“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.

Dickinson (2019): Anachronous Language as Artistic Device

Apple TV+ series Dickinson is ostensibly a biopic of the poet Emily Dickinson, described in the blurb as ¨Poet. Daughter. Total rebel.¨ Yet an Apple press release describes Dickinson as a ¨half-hour comedy series¨. The idea that a biographical series about a renowned poet would be a comedy is surprising, all the more so in the context of Emily Dickinson, whose spare, epigrammatic works and reclusive lifestyle are not the stuff of laughter. Yet the series does have at least a semi-comic tone to it. On the whole, Dickinson is a less categorizable programme than one might expect.

The feminist angle of the series is predictably pronounced, never more heavy-handedly than in the opening minutes of the first episode. After a brief but pious introduction to the historical Dickinson, the first scene shows Hailee Steinfeld as the eponymous poet sitting down to write a poem in her dark bedroom, before being interrupted by a knock at the door. It is her sister Lavinia:

Lavinia: Emily, wake up. You have to fetch water.

Emily: Lavinia, it is four o´clock in the morning. I am writing.

L: Mother says you have to. I did it yesterday.

E: Why can´t Austin do it?

L: Austin´s a boy.

E: This is such bullshit.

This dialogue unsubtly introduces one of the key themes of Dickinson: patriarchal oppression. It also establishes Emily´s oddness and her obsessive nature: she is up at 4am, writing. Indeed, that second line is a joke of sorts (set-up: it is four o´clock in the morning; punchline: I am writing). The final line, this is such bullshit, establishes her rebellious nature. More disconcertingly, it establishes that the series will not obey 19th-century speech conventions. With the use of the expletive bullshit this is announced in the most jarring manner.

The standard adaptation of real events ask the audience to accept that ¨these [events] might have happened in much the way we are about to see them depicted¨ (Steven Lipkin, quoted in Desmond and Hawkes, Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature, McGraw-Hill, 2005, p. 189). Dickinson throughout does not do this. It uses extremely anachronous language and mannerisms to problematize any such acceptance.

The Dickinsonś residence, roof flecked with snow.

Few mainstream 19th-century adaptations, pure parodies aside, dare to introduce overtly anachronistic language in a 19th-century setting. The BBC Oliver Twist (2007) was one that did so in the context of a gritty take on Dickens’ novel. It did not, however, prove a particularly successful one in its reception. Its use of such language was, in any case, not quite as upfront or as pervasive as that in Dickinson.  Take the following discussion in episode 8 of Dickinson, ¨There’s a certain Slant of light¨. The characters are discussing Dickens‘ Bleak House:

Lavinia: I´m honestly gonna die if we don’t find out who Esther’s mother is soon.

Austin: It’s obviously Lady Dedlock.

L: Austin! No spoilers!

Ben [entering the room]: What are you reading?

L: Bleak House. It’s so good.

B: You´re reading that too! What chapter are you on?

L: Twenty-five. How many chapters do you think there´ll  be?

B: Who knows? He gets paid by the word, so…

L: I never want it to end. Oh my God, Ben, do you think Esther’ll marry Mr Jarndyce?

A: Ew, gross. He’s her guardian

L: So what? People marry their guardians all the time… Oh my god! I’m such an Esther! I’m such an Esther it’s insane!

A: Last week you said you were an Ada.

L: I know. I’m half an Ada, half an Esther.

A: I think you’re more of a Mrs Jellyby.

B: Ooh!

L: Austin!

This episode is placed, then, in 1852-53, the period when Bleak House was first serialized. The language, far from aiming for period authenticity, includes such patently 21st-century youth slang as gross.  Further, the idea that marrying one´s guardian is something that could be seen as disgusting is in itself of more recent vintage. A 19-century response might be to see it as ill-advised or regrettable in many cases, but not disgusting per se. And, in Dickinson, Lavinia represents a 19th-century consciousness (although not 19th-century speech patterns) when she replies, ¨So what? People marry their guardians all the time¨.

Reading a ¨number¨ of Bleak House

Lavinia is also reading Bleak House in the way that a 21-century person would watch a TV series: with an obsessive desire to avoid ¨spoilers¨. This avoidance of spoilers for Bleak House becomes a motif of this episode. Thus the series dramatizes the often-made point that Dickens’ serialized novels were their era´s equivalent of the TV series, made with most insistence in comparisons with The Wire. By discussing Bleak House in familiar terms throughout the episode, Dickinson provides a way in for its audience into that formidable text, and to 19th-century literature in general.

