This is a cliched illustration, but we NEED the original Cruikshank from Chapter 32
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Krook is “perpetually full of gin” and carries within him “a portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.” If Krook is the novel’s direct representative of both Chancery and social apathy, it follows that he must also be apathetic towards himself. By continually being under the influence of alcohol, and gin was a strong drink marketed for the lower classes above all, he shows little regard for his well-being. It is in accordance with John Stuart Mill’s end-of-decade dictum in On Liberty, that Krook in this case harms no one but himself. “Portable hell…” it sounds reminiscent of Pale Fire (which I haven’t read yet).
Tony Jobling, or Weevle, takes the same room in which Captain Hawdon committed suicide. Weevle moves into a room full of death, in a house full of death, and in the great Chapter 32, “The Appointed Time,” will use Hawdon’s death to perpetuate another death in his plan to assist Guppy’s pursuit of Esther by securing Hawdon and Lady Dedlock’s letters from Krook. Weevle has ingratiated himself with Krook, and given him more gin.
“Mark the candle heavily burning with ‘a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.’ No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.” A candle is a long, thin object. A cabbage head is bulky, more expansive, the latter quality shared in more delicate style by the winding-sheet. Dickens uses these words to set up the controlled explosion which ends the chapter.
80
Krook’s death is a return to the fog of Chancery from which he came. “The evil within a man has destroyed the man…the metaphor has become a physical fact.” Nabokov carefully recounts all of the events for this sequence, and shows how “The Appointed Time” is an apt title for this chapter. (That is Mr. Rostan, not Mr. Nabokov.) In all of Dickens’s descriptions of Chancery and the neighborhood thus far, he has used imagery of fog, smoke, soot, a “soft black drizzle,” none of it especially heavy on its own but always there to the point of overpowering weight, and all ephemeral, thoughtless and uncaring of whom it subsumes. The atmosphere around Chancery represents Chancery, and thus represents Krook. The difference is that Chancery by its perpetuation shows a regard for itself. Krook now shows no regard for himself, per his alcoholism. The extra apathy is already weakening him when he is given more alcohol…more apathy…as part of a plan to commit what will be a malicious act (for Lady Dedlock, whom Mr. Guppy is not thinking about, and Weevle is only carrying out Mr. Guppy’s orders, so even more apathy here). The quantity of sin is enough to finally have Krook’s portable hell become the actual hell to which he returns in that same smoke. He has died at the appointed time when all of the apathy grows too much for him to bear.
81
Mr. Guppy and Weevle’s “rapid, colloquial…jerky” dialogue contrasts the “eloquent apostrophic tolling” of ‘Charles Dickens’ the narrator. Part of Dickens’s greatness was an ability to keep his characters separated and distinct. This extends to his own third-person narrative voice (or is it third-person…see later), an eloquent, omniscient tone which for all his loquaciousness and verve (and in the end of 32 indeed apostrophic, addressing an imaginary judge), is kept apart and distinguished from Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Turveydrop, and the other grandiose figures.
Dickens’s style is representative of his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, above all History of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s famed book came out simultaneously with the second half of Dickens’s novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers. In Bleak House, Dickens shows an exposure to the Carlyle who wrote Revolution and Sartor Resartus. There is a witty verbosity, an earnest defense of what the author sees as good and attack on the bad, and a relentless depiction of character. Apparently, Dickens and Carlyle were good friends, the latter helping inspire A Tale of Two Cities, and immediately before Bleak House Carlyle published his Latter-Day Pamphlets, critiques of the current society and its institutions, including laissez faire capitalism…another great form of apathy. It may be that Dickens was absorbing Carlyle’s style as the two shared opinions.
The names surrounding Chancery are apropos. Krook lives in his name what the people surrounding Chancery really are…the unlawful. Miss Flite is concerned with freedom, of birds soaring above the madness, while she is on a permanent “flight of fancy.” And as Dickens keeps evoking the fog and mud, so the lawyers in Chancery keep reducing “MY Lord” to “M’lud” to “Mud.” As with that great figure in fiction, the idiot-savant who sees all clearly in his lesser mind, the lawyers whose wits are dulled by Chancery refer to its heads as exactly what they are.
