Stephen Sondheim...iconoclast, genius, and follower of Dickensian Thought (No wonder he loves English crosswords!)
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"a soft black drizzle": Dickens uses this phrase to describe the smoke from Chancery's chimneys, the same smoke which Krook will die in. The phrase is even more appropriate for Krook, whose spontaneous combustion occurs indoors in a gentle smokiness noticed only by its burning. The use of such an apt comparison for a place which will be bound to a person for whom, several hundred pages later, the comparison will re-apply is not an accident. It is Dickens at his most all-seeing.
Dickens creatively uses alliteration in Chapter One. Dickens's opening description of the mud uses the cliché of "slipping and sliding," but he follows with "Chizzle, Mizzle, and Drizzle," the law firm,m who are "shirking and sharking." Nabokov points out that shirking and sharking are not just proper descriptive words for how lawyers struggle to gain control of legal situations, but they also can be used to describe how people move through mud, the mud of the streets of London or the metaphorical mud of Chancery.
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The connection between Richard and Miss Flite. When Richard, Ada, and Esther meet Miss Flite outside Chancery, the first word out of Richard's mouth being exposed to her trademark rambling is "Mad!" It is an apt description obvious to anyone with sense. Richard will by novel's end be living in the same quarters as Miss Flite, call her a friend, his reason lost by the same exposure to Chancery which has affected her.
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Miss Flite continually uses the words "youth, hope, beauty," which turn out to be the names of the three of her many pet birds. Miss Flite adores birds and seeing them fly, but keeps her multiple pets locked up in cages. Her explanation makes twisted sense…she is IN Chancery but does not understand it, is not OF it, as I mentioned in the previous part of commentary. In an attempt to gain more of an understanding of Chancery, which drove her to madness, she decides to wield the power of a judge (in the same establishment of the similar pretender Krook, the "Lord Chancellor") by keeping the birds in cages until the appropriate time to set them free. Like the suitors in Chancery, it is highly doubtful the birds' time will ever come under such a combination of sense and nonsense. For Miss Flite has sense. In that same first meeting with Esther, Richard, and Ada, she lists youth, hope, and beauty in the same breath as Chancery and Conversation Kenge, the garrulous attorney who brings the heroine and her allies into the business. Her last words are "Ha! Pray accept my blessing." Miss Flite knows that youth, hope, and beauty stand very little chance of winning over a system which cares for nothing but intricate logistics based in arcane knowledge (the opposite of youth). She identifies with this by practicing similar oppression, holding the birds with virtuous names in cages. Also, that keen natural observer Nabokov knows the symbolism behind the three species of birds she keeps: larks represent youth, linnets hope, and goldfinches beauty.
(Almost 130 years later in 1979, Stephen Sondheim used this same imagery in his masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Johanna's solo, sung in the room Judge Turpin keeps her locked in and from which Anthony first falls in love with her, is "Green Finch and Linnet Bird." Hope and beauty, the two qualities she and Anthony possess which Todd, Turpin, Mrs. Lovett, and the others lack…and note the GREEN finch. Green for jealousy, the jealousy which drives Turpin to take control of Johanna and her mother and send Benjamin Barker to the fate which sparks the murders. Sondheim and Dickens know how much sadness can be mixed with the best qualities in life.)
Caddy, another captive child, has a meeting with Prince in Miss Flite's room. A foreshadowing of the hopeful-tragic ending of Bleak House. Caddy and Prince, who is in his own way locked into a mode of living, have a great pre-wedding tryst in the Miss Flite's room precisely because of its oppressive qualities, but there they find a measure of freedom and strength. An oblique hint that the birds will one day be free.
Krook lists the names of Miss Flite's birds for Esther, Ada, Richard, and Mr. Jarndyce but leaves out "Beauty," and beauty will be the one thing Esther loses in the book. And of course, Esther's loss is solely due to her unselfish nature at odds with Krook's money-grubbing and Chancery. "Beauty" may slip Krook's mind because he has no notion of what the word really means, spending all of his time with oppressed suitors and unhappy and/or crazy people. There are twenty-six birds altogether (An alphabet of negativity…a comprehension?) and Krook names twenty-five. His audience possesses twenty-three of the names when we think about it before the novel is over, the exceptions being "Wigs" and "Rags," unless we can say for sure Jarndyce wears a wig (as was custom, especially in the courts) and at one point Esther may have rags while tending to Jo and then nursing herself.
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"He never thought…what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind." Leaving out a few typical histrionics, Esther's sad observation of the link between Richard and Miss Flite is accurate. Youth, hope, and beauty are subsumed to her and the powers of Chancery. Richard sees Miss Flite every day, does good deeds for her, and takes pity on her, but the good feeling he uses in describing this to Esther implies that he sees her as anyone would see a figure of sympathy…sympathy in the brutality of Chancery. I personally admire how Dickens uses the word "hungry." Krook's warehouse is indeed a consuming monstrosity, eating youth, hope, and beauty and sewing death (Captain Hawdon and Krook himself), depression (Mr. Gridley), and insanity. And Miss Flite takes a propriety interest in all who pass by her. Not Krook, her landlord, but certainly with Richard and Gridley, whom she grief-strickenly cries out died without her blessing.
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