never quite this hopeless.