4
This chapter focuses on Dickens’s portrayal of English society, which means that we will consider a wide variety of issues. These will include fashion, the law, industry, class, politics and economics. We will consider how these issues are played out by a wide variety of people, each with their own personal morality and placed into controversial circumstances. We will also look for the characters’ own attempts to understand their predicament in society and the world, with Dickens’s use of simple statements such as Jo the crossing sweeper’s ‘He was wery good to me’ and ‘I don’t know nothink’. Our aim, having examined the society Dickens depicts, is to define the moral response the author gives to the social and political evils he describes.
At the same time, we will take the opportunity to pursue a question raised in Chapter 1, where we looked at the introductory diatribes with which both of these novels begin. In Hard Times Dickens set himself to expose and oppose Utilitarianism, and in Bleak House he begins with a withering attack on the Court of Chancery. We know that the ‘factual’ upbringing of Louisa and Tom leads to disaster for both of them, and that the Court of Chancery leads to Richard’s decline and death. However, we still take this opportunity to ask: how successfully does Dickens follow through, develop and complete his declared political campaigns, in Hard Times and Bleak House?
A daunting range of aims for one chapter. Let us begin forthwith. Here is the start of the second ‘Book’ of Hard Times, entitled ‘Reaping’, as the author takes time at the start of the weekly episode for 27 May 1854, and on the occasion of a year’s break in the action, to offer a panoramic overview:
A SUNNY midsummer day. There was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown.
Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness: – Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen.
The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used – that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts – he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels.
Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills. Sun-blinds, and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets and the shops; but the mills, and the courts and alleys, baked at a fierce heat. Down upon the river that was black and thick with dye, some Coketown boys who were at large – a rare sight there – rowed a crazy boat, which made a spumous track upon the water as it jogged along, while every dip of an oar stirred up vile smells. But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless.
(HT, 105–106)
This passage is detailed and dense, and it is helpful to begin by summarising the paragraphs, so that we can achieve an overview. Our summary should indicate the mode in which a paragraph is written, and give some idea of its content. After the opening line, which tells us it is sunny and hot, the paragraphs are:
1. Descriptive. Smoke and haze both hide the town and reveal that it must be there.
2. Ironic/even sarcastic satire. The mill owners always complain about suggestions of reform, and threaten to throw everything into the sea.
3. Ironic/even sarcastic. The mill owners never do throw their property into the sea.
4. Descriptive. Heat, stokers, oil, ‘melancholy mad elephants’, ‘whirr of shafts and wheels’.
5. Descriptive. Boys in rowing boat, polluted river and town ‘engendering more death than life’.
This summary tells us how Dickens has structured his opening passage: he has included a bitter piece of sarcastic satire, targeting the mill owners for their inhumane opposition to safety measures (paragraphs 2 and 3), sandwiched between descriptions of Coketown on a sunny summer’s day (paragraphs 1, 4 and 5). The descriptions are also structured by means of the developing viewpoint. In paragraph 1 we are clearly looking at Coketown from a distance, but we are on the same level, looking from on the earth. In paragraph 4 our observing eyes are taken into Coketown: Dickens underlines this move by imagining the sun dazzling the eyes of people in the streets. Then, he takes us through those streets and into the ‘mills’, depicting the atmosphere and noise within those ‘Fairy palaces’. Finally, paragraph 5 opens at ground level in Coketown, where paragraph 4 left off, as we watch boys in a ‘crazy’ rowing boat on the polluted river, but this paragraph then takes us suddenly up above the earth as ‘the sun itself … looked’ down upon the town. Then, ‘the eye of Heaven itself [has] become an evil eye’, and can only see the mill owners. The workers are hidden by a layer of their ‘incapable or sordid’ bosses.
Our summary of paragraphs, and our look at the structure of this paragraph, has therefore shown us something about Dickens’s intention. He begins with a panorama, but from a human level. He then takes us through two necessary stages: his attack on the Coketown owners for their cruel hypocrisy, and his description of the town itself, which is filled with horror and revulsion. Finally, he has prepared the ground and is ready to combine moral outrage with vision. So he ends this set piece with the suggestion that Coketown is offensive to the sun, nature and God. At the same time, he whisks us off to a great distance, whence we can see the entire system: Heaven looking down, the ‘sordid’ bosses getting in the way, and the Hands who cannot be blessed, who live under an ‘evil eye’.
