[Literature] Charles Dickens: Bleak House #3/501

Eclipsed by the Crystal Palace and the goods it encased, these realities were also effectively erased in 1851,when “the Exhibition‍—its glories and its wonders, its accomplishment in the present, and its example to, and promise of, the future” were “the only topics of writing, speaking and reading, and form[ed] almost the only subject… of the draughtsman and the engraver” (Illustrated London News,May 3, 1851). While Dickens had spilled his share of ink on the topic of the day, he was never an avid enthusiast. Privately, he said he was “ ‘used up’ ” by the spectacle. “I don’t say ’there’s nothing in it‘‍—there’s too much,” he wrote after a foray into the Crystal Palace. “So many things bewildered me” (July 11, 1851). By mid-summer, he was also utterly fed up with the mania for the exhibition and its puffery by the press. It was at that time that he began “pondering afar off” a new novel: “Violent restlessness, and vague ideas of going I don’t know where, I don’t know why are the present symptoms of the disorder” (August 17, 1851), Dickens reported. But he had already indicated his direction earlier that year. Having commented with some admiration on the great resources and extraordinary ingenuity being devoted to the production of the Great Exhibition in an article entitled “The Last Words of the Old Year” (January 31, 1851), Dickens had gone on to ask: “Which of my children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants, of England equally united, for another Exhibition‍—for a great display of England’s sins and negligences, to be, by the steady contemplation of all eyes, and steady union of all hearts and hands, set right?” Bleak Houseis that “great display,” in which Dickens turned his back on the other one.

In so doing, he produced a more inclusive vision of mid-Victorian Britain than the Crystal Palace had done. Having spoken of the need to “study the Humanities through thesetransparent windows” (“Last Words”) , Dickens looked squarely at streets of “ ‘perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out; without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder; the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust’ ” (p. 106). If he was among “ ’the few’ ” who could “ ‘distinguish the grim misery lying underneath the magic brilliance which dazzles the visitor in the Great Exhibition’ ” (the Leader,quoted in Davis, The Great Exhibition,p. 192), Dickens was in an even smaller minority in taking a grim view of the entire condition of England. For, by mid-century, he had come to realize forcefully that Britain’s problems could not be isolated from one another, confined within class divisions, compartmentalized under discrete headings. Far from being local, such problems were inherent in the structure, the institutions, the practices, and the attitudes of society. From this perspective, Dickens could represent the disease emanating from the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s as “work[ing] its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high” (p. 590). Equally, he could represent the abuses of Chancery, the highest court in Britain, as leaving deadly “ ’impressions … all over England’ ” (p. 106). And, where this court could, and did, hold property interminably in its bureaucratic grasp, he could, and did, link the institution that was supposed to be dedicated to equity with the slum that gave ample evidence of inequity.

When Dickens began writing Bleak House,the injustices perpetrated and perpetuated by the court were not just topical; they were already proverbial. The Oxford English Dictionaryindicates that the phrase “in Chancery” referred, among other things, to “the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything, and the certainty of cost and loss to property” and dates this usage from the 1830s. Twenty years later, when the abuses of Chancery were being widely publicized in the press, Dickens’s indictment of the court extended to the equally dilatory procedures of Parliament, as well as to the reactionary upper classes, figured in the novel by the Dedlocks and their milieu. Both the world of Chancery and that of Fashion are “things of precedent and usage” (p. 23) in Bleak House,where Dickens further links the two in the cohesive symbolic pattern that encompasses all of Britain: “Fog everywhere.” “And … at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor, in his High Court of Chancery,” where dozens of bewigged lawyers are “mistily engaged” (p. 18) in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a “slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing” (p. 28).