Bleak House Once Again

I just completed another long stroll through Bleak House. It's either my fifth or sixth time through -- or almost once a decade since 1958. During this reading, which will no doubt be my last, I felt that I was imprisoned by the novel, hogtied; that I couldn't do anything or read anything else until I made it to the end of entire 900 pages. Dickens took over my life, and not for the first time. It was a struggle, perhaps made worse because my eyes are not as good as they once were and because the print in my Oxford Classics edition seems to be growing tinier and grayer.

It was a willing surrender and I was a willing captive. How can I not be dazzled and impressed by the profusion of Dickens' imagination and by his genius at keeping a dozen plot-balls in the air. 

Nevertheless, I don't ever remember being quite so angry and impatient at Mr. Dickens.  "Let 'em wait." Well, I waited for five days, which as fast as i can trot nowadays. 

The good parts of Bleak House are as good as anything in the language. The death of Jo the crossing sweeper ("And dying thus around us every day") remains the single greatest paragraph in the long history of the English novel. "Dead, your Majesty." The encounter of Sir Leicester and Rouncewell was much better than I remembered it. Mr. Chadband, the oleaginous preacher, was, this time, remarkably pertinent. Mr. Bucket is a triumph. Lady Dedlock's long repressed love for Captain Hawley was more poignant.

But I've lost my admiration for some other parts of the novel. I could hardly bear Esther Summerson's goody-goodiness; and, this time, I have to say that Esther's relationship with her dear darling Ada seemed suspect. Far too sentimentalized. Ada herself, still in mourning seven years after the death of her misguided weak husband -- unbearable.  The Jellyby and Pardiggle satires seemed misguided, excessive.  I was not amused by Mrs. Snagsby's jealousy or by the relentless pillorying of poor Mr. Guppy. Harold Skimpole's infantile nattering has lost its charm.

There's never been a novelist with more heart or less intellect than Dickens. He is the best of novelists, the worst of novelists. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

A lot more best than worst. Pickwick is still very funny, and I'm still waiting to read what happened with that valentine Pickwick sent. Did the master throw one up into the air and it never came down?