Dickinson in a playful way enacts the clash of language, morals and ideals that occurs in the encounter of the 21st-century mind with 19th-century literature. This clash is a source of comedy in the above-quoted scene. At other times, what is being suggested is a continuity in experience, the idea that the struggles of a 19th-century character cast light on the struggles of the 21st-century viewer. As such, Dickinson is one of many recent screen works dramatizing exceptional and heroic women and emphasizing their battles against a stifling patriarchy, an intended contribution to the contemporary feminist conversation. This is what one might have expected. More unexpectedly, it is a radical serio-comic mash-up of the 19th and 21st centuries, a signal of the death of the classical representative historical film and the birth of something different.

All that said, it is not easy to see how the series will maintain its tone through the already-announced season 2.  There is a certain biographical validity to the free-spirited and rebellious Emily of series 1, in general outline if not in detail.  Ted Hughes notes: “As a girl she was notorious for her comic wit and high-spirited originality, among her friends and within her family” (“Introduction”, Emily Dickinson: Poems Selected by Ted Hughes, Faber, Kindle edition, 2011, loc 185).  However, the years of reclusiveness and “nervous prostration” are approaching, placing obstacles before this merry tale of a patriarchy-smashing young poetess.

Earnestness or Death: The Tragedy of Richard Carstone in Bleak House (1852-53)

The idea of earnestness was a key one in Victorian times. Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the prime ideologue of earnestness:

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man; man’s life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive! (On Heroes, Lecture 1)

So, life is earnest. Reality is stern. If we try to conceive with this means in terms of the practice of living, we can find a good example in Dickens’ Bleak House. Dickens was, of course, a great admirer of Carlyle: “I would go at all times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive“, he said. In the 1850s, in particular, Dickens was all about Carlyle: 1854’s Hard Times was inscribed to the great Sage, and 1859’s A Tale of Two Cities used Carlyle’s French Revolution as its main historical source. Bleak House, too, is a Carlylean exercise in documenting the condition of England. We don’t have to look far in this book for the influence of Carlyle, but here we will concentrate on the concept of earnestness and its relevance to the character of Richard Carstone.

Richard is a character whose trajectory and fate have always troubled me somewhat. He is, along with the novel’s partial narrator Esther Summerson and Ada Clare (who becomes Richard’s fiance early in the novel), a ward of the benevolently patriarchal John Jarndyce. Richard is first introduced by Esther thus:

He was a handsome youth with an ingenuous face and a most engaging laugh […]. [H]e stood by us, in the light of the fire, talking gaily, like a light-hearted boy. (Bleak House, Ch. 3 [Oxford, 1999, p. 39])

This is evidently intended to predispose us in Richard’s favour. Richard’s appearance announces him as ingenuous, engaging and (in the older sense of the word) gay. This announcing of character through appearance is a common device in Dickens, and to do it in such positive terms tends to imply a hero or at least helper character. Surpisingly, though, Richard – though not a villain in a conventional sense – will function as an obstacle of sorts to the protagonist, Esther, a disturber of the domestic tranquillity in the Jarndyce household. Richard is actually an antagonist, though a somewhat sympathetic one.

Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House (2005)

The trouble for Richard starts when he moves in with his guardian, John Jarndyce. Richard is 19 at this point, and Jarndyce immediately starts casting around for a career for the young man. He does this in an odd way, not by speaking to Richard directly, but by conspiring with his other ward, Esther:

“However,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “to return to our gossip. Here’s Rick, a fine young fellow full of promise. What’s to be done with him?”

Oh, my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point!

“Here he is, Esther,” said Mr. Jarndyce, comfortably putting his hands into his pockets and stretching out his legs. “He must have a profession; he must make some choice for himself […].”

“Perhaps it would be best, first of all,” said I, “to ask Mr. Richard what he inclines to himself.”

“Exactly so,” he returned. “That’s what I mean! You know, just accustom yourself to talk it over, with your tact and in your quiet way, with him and Ada, and see what you all make of it. We are sure to come at the heart of the matter by your means, little woman.” (Ch. 8 [p. 111])

This is a curious passage: Richard is now figured by Jarndyce as a man, in that the time has come for him to undertake a profession; and as a child, in that his course is in the hands of others, and he is not privy to the discussions about his own prospects. Secrecy is a pivotal theme in Bleak House, and here Jarndyce initiates a secretive manipulation of Richard’s life and prospects. It seems, perhaps, that Jarndyce is using the excuse of Richard’s prospects to get close to Esther, to establish an intimate bond of conspiracy and secrecy between them.