83
Krook and Chancery both meet logical ends. Krook dies when the apathy which characterizes Chancery takes full control and returns him to the fog. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is finally resolved when Chancery, in turn, is overwhelmed by itself. The lawyers’ fees have over time eaten up the entire cost of the estate, so there is nothing left to sue over…the case is absorbed into the same fog as Krook, apathy now working its way over a controlled period of time. Thus the end of the suit is less dramatic than Krook’s death, but it carries the same logic and the same absurdity. No wonder the lawyers laugh upon hearing the final decision: they have defeated themselves! But as Nabokov sagely says, “Only the dead do not laugh.” Richard’s reaction is sorrow and regret that he has gotten caught up in the absurdity, and it is by this that God gracefully allows his forgiveness by Mr. Jarndyce and Ada
John Jarndyce calls a child “the finest creature on earth,” and for Dickens it was so because children were good, innocent, not yet wise to the worst of the world, and Nabokov says he was at his best documenting the simple pathos and cruel miseries of children.” We now leave Chancery behind to come to the child theme, which is crucial to Bleak House.
In my introduction, I discussed how being oversaturated with Dickens caused me to lay him aside for a long time, but Nabokov is right, and it is a beautiful torture that this is the case: Dickens’s most known and most clichéd trademark was also what he did best. The entire world knows (or should know) about not just Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim but also Smike, the young David Copperfield, Pip, and those two lovely Little girls Nell and Dorrit. In writing their melodramas and tragic or gloriously uplifting endings, he WAS perhaps the best English writer since Shakespeare. The secret was his ability at making things RELATIVE. I compare this to when I watched Nanette Burstein’s excellent documentary American Teen, where my irritation with her subjects’ goals and drama and sadness over “unimportant things” gave way to epiphany that when I was in high school, I cared about those “unimportant things” just as much. Dickens knew that for a child just learning about the world, they had cares, joys, loves, hopes, and fears very different from those of adults, and he wrote about these emotions with empathy and realism. Empathy…that is what Dickens’s best children possess most of all. They are loyal, generous, and loving to mankind because they haven’t “learned” enough to know it’s possible to be otherwise! They are the natural opposition to the apathy of Bleak House, which is why not only in this novel do they suffer more trials than Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey combined would have ever wanted to go through…but also why he was able to create one of the greatest comic villains of all literature…whom I shall get to in the next post.
For right now, all I can say is that all of the negative sides of humanity in Bleak House are always countered by the gentle goodness of its “real” children, and that our heroine Esther and her two best partners, Allan and Mr. Jardnyce, are the adults who have held fast to that goodness and go out of their way to practice empathy…especially towards children from Jo to Ada who are afflicted most of all.
Krook is “perpetually full of gin” and carries within him “a portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.” If Krook is the novel’s direct representative of both Chancery and social apathy, it follows that he must also be apathetic towards himself. By continually being under the influence of alcohol, and gin was a strong drink marketed for the lower classes above all, he shows little regard for his well-being. It is in accordance with John Stuart Mill’s end-of-decade dictum in On Liberty, that Krook in this case harms no one but himself. “Portable hell…” it sounds reminiscent of Pale Fire (which I haven’t read yet).
Tony Jobling, or Weevle, takes the same room in which Captain Hawdon committed suicide. Weevle moves into a room full of death, in a house full of death, and in the great Chapter 32, “The Appointed Time,” will use Hawdon’s death to perpetuate another death in his plan to assist Guppy’s pursuit of Esther by securing Hawdon and Lady Dedlock’s letters from Krook. Weevle has ingratiated himself with Krook, and given him more gin.
“Mark the candle heavily burning with ‘a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.’ No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.” A candle is a long, thin object. A cabbage head is bulky, more expansive, the latter quality shared in more delicate style by the winding-sheet. Dickens uses these words to set up the controlled explosion which ends the chapter.
80
Krook’s death is a return to the fog of Chancery from which he came. “The evil within a man has destroyed the man…the metaphor has become a physical fact.” Nabokov carefully recounts all of the events for this sequence, and shows how “The Appointed Time” is an apt title for this chapter. (That is Mr. Rostan, not Mr. Nabokov.) In all of Dickens’s descriptions of Chancery and the neighborhood thus far, he has used imagery of fog, smoke, soot, a “soft black drizzle,” none of it especially heavy on its own but always there to the point of overpowering weight, and all ephemeral, thoughtless and uncaring of whom it subsumes. The atmosphere around Chancery represents Chancery, and thus represents Krook. The difference is that Chancery by its perpetuation shows a regard for itself. Krook now shows no regard for himself, per his alcoholism. The extra apathy is already weakening him when he is given more alcohol…more apathy…as part of a plan to commit what will be a malicious act (for Lady Dedlock, whom Mr. Guppy is not thinking about, and Weevle is only carrying out Mr. Guppy’s orders, so even more apathy here). The quantity of sin is enough to finally have Krook’s portable hell become the actual hell to which he returns in that same smoke. He has died at the appointed time when all of the apathy grows too much for him to bear.
