“Imposture, how it burns”: The Death of Krook in Bleak House and Carlyle´s Thoughts on History

Mr. Krook is first introduced in chapter 5 of Bleak House. As with many characters in Dickens, the character and the setting mirror each other. First we are introduced to the setting, the rag and bottle shop and its contents: “old crackled… discolored and dog-eared… rusty… bones in a corner.” Everything suggests age, lack of use and lack of utility. The bones in the corner further emphasize the lifeless quality of the place. Even the weather, and this is also typical of this novel, reflects the mood. It is “foggy and dark.”

So, before Krook enters the scene, we have a very fair idea of what to expect of the owner of such a shop. When he does enter, we are told he is “old… short, cadaverous and withered.” Just as there is something of the sepulchre about the shop, there is something of the cadaver about Krook. Already, we know he belongs to the realm of death. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, Dickens describes Krook´s breath as “issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if we were on fire within.” The first-time reader is very unlikely to divine the import of this simile, so it is there as an Easter egg for the returning reader.

Mr. Krook and His Cat, by Harry Furniss, 1910. http://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/furniss/170.html

Krook is not only closely linked with death, but he also has a disturbing omnivorousness. Just as death eventually claims us all, Krook is determined to take possession of everything he can, for reasons unclear to himself: “All´s fish that comes to my net”. Everything he touches come to partake of a soiled, unusable quality. This introduces another key theme of the novel: infection. Krook´s repellent and grasping being is not a colourful character quirk; it is a social problem that infests London.

Krook is from the beginning associated with the legal system, being “called, among the neighbours, the Lord Chancellor”. He is parasitical upon it and by his infectious deathliness he enhances Dickens’ critique of that system – emotionally if not in terms of rational argumentation. Dickens pours into him all his anger and disgust at the operation of the legal system in England.

Johnny Vegas as Mr. Krook in the BBC Bleak House (2005).

As noted above, the description of Krook´s breath suggesting he is “on fire within” is a foreshadowing. Krook is destined to die by spontaneous combustion, a fire that begins within and consumes his entire being. Dickens claimed there was some scientific validity to the move, though critics like G.H. Lewes disagreed (see also here). It was an audacious and original move by Dickens. Krook dies and, disembodied, becomes miasma, no less disgusting in death than he was in life: “a mouldering suffocating vapor” and “a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceilings” (Chapter 32).

Then, in a famous passage, Dickens denounces Krook in his strongest and most hortatory tones:

The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

Bleak House, Chapter 32

Here again, Krook is referred to ironically as the Lord Chancellor, and it is implied that his death is a result of “false pretences” and “injustice”. These are strange charges to bring against Krook, particularly that of false pretences. Krook’s speech is rather frank than otherwise. He is what he looks like and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

In this paragraph, Dickens’ more general anger against society has taken over. He is no longer talking about Krook but about what he symbolises. To make sense of this paragraph, I think, it has to be seen as a Carlylean denunciation of society. First, the apostrophical appeal to “your Highness”, creating an implied reader of the highest in the land, is an effect similar to that Carlyle uses throughout his then recently published Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), much of which is addressed to an unspecified “your Lordship”. For example:

Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom for us all!

¨The Modern Age¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets.

Similarly the notion of false pretences, and the analogous concepts of sham, imposture and insincerity are at the angry heart of the Pamphlets:

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man’s real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther:—fallen insolvent; unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its pot boil any more for the present!

Ibid.

Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,—in a human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian quagmire of our affairs?

¨The New Downing Street¨, Latter-Day Pamphlets

Note in the second excerpt the sense of physical disgust contained in the imagery of work that oozes down, the Stygian quagmire and the poison-tank of drainage. This is a characteristic of both the Pamphlets and Bleak House. Note in the first excerpt the connection between falsity and fiery imagery. Carlyle´s powerful if under-argued suggestion is that an excess of falsity in societal relations will lead to overthrow of society as humans simply cannot bear too much falsity. To express the fearsome violence of this overthrow, Carlyle uses the image of “indispensable revolutionary fire”, building on the imagery of the bonfire of imposture in his earlier The French Revolution, one of Dickens favourite books:

IMPOSTURE is in flames, Imposture is burnt up: one red sea of Fire, wild-bellowing, enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois Mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drip fatness […]. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the Earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The world is black ashes […]. For it is the end of the dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is darkness and opaque Fire-damp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.