That is a fateful discussion between Jarndyce and Esther, for it problematizes Richard’s career before it has even begun, and thereafter Richard is a bewildered figure at the centre of various schemes for his professional advancement. It soon becomes clear that Richard has no clear preference regarding a profession – no earnest attachment to any particular field. He just hasn’t given it much thought. This is a major problem for Jarndyce and Esther, and becomes a central plot point through the novel:

We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him, but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he had thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of that, too, and it wasn’t a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him to try and decide within himself whether his old preference for the sea was an ordinary boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard answered, Well he really HAD tried very often, and he couldn’t make out.

“How much of this indecision of character,” Mr. Jarndyce said to me, “is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don’t pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is responsible for some of it, I can plainly see[…].” (Ch. 13 [pp. 179-180])

Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce in the BBC Bleak House

In the above extract, conversations with Richard about his career take place, as well as conversations between Jarndyce and Esther about Richard. These later feature complicated and searching explanations for Richard’s “indecision of character”.

What is striking in the treatment of this plot thread is how Esther immediately and unquestioningly brings herself over to Jarndyce’s side. From the first moment on, she subscribes entirely to the notion that Richard must immediately choose a career and be resolute in following it up. She accepts Jarndyce’s dramatic problematization of Richard’s lack of earnestness, and reflects all Jarndyce’s opinions and assumptions back to him, and together they come to adverse judgements on Richard’s character. Esther’s speed to reach these judgements is all the more surprising given that she is Richard’s close friend, and before Jarndyce suggests it, she has no doubts about Richard’s character, but likes him very much (or so she says). It all suggests an excessive obedience to paternalistic authority, and a wish to be on the side of power, even when it means sacrificing her own friends.

Richard chooses a career in medicine and undertakes an apprenticeship. But his master’s first report, given informally, is as follows:

He is of such a very easy disposition that probably he would never think it worth-while to mention how he really feels, but he feels languid about the profession. He has not that positive interest in it which makes it his vocation. (Ch. 17 [p. 246])

Richard is guilty of no particular act or omission, but the adjective languid is an extremely loaded one. Languidity is the opposite of earnestness, uncomfortably close to laziness. Shortly afterwards, Esther converses with Richard and she extracts from him the confession that his work is “monotonous” (Ch. 17 [p. 248]). She also tells him that his master has noted his lack of enthusiasm and Richard expresses surprise that he has been a source of disappointment. The upshot of it is that Richard, encouraged by Esther, gives up medicine and decides to go in for law.

Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson in the BBC Bleak House.

It needs to be emphasized here that it is through the intervention of Esther that Richard leaves his post. Until their conversation, he has no intention of doing so, believing that “[i]t’ll do as well as anything else” (ibid). So Esther is the direct cause of Richard’s failure in medicine. Esther and Jarndyce’s worries about Richard have a self-fulfilling force, and have now created the difficulties they anticipated.

In encouraging him to change careers, Esther is motivated by the following reflection:

Consider how important it is to you both, and what a point of honour it is towards your cousin, that you, Richard, should be quite in earnest without any reservation. I think we had better talk about this, really, Ada. It will be too late very soon. (ibid).

So Richard must leave his post because he is not sufficiently in earnest about it; and his being in earnest is a point of honour with his cousin (i.e. Jarndyce). This is a high standard indeed: not only must he perform his work duties competently, he must do them earnestly, and any less dishonours his cousin. So his position as ward of Jarndyce has made Richard’s duties far more complex. The idea of honouring Jarndyce is now assumed to be central to his choices, abstract as that idea is.

It’s worth noting also that Richard’s reflection on the monotony of medical work is rejected by Esther:

“Then,” pursued Richard, “it’s monotonous, and to-day is too like yesterday, and to-morrow is too like to-day.”

“But I am afraid,” said I, “this is an objection to all kinds of application—to life itself, except under some very uncommon circumstances.” (ibid).

So Esther does not accept that Richard should find less monotonous work, but insists that he do his necessarily monotonous work more earnestly. There is a great deal of complacency from Esther here; and an unearned sense of her own wisdom and superiority in terms of life experience. She is Richard’s age, and has led a more sheltered existence. Yet her closeness to Jarndyce grants her an authority over him. Richard accepts her arguments meekly and without apparent rancour.  From this point on, with his own desires so roundly ignored, and the added pressure of working for the honour of his overbearing guardian Jarndyce, it is inevitable that Richard will find it impossible to settle into his work.