81
Mr. Guppy and Weevle’s “rapid, colloquial…jerky” dialogue contrasts the “eloquent apostrophic tolling” of ‘Charles Dickens’ the narrator. Part of Dickens’s greatness was an ability to keep his characters separated and distinct. This extends to his own third-person narrative voice (or is it third-person…see later), an eloquent, omniscient tone which for all his loquaciousness and verve (and in the end of 32 indeed apostrophic, addressing an imaginary judge), is kept apart and distinguished from Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Turveydrop, and the other grandiose figures.
Dickens’s style is representative of his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, above all History of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s famed book came out simultaneously with the second half of Dickens’s novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers. In Bleak House, Dickens shows an exposure to the Carlyle who wrote Revolution and Sartor Resartus. There is a witty verbosity, an earnest defense of what the author sees as good and attack on the bad, and a relentless depiction of character. Apparently, Dickens and Carlyle were good friends, the latter helping inspire A Tale of Two Cities, and immediately before Bleak House Carlyle published his Latter-Day Pamphlets, critiques of the current society and its institutions, including laissez faire capitalism…another great form of apathy. It may be that Dickens was absorbing Carlyle’s style as the two shared opinions.
The names surrounding Chancery are apropos. Krook lives in his name what the people surrounding Chancery really are…the unlawful. Miss Flite is concerned with freedom, of birds soaring above the madness, while she is on a permanent “flight of fancy.” And as Dickens keeps evoking the fog and mud, so the lawyers in Chancery keep reducing “MY Lord” to “M’lud” to “Mud.” As with that great figure in fiction, the idiot-savant who sees all clearly in his lesser mind, the lawyers whose wits are dulled by Chancery refer to its heads as exactly what they are.
83
Krook and Chancery both meet logical ends. Krook dies when the apathy which characterizes Chancery takes full control and returns him to the fog. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is finally resolved when Chancery, in turn, is overwhelmed by itself. The lawyers’ fees have over time eaten up the entire cost of the estate, so there is nothing left to sue over…the case is absorbed into the same fog as Krook, apathy now working its way over a controlled period of time. Thus the end of the suit is less dramatic than Krook’s death, but it carries the same logic and the same absurdity. No wonder the lawyers laugh upon hearing the final decision: they have defeated themselves! But as Nabokov sagely says, “Only the dead do not laugh.” Richard’s reaction is sorrow and regret that he has gotten caught up in the absurdity, and it is by this that God gracefully allows his forgiveness by Mr. Jarndyce and Ada
John Jarndyce calls a child “the finest creature on earth,” and for Dickens it was so because children were good, innocent, not yet wise to the worst of the world, and Nabokov says he was at his best documenting the simple pathos and cruel miseries of children.” We now leave Chancery behind to come to the child theme, which is crucial to Bleak House.
In my introduction, I discussed how being oversaturated with Dickens caused me to lay him aside for a long time, but Nabokov is right, and it is a beautiful torture that this is the case: Dickens’s most known and most clichéd trademark was also what he did best. The entire world knows (or should know) about not just Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim but also Smike, the young David Copperfield, Pip, and those two lovely Little girls Nell and Dorrit. In writing their melodramas and tragic or gloriously uplifting endings, he WAS perhaps the best English writer since Shakespeare. The secret was his ability at making things RELATIVE. I compare this to when I watched Nanette Burstein’s excellent documentary American Teen, where my irritation with her subjects’ goals and drama and sadness over “unimportant things” gave way to epiphany that when I was in high school, I cared about those “unimportant things” just as much. Dickens knew that for a child just learning about the world, they had cares, joys, loves, hopes, and fears very different from those of adults, and he wrote about these emotions with empathy and realism. Empathy…that is what Dickens’s best children possess most of all. They are loyal, generous, and loving to mankind because they haven’t “learned” enough to know it’s possible to be otherwise! They are the natural opposition to the apathy of Bleak House, which is why not only in this novel do they suffer more trials than Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey combined would have ever wanted to go through…but also why he was able to create one of the greatest comic villains of all literature…whom I shall get to in the next post.
For right now, all I can say is that all of the negative sides of humanity in Bleak House are always countered by the gentle goodness of its “real” children, and that our heroine Esther and her two best partners, Allan and Mr. Jardnyce, are the adults who have held fast to that goodness and go out of their way to practice empathy…especially towards children from Jo to Ada who are afflicted most of all.
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