Bleak House: I’ve Got the Feeling…Oh, No, No

The Picture of Apathy

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"When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given the birds their liberty." The closing sentence in the penultimate chapter for Esther. Miss Flite frees the birds only when youth, hope, and beauty have triumphed. Mr. Jarndyce has no need to think of the suit ever again, Richard and Ada are reunited in his death, and Esther has found a husband who loves her and her true place in the world. However, yes, Richard has to die. Miss Flite is not evil or malicious herself—she IS one of Esther's most-loved acquaintances, after all—but her complicity in the murkiness of Chancery requires some necessary side effects to her breaking free of it, and Richard's fate has become bound to hers, and his youth, hope, and beauty are fair game. (Also, after Miss Flite releases the birds into the world, Esther apparently receives Beauty again, going by Allan's last words.)

Krook advertises that he will buy and resell bones and wardrobes. Used clothing is rags, so he sells the same bones and rags which Chancery turns its suitors into. The rest of his shop is rotting junk, like rotting laws. Nabokov draws a tight line between Krook and Chancery. On the surface, Krook is a typical Dickens eccentric like Jingle or Micawber, a rumbling, outsized, ultimately harmless personage who keeps a rambling warehouse and tends to his cat. However…

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"Krook calls the Lord Chancellor his brother—his brother in rust and dust, in madness and mud." Krook is the symbolic representative of the social ills plaguing British society. He looks like a sick man, white-haired, gnarled, and misshapen. The implication of his warehouse is that he will give people pennies for their goods to ensure he makes a profit by selling what is really junk back to others who probably deserve better but can only really afford his wares…he continues a vicious cycle of social oppression just as Chancery is a vicious cycle of legal (and social as well) oppression. And as mentioned, everyone who comes into his warehouse either dies or goes insane. The real tragedy is that Krook never comes across as any more devilish than sweet Miss Flite. He has found a niche where he is on the top rung of a system and has no interest in halting its perpetuation…just as the Lord Chancellor is in charge of an outmoded, fiendishly complex system that works well enough for him and the lawyers under him for no thought of change to enter his head.

Apathy is one of the great sins in the Dickensian world view, and Bleak House is in part a portrait of a world where few take the time to truly understand others. As maddening as Esther can be, Dickens likes her and elevates her because she has empathy for others. Allan Woodcourt and Mr. Jarndyce fall into the same category, and the Dedlocks are redeemed by empathy. The villains of the book are either unthinking (Krook) or deliberate (Skimpole and the Smallweeds) or just turn out that way by cynical nature (Mr. Tulkinghorn, who does not set out to wreck peoples' lives but does so anyway in the name of legal business…has there ever been anyone since Shakespeare who makes a case for killing all the lawyers as well as Dickens?), but they share one trait: a cool unwillingness to think of others. Even philanthropists like Mrs. Jellyby suffer from apathy, performing their acts out of self-righteousness and not Christian charity. The three plots of the book all turn around apathy. The murder happens because Mr. Tulkinghorn refuses to consider the points of view of all his potential killers, the children, Jo and the Necketts above all, are tortured or die from people making self-interested decisions (Skimpole is the worst), and Chancery is the apex of apathy, a court system…and law is for the protection of the people…where the aggrieved are barely allowed to speak and the most impersonal spokesmen of all do everything. Krook seems to have very few thoughts in his head and never does any act, good or ill, for anyone. A fine brother for the Lord Chancellor!

Richard identifies the bones in Krook's warehouse as a potential assemblage for a Chancery client…the same sort of man he will become in the end thanks to a "temperamental flaw in his nature" which leaves him jobless and ultimately obsessed with Chancery. Let me illustrate this point with a personal story. One of the best and most loving friends I have ever had has a rather notable father whom my Dad really doesn't like. Last year, my friend went out of her way to do something extraordinarily heartfelt for me, and when Dad heard about it, he said he would try not to openly criticize her father in the future, because the way he raised his daughter meant he did one thing right in his life. Similarly, Dickens does not want us to think of Richard as a figure to despise, for he does at least one thing right: he is genuinely good enough to win the love and devotion of Ada, the sweetest figure in the story, who believes in him and ultimately has her beliefs confirmed. But Richard is indeed a collection of bones: he has many qualities, most of them decent, some very good, but the flaw is that he lacks a connecting tissue (like skin) to bind and focus his qualities together. Thus he is restless and impetuous, rejecting medicine, law, and the army in turn, then deciding that the only way to take care of Ada (he always carries empathy for Ada, which keeps him on the right side of Dickens) is to win the suit, separating him from Mr. Jarndyce and putting him on the path to the boneyard.

When Krook is introduced, Esther sees something in his eyes "as if he were on fire within." If this isn't the most clever foreshadowing imaginable for an event we could never have predicted, tell me what is. Krook is on fire—hellfire—for his continual ignorant sin, and the reckoning comes in Chapter 32 when he comes into possession of some of the most destructive artifacts in the novel, the letters between Hawdon and Lady Dedlock, letters to pure for a sullied man to touch or deal with.

Krook and his cat, a tiger of a pet, are "waiting for the birds to leave their cages," for "only death can liberate a Chancery suitor" such as Gridley, Richard, and Tom Jarndyce, whom Krook quotes as comparing the suit to "a slow fire." I think I've said enough about Chancery leading to either liberating death or, worse, liberating insanity, but two points stand out: Krook's deliberate equation of Chancery and burning, and the cat, a beast who scares Esther and the natural predator of the bird. There is always a chance the cat can get into the cages, and Dickens further compares the cat to those other oppressors, the dry, money-minded Smallweeds who help in the persecution of the helpless good.