Upon undertaking his new career, Richard soon gets into debt, and on finding this out Jarndyce forces a break in the engagement between Richard and Ada (another ward of Jarndyce). In Inside Bleak House (Duckworth, 2005), John Sutherland questions this deviation from the “habitual good nature” of Jarndyce, noting that “[a]t this stage, Richard is by no means a lost cause (no more than Pip, for example, in Great Expectations, in the period before Magwitch’s return” (p. 145). I suggest, however, that it is less a deviation than the natural development of Jarndyce’s proprietorial and overbearingly authoritarian attitude towards Richard, and that there is no “good nature” evident in Jarndyce’s treatment of Richard at any point. He is motivated, rather, by two things: he enjoys flexing his power over Richard; and he is invested in getting close to Esther via earnest and intense discussions about Richard. His insistence that Richard evince earnest devotion to a respectable profession is also rather hypocritical in that he himself does not work at all and seems never to have done so.

Things get no better for Richard as the novel progresses. Throughout he is ill served by those closest to him. With friends like Esther, who needs enemies? With benefactors like Jarndyce, who needs malefactors? By sticking to the Victorian party line about earnestness, they were able to destroy Richard’s prospects and peace of mind, and make him think it was all his fault. Earnestness has rarely been less attractive than when coming from these characters. Bleak House is a book that one has to admire in many respects, but sometimes it is a hard book to like. Esther’s excessive modesty has often been noted – Charlotte Bronte called her a “weak and twaddling” character – but her relations with Richard show her to be worse than that. Esther is a fraud whose assumptions of moral superiority disguise her cringing and self-serving adherence to the bullying dictats of Jarndyce. A pair of sanctimonious and pettily power-hungry hypocrites, perhaps their marriage would have been a good match after all!

Poverty, Domestic Violence and Rapacious Benevolence: The Brickmaker from Bleak House (1852-53)

The English social novels of the 1840s-50s were concerned with analysing the relations between the haves and have-nots. Generally, the conclusions suggested in novels like North and South (1854-55) was that there was misunderstanding between these sectors, and if they both listened to each other, they would get along and work productively together. In North and South, the protagonist Margaret Hale befriends a household of poor factory workers, the Higginses, and at times mediates between them and mill-owner John Thornton.

Margaret is welcomed into the Higgins household. But the course of trans-class friendship does not always run smooth. The charitable instincts of a middle-class lady are not necessarily met with gratitude from the working class. There is a compelling scene quite early in Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-53) wherein a group of would-be philanthropists enter a brickmaker’s house. The house and its environs are a scene of dismal poverty. Characteristic of Bleak House, the initial description of the setting emphasizes dirt, grime and an overall sense of decay and stagnation:

[I]t was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a brick-field, with pigsties close to the broken windows and miserable little gardens before the doors growing nothing but stagnant pools. Here and there an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof, or they were banked up with mud into a little pond like a large dirt-pie. At the doors and windows some men and women lounged or prowled about, and took little notice of us except to laugh to one another or to say something as we passed about gentlefolks minding their own business and not troubling their heads and muddying their shoes with coming to look after other people’s. (Bleak House, Ch. VIII)

Dickens’ narrator here is Esther Summerson, and she implicitly raises one of the key themes of the book when she notes the “gentlefolk” passing by “minding their own business”. Like Gaskell, Dickens is concerned with the lack of interaction between classes, and the middle-class disinterest in the problems of the working class. But Dickens’ passage here goes on to show the difficulty in initiating an inter-class exchange. In this passage, it is not Esther who initiates the exchange, but Mrs Pardiggle, a philanthropist whose efforts are characterised by “rapacious benevolence” according to Dickens/Esther. As far as the characters with whom she interacts are concerned, Mrs Pardiggle is both tireless and tiresome:

“Well, my friends,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. “How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn’t tire me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word.”

“There an’t,” growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on his hand as he stared at us, “any more on you to come in, is there?”

“No, my friend,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool and knocking down another. “We are all here.”

“Because I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?” said the man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.

The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.

