Bleak House
(Charles Dickens)
A U.S. Public Television production has revived interest in one of Charles Dickens's typically masterful but less-remembered novels. Masterpiece Theatre's six-part "Bleak House" (January-February 2006) offered enough plot and characters to send this abstracter directly to the book itself.
Dickens's righteous indignation, powerfully directed at the seedy and hypocritical elements of mid-19th century England throughout his works, is concentrated this time on the British Court of Chancery, which disposes--or more accurately fails to efficiently dispose --of disputed wills. And so it is that the full length of this emphatically full-length novel flits in and out of the closing stages of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a decades-old contested estate case that has managed to poison the lives of many it touches while consuming its assets. Dickens's pointed observation that its only beneficiaries are the lawyers representing the interested parties still resonates in a society that richly rewards and at the same time scorns trial attorneys as a class.
But the author's preoccupation with chancery litigation does not preclude his presentation of the usual array of fascinating characters. He gives us a charming orphan of mysterious origins, a guardian of almost unfathomable altruism, a much-envied noblewoman haunted by a tragic affair, a ubiquitous, coldly calculating legal adviser, and a seemingly crude but ultimately effective police detective. To supplement these main protagonists, there are a sinister moneylender, a comically obnoxious law clerk, an unlettered boy of the streets, a pair of ill-fated young lovers, a heroic physician, and a variety of servants, tradespeople, and hangers-on.
We visit the high and the low, both in London and the countryside. And while words clearly predominate over action in the earlier stages of the book, events begin to swirl under the author's expert hand toward a tricky murder investigation and a climactic woman-hunt through a bone-chilling snowy night. The survivors are then free to pursue the happiness that Dickens generally reserves for the final chapters of his great works.
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