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Bleak House

Charles Dickens

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Apr 22, 2022 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-fiction, classics

Note, Jan. 30, 2023: I've just edited this review to correct a typo that resulted in two incorrect dates.

Charles Dickens ranks, in my estimation and in that of many serious students of literature, as one of the greatest fiction writers of all time. He's been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered him as a child; but there are still many of his novels that I haven't read. I'm indebted to the wonderful Goodreads group Dickensians! for the chance to take part in a very stimulating common read Note, Jan. 30, 2023: I've just edited this review to correct a typo that resulted in two incorrect dates.

Charles Dickens ranks, in my estimation and in that of many serious students of literature, as one of the greatest fiction writers of all time. He's been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered him as a child; but there are still many of his novels that I haven't read. I'm indebted to the wonderful Goodreads group Dickensians! for the chance to take part in a very stimulating common read of this one, which I dipped into as a kid (I could remember quite a few specific lines!) but only finished for the first time this week.

At 880 pages, this is (as most of Dickens' books are!) a very long novel. It took me the better part of two months to read it. Your reading time will vary, depending on how rapidly you read and how much time you can devote to it in a typical day; but this will definitely be a relatively time-consuming read. But for me, every minute of it was time well spent! This is a tour de force of literary genius, bringing together a complex tapestry of interwoven plot strands; a gallery of not-to-be-forgotten characters; carefully crafted prose steeped in symbolism and often multilayered in meanings, humor that can be by turns jovial and cuttingly satirical, an appeal to a full panoply of human emotions in the best Romantic tradition, and serious thought content that's as relevant now as when it was written. All of these qualities are thoroughly characteristic of Dickens' style in any of his novels that I've read.

In this particular novel, the author begins with an omniscient third-person narrative strand, which is generally in present tense, a literary technique not common in the 19th century. Soon, however, he begins to alternate it with the first-person, past tense narration of a female character, Esther Summerson. She's writing in the author's present; but as we learn near the book's end, she's looking back on the main narrative from the vantage point of seven years. So the main body of the novel, when she's in her early 20s, takes place in the 1840s --and some of it well back into the 1830s, because like David Copperfield and Pip Pirrip, she gives us an early look at her formative young childhood. This is a complicated structure, but it allows for the presentation of different perspectives and the incorporation of many scenes and plot strands to which Esther isn't privy. It works well, IMO, and Dickens juggles the two strands masterfully. (Dickens famously guessed that the author of Jane Eyre was female, because he thought no male writer could voice a female narrator so convincingly; but truth be told, he was no slouch at that feat himself!)

It's been said --truly, as far as I know-- that this is literally the first novel ever written which has a detective (Mr. Bucket) as a significant character. Some would class it as prototypical mystery fiction. For my part, I view it as general fiction. Yes, there is investigation of a crime; but the crime doesn't occur until relatively close to the end of the book, and its solution doesn't occupy a whole lot of the plot. The great majority of the tale revolves around normal life in everyday situations, and the interactions of people in all ordinary walks of life, high and low. (One of Dickens' strengths is the fact that he's as concerned with, and as sympathetic to, the poor and lowly as the high and mighty.) But this is also general fiction that does embody a strong theme of secrets and mystery, identifying the perpetrator of a crime being only one of them (and not necessarily the most important!) A lot of these secrets are going to be found to revolve around Esther's origins, which are as unknown to her at the outset as they are to us, save that she's apparently born out of wedlock. (In that way, she has some commonality with Oliver Twist.)

Much of the plot revolves around a fictional long-continued court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving a contested will. This case has dragged on in the Court of Chancery for generations, enriching nobody but the lawyers at the expense of the litigants, whose involvement with the case has led many to the ruination of solvency and sanity. As many readers then and now have noted, this fictional case has countless real-life counterparts in a thoroughly rotten real-life legal system of that day, and represents Dickens' passionate cri de coeur for reform. There's also a strong note of criticism of a morally bankrupt sort of social reform that aimed at improvements in foreign countries while ignoring or only ineffectually addressing widespread grinding poverty at home. But these somewhat dated specifics are underlain by a more general serious message that calls us to kindness, unselfishness, honesty, and serious concern for others as the hallmark of our life in this world. And this message is part-and-parcel of a grounding in the Christian worldview which is apparent here in many places, and undergirds all of Dickens' work. As he wrote in a letter to one Rev. D. Macrae:
“With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are drawn from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving.”
(This devotion to genuine Christianity, of course, also prompts the author to unsparing indignation at hypocritical and perverted forms of it.)

A final comment that needs to be made here is that any reader who takes Dickens' art at face value, and who has any perception of his actual attitudes, has to recognize that the author has the highest possible regard and admiration for Esther, and considers her an honest and essentially reliable narrator. This reader shares that estimation; most readers probably will, and would be surprised that anybody doesn't. But there is a cynical school of critical thought going back at least to Osbert Sitwell, who does the Introduction to the 1948 (and often reprinted) Oxford Illustrated Dickens printing of this book, and who dismisses her in one sneering partial sentence as "odious." (That, from a pundit who devotes several paragraphs of praise and defense to the hypocritical, self-serving leech Harold Skimpole, who actually IS all of odious!) Much of that view boils down to the theory that nobody's really humble (even if they have self-image issues from emotional abuse as kids), kind-hearted and caring about others; if someone appears to be, she's got to be faking it. (I would submit that this tells us a lot more about these theorists than it does about Esther!)

Like all of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens editions, this one is enhanced by the original black-and-white illustrations by Dickens' friend Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz") that graced the novel during its original serial publication in 1852-53 --a nice feature, though many of them aren't placed with the part of the text they're illustrating. ...more

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Jul 12, 2016 Abzalkumarov rated it it was amazing

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