Esther maintains a critical attitude towards Mrs Pardiggle, characterizing her as “too business-like and systematic”. It is clear that her charitable efforts are not approved of by Dickens, and he also satirizes organized charity through the characterization of Mrs Jellyby elsewhere in the book. In a manner that is somewhat typical for Dickens, the energy from the scene doesn’t really come from any of the main players. It comes, instead, from the brickmaker himself, who only appears in this scene and plays no part in the plot of the novel. He doesn’t even have a name. His role in this scene is to frustrate Mrs Pardiggle’s attempts at charity, and to express the anger and hostility that Esther also feels, but is too respectable to say.  The brickmaker’s first sally is the sarcastic observation that “I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?”. Then he is given the opportunity to launch into a powerful speech.

Phiz’s original illustration for “A Visit to the Brickmaker’s” http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/bleakhouse/6.html 

 

“You can’t tire me, good people,” said Mrs. Pardiggle to these latter. “I enjoy hard work, and the harder you make mine, the better I like it.”

“Then make it easy for her!” growled the man upon the floor. “I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants an end of being drawed like a badger. Now you’re a-going to poll-pry and question according to custom—I know what you’re a-going to be up to. Well! You haven’t got no occasion to be up to it. I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she IS a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby. If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it. How have I been conducting of myself? Why, I’ve been drunk for three days; and I’da been drunk four if I’da had the money. Don’t I never mean for to go to church? No, I don’t never mean for to go to church. I shouldn’t be expected there, if I did; the beadle’s too gen-teel for me. And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a lie!”

As well as powerful, this speech from the brickmaker is a rather complicated one. It indicts Mrs Pardiggle’s arrogance and insensitivity. It also refers with brutal frankness to the infant mortality rate. It characterizes the brickmaker as a violent tyrant in his domestic setting, as well as a drunk. Dickens is well known for sentimentality, and rightly so, but here there is no sentimentality, just a vision of degradation, and an unjudgemental portrait of an individual who is both a victim and a bully. All of Dickens’ condemnation seems to be directed against intrusive philanthropists. The brickmaker’s frank assumption of all the worst traits of the “undeserving poor” gives him a momentary heroism, a breaking through of all social conventions that is riveting to read. Say what you like about the brickmaker, he has no cant – an important point for such 19th-century commentators as Dickens and Carlyle, and certainly not something that one could say for Mrs Pardiggle.

The brickmaker’s black-eyed wife is also nursing a baby. As the scene goes on, there is more Dickensian drama:

Ada, whose gentle heart was moved by  [the baby’s] appearance, bent down to touch its little face. As she did so, I saw what happened and drew her back. The child died.

“Oh, Esther!” cried Ada, sinking on her knees beside it. “Look here! Oh, Esther, my love, the little thing! The suffering, quiet, pretty little thing! I am so sorry for it. I am so sorry for the mother. I never saw a sight so pitiful as this before! Oh, baby, baby!”

[…]

Presently I took the light burden from her lap, did what I could to make the baby’s rest the prettier and gentler, laid it on a shelf, and covered it with my own handkerchief. We tried to comfort the mother, and we whispered to her what Our Saviour said of children. She answered nothing, but sat weeping—weeping very much.

When I turned, I found that the young man had taken out the dog and was standing at the door looking in upon us with dry eyes, but quiet. The girl was quiet too and sat in a corner looking on the ground. The man had risen. He still smoked his pipe with an air of defiance, but he was silent.

[…]

We felt it better to withdraw and leave them uninterrupted. We stole out quietly and without notice from any one except the man. He was leaning against the wall near the door, and finding that there was scarcely room for us to pass, went out before us. He seemed to want to hide that he did this on our account, but we perceived that he did, and thanked him. He made no answer.

This is the last we see of the brickmaker, stepping quietly aside to let Esther and Ada pass outside. We presume he returned to his errant ways, but that simple final gesture of respect and decorum is subtly powerful, in the circumstances. It is Dickens at his most unsentimental and dignified. Sometimes, in Bleak House and elsewhere, he lays it on with a trowel, but there are moments where he transcends.

George Orwell famously said of Dickens: “He is all fragments, all details — rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles.” The Brickmaker is a gargoyle: he doesn’t need to be there. He doesn’t return later to tie up any loose ends in the plot. But he does provide one of the most compelling, if narratively inessential, characterizations in the novel. In that, he is classic Dickens.

