Some while back I posted about Victorian Literature and produced a My Favourites list. This drew many comments and one visitor asked why did I love Bleak House. I promised to blog about this, but have only just got round to doing so. If you should drop by again, my apologies and here, for what they are worth, are my thoughts:
Firstly, it is by Charles Dickens. Stating the obvious I know, but I am a huge Dickens fan ever since reading David Copperfield at school and loving it. For David Copperfield read Charles Dickens and his own childhood unhappiness is amply illustrated here, a childhood which bit deeply into his soul and shaped him for the rest of his life. I went on to read other Dickens, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol (which I read religiously each Christmas Eve) and then when I was about 16 and studying for my A levels was given Bleak House to read as it was one of the exam texts. I opened it and read those wonderful opening lines:
"Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.Implacable weather…………….Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollution of a great and dirty city; Fog on the marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; ………….gas in the eyes and throat of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of the shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck………………Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the street ……..most of the shops lighted two hours before their time as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look"
Well, show me a more atmospheric and brooding opening of a book if you can. Within three paragraphs Dickens conjours up the grime and dirt of Victorian London. But where is the fog thickest? No surprise to find that it is:
"Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire to deep to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day, in the sight of heaven and earth"
Dickens worked as a law clerk and would have had first hand knowledge of the arcane and time consuming ways of the judiciary.This book tells the story of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a case over a disputed will that has been dragging on for years. It corrupts and ruins everyone who becomes involved in it. We meet two new wards of Chancery within the first few chapters, Ada and Richard who are to live with their 
guardian, John Jarndyce, and their companion, Esther Summerson. Richard decides to become involved in the Jarndyce case and, despite the love of Ada, whom he later marries, gradually becomes ruined both mentally and physically by the labyrinthine processes of the law.
Bleak House teems with characters and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of all of them. I have to admit to a slight resistance to some of Dicken’s more supposedly, funny or outrageous characters. Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, has always struck me as being acutely irritating, but is always portrayed in a sympathetic manner, and here I always find Mrs Jelleby a pain and Mr Turveydrop a selfish old man.They seem to be thrown in to provide some comic relief, though the story of Bleak House does not really need them, but as the story was originally issued in serial form in a magazine, it is understandable that they were there to keep the reader’s attention from week to week.
Every single character in Bleak House is linked to each other one way or the other. Who is the mysterious ‘Nemo’ the sight of whose handwriting causes Lady Dedlock to become faint, and alert the malevolent lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn to something in her past she might wish to forget? Who is Esther Summerson’s mother? And who finally murders Mr Tulkinghorn and why?
I cannot write a learned treatise on Bleak House, it is too broad a canvas for me to even attempt to do so.I simply want to say that, much though I love David Copperfield and other Dicken’s novels, this is my favourite. When I first read it at the age of 16 I was enthralled and read it through in three days. My English teacher did not believe that I had managed to take it all in and made me read it all over again, no hardship. Since then I have returned to this book on many occasions and at every read I find I cannot put it down and want to read on and see what happens, even though I know the ending. Surely this is the sign of a truly great book that it holds the reader’s attention time and time again?
In 2005 the BBC did a simply superb adaptation. It was done by the ubiquitous Andrew Davies, who was 
responsible for the 1997 Pride and Prejudice which has entered BBC history as a landmark classic serial, and he decided to produce it in thirteen half hour episodes rather like a ‘soap opera’ This worked brilliantly with the viewer on the edge of their seats at the end of each half hour eager to find out what happened. Gillian Anderson was excellent as Lady Dedlock with Charles Dance, evil personified, as Mr Tulkinghorn. The cast was full of wonderful British thesps all turning in terrific performances and, much though I loved and still do, the 1980s version (Diana Rigg as another wonderful Lady Dedlock) this latest production put it into the shade.
I do not think for one moment I have given any insight into this magnificent book but I just want everyone to know that I think it is a work of genius, once again I will say I love it and if anybody picks up a copy and reads it because of anything I have said, I will be delighted. I will close however with the following quote from a website on Bleak House:
"Bleak House is Dicken’s worst book. It’s a chore to read and the heroine is more saintly than is possible, much to the detriment of our ability to hold down the contents of our stomachs"
Ah, well can’t please everyone all of the time…
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