Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’

At 1100 pages, Bleak House was my second 1000+ work that I tackled this year (the previous one being War and Peace). Bleak House is not Dickens’ most popular work but it’s a novel that’s been cited as his best by numerous critics. Its also his longest.

I haven’t read Marx’s appreciation of Dickens but its not hard to see the debt that Marx owed him. In the book, Dickens sharply critiques the class conflicts, the squalor of London, the inequality of wealth, the norms of the aristocracy, the hollowness of philanthropy and of course the impact of the unfolding Industrial Revolution all over England.

Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but, as yet, such things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers desolately look at one another over roads and streams, like brick and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of embankments are thrown up, and left as precipices with torrents of rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything looks chaotic, and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its way without a railroad on its mind.

—-

He comes to a gateway in the brick wall, looks in, and sees a great perplexity of iron lying about, in every stage, and in a vast variety of shapes; in bars, in wedges, in sheets; in tanks, in boilers, in axles, in wheels, in cogs, in cranks, in rails; twisted and wrenched into eccentric and perverse forms, as separate parts of machinery; mountains of it broken up, and rusty in its age; distant furnaces of it glowing and bubbling in its youth; bright fireworks of it showering about, under the blows of the steam hammer; red-hot iron, white-hot iron, cold-black iron; an iron taste, an iron smell, and a Babel of iron sounds.

Orwell’s essay on Dickens which I browsed through after finishing Bleak House had this memorable line:

In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling.

The essay is a delightful critique of Dickens’ politics. But I probably would need to read more of his works to agree or disagree with Orwell.

The 1853 first editions of the novel are selling at around £12,500 online. The book was also adapted by BBC as a 15-part series with Gilian Anderson starring as Lady Dedlock.