 

 

The Other Bleak House: The BBC 1985 Serial

The BBC serial adaptation of Bleak House broadcast in 2005 came in for a great deal of praise both from critics and from the general public. Indeed, a perusal of the Amazon.co.uk reviews shows that general approbation has been almost universal: 99 reviews (as of 4 August 2012), avg. 4.8 (out of 5): 87×5 star, 9×4 star and one each of 3, 2, and 1 stars. And even the one star review insists on the merits of the series, giving one star solely on the basis of the DVD release policy (deluxe edition with extras only 9 months after initial release). So this blog is somewhat in the minority in not enjoying the serial.

In technical terms Bleak House was undoubtedly something of a departure for the classic serial. Quick scenes, lots of sound effects, kinetic camerawork. Everything to give the impression of ceaseless movement, a plot rushing towards revelation and resolution. It was interesting also that the DVD cover claimed the serial was Bleak House “stripped of its sentimentality”, certainly a departure from the aesthetic of fidelity that has been presumed to be paramount in classic serials. Bleak House was not to be faithful, rather it was to distance itself from Dickens’ sentimentality. Yet ultimately, shorn of its sonic and visual innovations, Bleak House was more conventional than intended. The script, by the patron saint of adapters Andrew Davies, did not escape sentimentality, and, despite making interesting comments about his reworking of Esther Summerson’s character (in an interview in Cartmell and Whelehan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (CUP, 2007), she remained what G.B. Shaw called Dickens’ Esther, “a maddening prig“, humourless and quietly but immovably judgemental. It’s not so easy to strip Bleak House of its sentimentality, because the whole plot revolves around Esther’s loveability: Jarndyce loves her, Woodcourt loves her, Guppy loves her, Caddy loves her, Ada loves her, everybody loves her! A perhaps impossible challenge for the adapter is to render Esther as likeable to the reader as she is to everyone in the diegetic world, or at least to make it plausible that she would generate such extreme affection; making the other characters recognize that she’s actually “a maddening prig” won’t work, because the love of these characters for Esther operates on the development of the plot – no love for Esther, very little plot.

In the 1985 BBC Bleak House, now unfairly overshadowed by its successor, the problem of Esther isn’t really solved either, but we do have a quieter Esther, who stays in the background as much as is feasible given her large role in the plot. She is silent where Dickens’ Esther is disingenuously self-denigrating and Anna Maxwell-Martin’s Esther in the 2005 version is (I think) too assertive, too secure in her judgements. Silence is, frankly, about the best that can be done with Esther.

Suzanne Burden as Esther Summerson, Bleak House (BBC 1985)

The 1985 Bleak House is very much in the mould of the classic serial: no 24-style zooming lenses here, just long scenes, static camera, and often only the dialogue and the actors’ faces to concentrate on. The obligatory orchestral score is relatively understated, often giving way to the dialogue. There are some very effective long scenes, a 10-minute scene in Lady Dedlock’s drawing room with Lady D and Guppy springs to mind. With the almost total absence of non-diegetic sound and the long, still close-ups of the two actors, it’s almost theatrical, and it works wonderfully. Diana Rigg is an excellent Lady Dedlock, all told.

Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock

Of course, there’s difficulty with the plotting: Lady D.’s death is dealt with in episode 7 (of 8, 50 minutes each), so the final episode is given over almost totally to Richard’s experience in Chancery -a terrible scripting decision: all the other strands are already gathered together, so there’s an inessential feel to the episode; it feels more like a long afterword than a properly integrated episode, certainly not a climactic final episode. Other plot lines are just dropped: as far as I remember, George is last seen or heard of in prison in the penultimate episode, and his release is not dealt with. Overall, though, despite this serious caveat, this Bleak House copes admirably with the difficulties of the adaptation and seems to my judgement to be a better bet than its successor, with a more sympathetic and nuanced (if less well structured) script, and more understated but effective performances.

The Victorian Bachelor in Adaptation

Victorian novels, especially Dickens’s, tend to feature a benevolent / philanthropic bachelor-type character, who enters for the purpose of providing protection, prospects of social advancement and, often, large amounts of money to the protagonist. Someone like Mr Brownlow in Oliver Twist or the Cheerybles in Nicholas Nickleby. They may be an uncle or other relation to the protagonist, or be motivated to help simply by their overflowing niceness, and they ask nothing in return. They are singularly uncomplicated individuals, ones who tend to have no intimate personal relationships but to operate in the capacity of fairy godfathers to any deserving person who happens to come into their path. Recent adaptations suggest this character creates quite a headache, as such disinterested benevolence cannot be accepted as credible.