The French Revolution, 3.7.VIII

In the end, the death by spontaneous combustion of Krook gives Dickens an opportunity to explore Carlylean notions of the burning up of an insincere society. Like Carlyle´s own work, it does not necessarily all hang together in terms of argumentation, but remains powerful, allowing both author and reader to reflect on the insincerity and muddle of society and posit, not without satisfaction, the inevitable punishment and destruction of those who contribute to such a status quo.

Does History Progress? If so, to what?

¨Does history progress? If so, to what?¨ is the Question of the Month at Philosophy Now. My offering is among those printed in the December/January edition. It goes as follows:

The notion of historical progress was dealt a mortal blow in the nineteenth century by the discovery that the Sun must eventually burn itself out, destroying life on Earth in the process. H.G. Wells dramatized this end at the climax of 1895’s The Time Machine, when the weakening Sun renders the Earth too cold to support life.

Although the ramifications of Darwinism were generally undignified, it did at least suggest a sort of progress, from ape to man. The science of thermodynamics was altogether bleaker, and the idea of the dying Sun in particular exercised the late Victorian imagination greatly. Not only was individual death inevitable, but species death, too.

In the twenty-first century, we feel this notion less keenly than those who were first exposed to it, but it remains the ultimate stumbling block. While it is conceivable that humanity will last until the Sun makes life on Earth unsupportable, it’s unlikely to be in good enough shape to organise a sustainable civilization in another suitable corner of the universe. That is the end of our history, and it is for this that our progress must prepare us. Our intellectual progress is preparing us for this end. With the death of humanism, the tragedic nature of the death-of-the-Sun scenario evaporates.

Yuval Noah Harari tells us in Homo Deus (2015) that current scientific consensus is that individuals are, in fact, ‘dividuals’, that is, an assemblage of many different algorithms. The decisions of this assemblage are random, but not free. Who could weep for such an assemblage? But, in short, considering ourselves as assemblages of algorithms is intellectual progress, if it removes the existential horror that surrounds the fate of humanity.

The passage from Wells I alluded to but did not have space to quote comes from chapter 11 of The Time Machine (1895):

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses farther out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

From The Time Machine at Project Gutenberg.

W.H. Hodgson, who I have written about elsewhere, was heavily influenced by this chapter in The House on the Borderland (1908). The preoccupation with the death of the sun is characteristically late 19th century, and the existential despair it engenders has always been summed up for me by a passage from Joseph Conrad´s letters:

The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence.

Quoted in Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad (Longman, 1982), p. 87

Like Wells, Conrad pictured the death of life to come in coldness and silence, when the sun had burned out. This is not, current scientific consensus has it, how it will be, as the sun will get hotter before it gets colder:

“The predictions for what exactly will happen to Earth as the Sun brightens over the next billion years are pretty uncertain,” Scudder said. “But the general gist is that the increasing heat from the sun will cause more water to evaporate off the surface, and be held in the atmosphere instead. The water then acts as a greenhouse gas, which traps more incoming heat, which speeds up the evaporation.”

Before it ever even runs out of hydrogen, the sun’s high-energy light will bombard our atmosphere and “split apart the molecules and allow the water to escape as hydrogen and oxygen, eventually bleeding Earth dry of water,” Scudder said.

Ali Sundermier, ¨The sun will destroy Earth a lot sooner than you might think¨, Independent, 19 January 2018.

We have our own issues, and our own sources of apocalyptic despair, but we tend not to summon up quite the level of dread over the death of the sun that our predecessors had. However, William Thomson/Lord Kelvin´s theories on the matter are of enormous philosophical impact, at a stroke striking a critical blow against both religious teleology and whiggist notions of history. Given that this is what historical progress must lead to, the best way to progress may be by numbing the mind, anaesthetization and the Hararian notion that we are but assemblages of algorithms. Existential dread can wield little force in such an entity.