The extract, then, is written in two modes: descriptive and ironic. We will look first at the ironic middle section, paragraphs 2 and 3. Dickens begins with a series of four sentences which drip with sarcasm. ‘The wonder was’, ‘it was amazing how’, ‘surely there never was’, ‘Handle them never so lightly’. It is clear to us that these sentences are a withering attack upon the ‘millers of Coketown’, and we know, because we already know Bounderby, that the idea that such men are so fragile they might break in pieces at the slightest hurt, is an absurd idea. However, we are still not sure what Dickens’s heavy irony is about. Clearly, there is an amusing triple meaning in the phrase ‘you might suspect them of having been flawed before’, which has the original ironic double meaning (they claim to be fragile but they are nothing of the kind) and the extra implication (Dickens implies that they are morally ‘flawed’). However, we do not begin to follow the actual target of this attack until the anaphora on ‘They were ruined’ begins, this phrase being repeated twice and then varied to ‘they were utterly undone’, and alternating with suggestions for improved conditions and safety reforms. The Coketown owners moan about costs, and threaten to go out of business, while Dickens mentions a list of reforms that are of steadily increasing humanity. Here is the list:
1. Send workers’ children to school;
2. Allow inspectors into their factories;
3. Stop chopping up workers with their machines;
4. Don’t make so much smoke.
Dickens has built his irony to a crescendo with this four-part anaphora, and by this time the reader is well on board with the true meaning of the attack, and shares Dickens’s contempt for the whingeing millers. The final part of the paragraph takes us a step further, however. We are familiar with Bounderby’s ‘golden spoon’ idea that all the Hands want to live in impossible luxury. Now we hear another of the mill owners’ fictions – that they would rather throw away their mills than institute the proposed reforms. The evil of this fiction is that it threatens the Home Secretary (what would happen to the country if industry stopped?), so the owners win and no reforms can be begun. Notice that Dickens is still writing in a witheringly sarcastic mode: the Home Secretary is ‘terrified … within an inch of his life’, for example, and the threat is an ‘awful menace’, while all this happens if a Coketowner is held ‘accountable for the consequences of any of his acts’.
Paragraph 3 crowns the irony by combining its two strands into a statement that makes us laugh. The self-pity and whingeing of the owners, combined with their threat to the politicians, leads to the assertion that they are ‘patriotic’ in holding on to their property. We arrive, in fact, at the laughable combination of ideas: that they are making profits and growing rich, not from greed but out of patriotic duty. Dickens here has created a wonderful piece of polemical satire. We notice that there have been intensive uses of irony and many examples of sarcastic phrases; that the four sentences at the start of Paragraph 2, and the four-part anaphora that ensues, structurally build our outrage and our comic contempt for the owners who are Dickens’s target; and that the two subsequent stages – to the Home Secretary, and then to patriotism – each take the satire one stage further. So, we have charted and admired Dickens’s satirical technique. However, perhaps the most effective element in this passage is his reticence in the middle of such grandiose irony. Dickens does not explain the direction of his attack: we have to interpret and catch up with him. Similarly, he declares the owners’ patriotism and kindness in a bland and open tone, with only the phrase ‘take mighty good care’ reminiscent of the extravagant ironies we have been reading. So, by means of this reticence, and some restraint, Dickens provides us with that slight delay as we realise exactly what his comic idea is, and as we catch up with him. It is the written equivalent of what a comic would call ‘dead-pan’ delivery. This in turn provides the pleasure and amusement we enjoy from the witty idea, which would not have been as effective had the author hammered it home more explicitly.
This is a surprising effect for us to remark, because the passage we are studying appears to be overwritten, if anything. So we realise that Dickens has managed to combine an unrestrained and quite withering level of sarcastic overwriting, with some selective reticence, and has thus created both the intellectual pleasure normally gleaned from a more subtle form of satire, as well as the direct power of his rhetorical tour de force.
We now turn to the descriptive paragraphs. The first of these emphasises what cannot be seen, because of visual confusions and indistinctness. The vocabulary Dickens employs intensively builds this effect: ‘shrouded’, ‘haze’, ‘impervious’, ‘sulky blotch’, ‘blur of soot and smoke’, ‘confusedly’, ‘murkily’, ‘a dense formless jumble’, ‘nothing but masses of darkness’. The sentences echo the progress of the paragraph. The opening two sentences are clear. The main clause of sentence 1 is the middle of three, then, sentence 2 is a two-part sentence with the main clause at the start. The third sentence continues for the rest of the paragraph. It begins with ten phrases which are all descriptive subordinate clauses dependent on ‘A blur’ and ‘a dense formless jumble’, before finally reaching the main clause ‘Coketown … was suggestive of itself’. It is hard to describe the effect of this structure: it is as if the third sentence, with its ‘this way’, ‘that way’, ‘to the vault of Heaven’, ‘creeping’, ‘rose and fell’, seems to wave a whole cloud of words in front of ‘Coketown’; and, as we have remarked, a lot of these words denote confusion and indistinctness. This paragraph also contains a vein of revulsion against Coketown. So, for example, the town is a ‘sulky blotch’, and a ‘jumble’, or ‘masses of darkness’ on a sunny day. None of these are attractive descriptions.
So far, we have noted diction and the developments in sentence structure. However, as usual with Dickens, we should also be alert to imagery, whether explicit or implied by connotation. So, for example, ‘shrouded’ imports a connotation of death; ‘sulky’ is a personification, implying the town’s grumpy temper, and personification continues, the smoke pictured ‘aspiring’ to Heaven, then ‘creeping along the earth’. Certainly, the character imputed to Coketown in these hints is both confused and lacking any intelligent consistency.
