Dead, your Majesty! (Bleak House - Charles Dickens)

Member Name: Athanasius Green

Product:	Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Date:	14/10/00 (175 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Funny, moving, exuberant, tragic

Disadvantages: Sentimental, crude coincidence

Q. What do you call 5000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
A. A good start.

This little joke might serve quite adequately as a good summary of Bleak House.

Yes, it has plenty of toe-curling Dickensian sentimentality and magnificent rhetoric. But, these defects forgiven, it is full of astute caricature which is often comic, caustic, salutary, pathetic.

It is full of Dickensian special effects - one of the central characters spontaneously combusts, and many others are driven to one kind of madness or another. It is full of wonderful little details - a bedroom curtain held on its rail by a kitchen fork in the chaotic home of the absurd do-gooder, Mrs. Jellybee.

In a huge sweep, this novel describes how just about every layer of English society is locked together and largely blighted by the hugely inadequate system of law that we call "Equity" - the species of law that is dispensed by the Court of Chancery that once sat in the old hall of Lincoln's Inn - and which was radically overhauled some twenty years after Bleak House was published.

It is inspired by a real-life law suit ("the Titchbourne Claimant") that took over 30 years to come to settlement. In Bleak House, the central lawsuit, unresolved for decades, eating up a disputed estate in lawyers' fees (much to the amusement of the lawyers), is called, in capital letters, JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE. All kinds of people get swept up into the case - from Lady Dedlock, the leader of fashion, to Jo the Crossing Sweeper (a child who is a Dickensian forerunner of the Squeegee merchants who clean windscreens at traffic lights), the poorest of the poor. In the middle, you have plenty of calm lawyers and one who is thoroughly ominous, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who knows everybody's secrets. JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE leaves within its wake a myriad of broken hearts, broken minds, suicides, and paupers.

The thing about caricature, of course, is that it does
not depict the appearance, it depicts the soul. As long as you remember that fact, you can only wish to have the good fortune to meet a soul as excellent as that of one of the narrators of the story, Esther.

There's something chillingly Blairite about Bleak House. It is a novel about an institution, the Court of Chancery, that Tony Blair would regard as the epitome of one of the "forces of conservatism". Whether this attracts you or turns you off, the truth is that Bleak House is an astonishing achievement.

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