Andrew Davies was certainly conscious of this when he came to script Bleak House (BBC 2005). Bleak House has John Jarndyce as a central character, and Jarndyce is in the tradition of the benevolent bachelor, though with a complicating factor: he wants to get married to Esther, and traditionally this character is entirely happy with his bachelor state, and never countenances any other possibility. Dickens doesn’t really deal with Jarndyce’s reasons for marrying Esther, or the element of sexual desire that is, presumably, involved in his proposal. Rather, he has Esther (and also Ada) refer to Jarndyce as being “like a father” and other such terms. He also constantly stresses Jarndyce’s moral uprightness, and the respect all the other characters have for him, a sleight of hand obscuring Jarndyce’s real intention, as Davies sees them:

Dickens raises it, in a way, but shies away from it, as usual. Why did Jarndyce not get married before? Why does he settle on a child? Of course, she’s grown up by the time he actually pops the question, but by then she’s so obliged to him, isn’t she? […] Dickens is writing about a man who, for some reason, can’t deal with grown-up women, so what he’d like to do is groom this girl (Cartmell and Whelehan, 240).

Now whether Davies successfully redrafts Jarndyce’s character to get this across is another story. I don’t think he does. Though there are a few telling details added, they’re buried beneath the weight of Jarndyce’s overall niceness and at the serial’s pivotal points, it tends to follow the Dickens approach to Jarndyce. I don’t think anyone comes away from Davies’s Bleak House thinking of Jarndyce having groomed Esther. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting point, and this ambivalence about benevolent bachelor characters recurs in other period dramas of recent vintage.

In North and South (BBC 2004), we have Mr Bell making an implicit offer of marriage to Margaret Hale. Mr Bell is Margaret’s godfather, and her father has entrusted her to him, little suspecting (one presumes) that by “looking after” Margaret, Mr Bell has matrimony in mind. And, of course, in Gaskell’s novel he doesn’t have that in mind. Gaskell’s Mr Bell is presented without any sexual colouring at all; he’s an Oxford don, he’s never been married and the idea of it never seems to have occurred to him. Again, though, for scriptwriter Sandy Welch, this attitude on Bell’s part is unthinkable, and the need is felt to uncover the sexuality lurking under his mild and disinterested exterior.

Mr Bell's proposal

Oliver Twist (BBC 2007) – written by Sarah Phelps, who also scripted the 2011 BBC Great Expectations – is one of the more radical classic serials of recent times: a black Nancy, a Fagin who is victim rather than villain (not without precedent in recent adaptations, but the anti-semitism is explicitly tackled here), and who is also of a rotund figure, thus breaking with the conventional vision of Fagin from Hogarth’s illustrations through Alec Guinness in Lean’s Oliver Twist, Ron Moody in Carol Reed’s Oliver! and beyond. It also rejects the Dickensian portrayal of Brownlow by painting him as a paranoid and somewhat controlling individual. In this version he lives with Rose Maylie – no, he doesn’t want to marry her, but he is a morose and taciturn individual and very over-protective of Rose, being generally opposed to letting her out of the house, because she is the last link with the woman he once loved (who was Rose’s sister and Oliver’s mother– i.e. Rose is O.’s aunt in this version). So this Brownlow, as well as lacking the good temper of Dickens’s character, is also given a romantic past, and perhaps a romantic present, if we see him as having transferred his love for Rose’s older sister onto Rose herself. Actually, it’s Monks, here Brownlow’s nephew (confused yet?) who bears a predatory lust for Rose, but given the close filial relationship between Brownlow and Monks for most of the serial (until Monks’s dastardly Rose-entrapping schemes are revealed), one might well see Monks as a manifestation of Mr B.’s dark urges. It’s all very confusing, but for the purposes of this post all that’s relevant is that Brownlow is not the happy bachelor of Dickens’s novel.

Of course, the greatest of all Victorian bachelors was Sherlock Holmes, albeit much later in the Victorian era. I haven’t seen the serial Sherlock yet (!), so I don’t know if they do try to explore the title character’s sexuality. In Doyle’s stories, Holmes is depicted, I would say, as being “above” sexuality, a concept the Victorians wouldn’t have had a problem with, but that, in the context of recent adaptations, may not now be seen to be credible. Certainly not if the vid below is any indication.

*Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, “A practical understanding of literature on screen: two conversations with Andrew Davies”, in Cartmell and Whelehan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 240.