It’s hard to sum Bleak House up in a few words. It’s a big book, in every way. It runs to more than 800 pages, has dozens of characters, two narrators and several plots and subplots. Let’s just say it’s by Charles Dickens and that will give you enough to get started with.
Don’t be put off by the title. Bleak House is the name of a manor house that is the setting for some of the story. Although there is plenty of poverty, injustice and grim social commentary, the book also contains its full share of Dickens’ humor. It’s probably not beach reading, but it’s a good book for later in the year when the evenings are getting longer, the weather’s getting chilly, and there is nothing on TV worth watching.
One of the joys of Bleak House is Inspector Bucket, the prototype of the great English detective—unflappable, unfailingly polite, and tenacious as a bulldog. I wish Dickens had given the inspector a book of his own.* Whenever he shows up it’s a pleasure to watch him in action.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
Bleak House is not one of Dickens’ best-known works and its characters have not become household names, as have Scrooge, Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Its best-known contribution to popular culture is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Chancery Court case involving disputed wills that has dragged on for generations, impoverishing the family and enriching lawyers until the costs have exceeded the value of the estate.
The fictional case has become a byword for judicial inefficiency and legal log-rolling. It consumes fortunes, costs the sanity and ruins the lives of several characters, and is the central device around which the various plots revolve. Dickens assured readers in his preface that everything in the book about the Court of Chancery is “essentially true,” and cites several examples of similar cases extant in 1853 to prove it.
As anyone who has read or watched Rumpole of the Bailey knows, English law is a mystery to Americans. Procedure is confusing and distinctions between barristers and solicitors, even between prosecutors and defenders, are puzzling, and the 19th century Court of Chancery is a maze that could baffle even an Old Bailey hack. Fortunately, you don’t have to understand Victorian jurisprudence to enjoy Bleak House any more than you have to know anatomy to enjoy Frankenstein. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is the monster stalking its victims through the pages of the book.
The players
Esther Summerson and Richard Carstone, two wards of the court, are taken under the wing of an uncle, John Jarndyce, who wants to make up for some of the damage done to the family by the interminable lawsuit. They live with their uncle at the unfortunately named Bleak House but are raised by him with love and kindness. A widening circle of extended family members and acquaintances are drawn into a family mystery and their own dramas become intertwined as the plots thicken.
Although they are not household names, there are many memorable characters in this book. There is Mr. George, the honorable ex-soldier, the dysfunctional Jellyby family, the evil Smallweeds, and a host of others. This wouldn’t be Dickens without a dose of pathos, and Jo, the young street sweeper, is one of the author’s most successful creations for this. And of course there are the lawyers. Nobody does lawyers—good or disreputable—like Dickens, and Bleak House provides plenty of them, including Mr. Tulkinghorn, Messrs. Vholes and Kenge, and their clerks.
If you know the book, I have probably left out many of your favorite characters. Sorry about that; there are just too many to name all of them.
Bleak House is a good mystery story, good social commentary, a good comic novel and a good melodrama. As befits an author who earned his living being paid by the installment, it is told in a leisurely style, but at 800-plus pages there is no sense that it is too long. Being Dickens, Bleak House is always in print and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a copy at your local library or bookstore.
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*The BBC made Inspector Bucket the central character in a limited series, Dickensian, set in the Dickens universe and peopled with characters from many of his novels. I never got into this show and can’t really say how good it is.