We now come to paragraph 4, where Dickens returns to a descriptive mode after his anti-owners satire. We begin by noticing the sentences. The first two are both quite long but of plain construction. The stokers sit on a list of ‘steps, and posts, and palings’, the sentence lengths perhaps enhancing the sense of exhaustion, before suddenly, two unexpectedly short sentences that tell us about oil. These are followed by a three-part parallelism: the oil is on ‘steam-engines’, the clothes of the Hands and throughout the mills. We will return to the ‘Fairy palaces’ and ‘mad elephants’. A further parallelism emphasises how the looms are always working, in ‘hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul’, before Dickens’s final two sentences are constructed as a kind of inversely parallel pair. The first compares the looms’ shadows to shadows of trees in a wood; the second reverses the comparison, saying that in place of the hum of insects, there is the whir of machinery. Both these comparisons, of course, emphasise the absence of natural surroundings, but thanks to Dickens’s careful construction of them as a reversed pair, we seem to move out of the mill, away from the machinery to the woods, then, via the hum of insects, we are delivered back into the mill, back to the noisy machines.
The first half of this paragraph is purely descriptive and is almost entirely literal, in contrast to the highly suggestive evocations found in paragraph 1. This conveys the dullness and emptiness of Coketown when heat has reduced energy. Then, with the image of the mills as ‘Fairy palaces’ and the air as a ‘simoom’ – a hot and sandy desert wind – imagery bursts into the writing. ‘Fairy palaces’ is clearly a sarcastic image for the mills, but when the ‘simoom’ continues the Arabian allusion, this leads to a directly bitter comment, for the Hands toil ‘in the desert’, that is both the desert of the metaphor, and the desert of an industrial worker’s existence. Next come the ‘melancholy mad elephants’ with ‘their wearisome heads’, which we know to be Dickens’s simile for the machines, first mentioned on page 26. Typically, Dickens does not reiterate his image, but instead writes of the image (i.e. the elephants) as literal. Finally, the elephants’ shadows lead us into the pair of images at the end of the paragraph: machine-shadows/tree-shadows, then insect-hum/machine-whir. With its evocation of a town frying in oil, and with its strangely exotic imagery of Arabian sand-storms, fairy palaces and mad elephants, as well as the contrast with summer’s sights and sounds in other, more natural surroundings, this paragraph gives a strong impression of the exhausted, sweltering town. Certainly, we feel that working in one of those mills on such a day would be a form of torture.
Our last paragraph, however, brings together the different threads of the passage we have been analysing so far. The paragraph first imagines a man, called a ‘passenger’, walking through the town: a draining of energy is again emphasised, for the machines whir ‘drowsily’ and the mills were ‘humming’. Next, apart from some wider streets that have been watered, everything bakes. Then, we see boys in a boat; but the dominant idea is pollution: the river is ‘black and thick with dye’, the boat’s wake is ‘spumous’, and the oars stir up ‘vile smells’ from the water. It is deadly hot, there is a draining of energy, and it is repulsively foul.
In the final two sentences, Dickens turns to the sun again, personifying its character: it is ‘less kind to Coketown’ despite its general beneficence. The more ‘intently’ it looks at Coketown, the more it is ‘engendering more death than life’. Again, as at the end of the previous paragraph, Dickens doubles his statement. Just as the Sun engenders ‘death’, so the ‘eye of Heaven’ becomes an ‘evil eye’ when directed to Coketown. As we have seen, this is because of the layer of the ‘incapable or sordid’ which overlies and hides the more deserving people below. We should notice what this finale to Dickens’s panoramic overview has achieved. It has established that Coketown is not only unnatural, unhuman, foul, dirty, polluted and ugly – all of which are powerfully evoked by straightforward descriptive means; Coketown is also morally foul, and creates and lives off a reversal of both nature, morality, and by implication, God himself. In particular, the cruel and greedy self-interest of the owners, and their hypocrisy, seems to reverse nature entirely: in Coketown, even the sun breeds death, and the eye of Heaven is an ‘evil eye’.
Our detailed analysis of this passage is not quite complete: there are two references for us to check. First, we notice biblical vocabulary and style in the phrase ‘And it increased and multiplied’ at the end of paragraph 3. This is a reference to Exodus:
And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them.
(The Bible, Exodus 1:7. Authorised Version)
Recognising when Dickens refers to the Bible can help our understanding. Here, it is the Coketown owners’ property that multiplies: in other words they become richer and richer. If we look at the context in Exodus, we find that the Israelites ‘increased’ and ‘multiplied’ while in captivity in Egypt. Indeed, their oppression seems only to have made them stronger and more numerous: verse 12 reads ‘But the more they [Egypt] afflicted them [the Israelites], the more they multiplied and grew’. This is an amusing and appropriate comment, because Dickens has just shown how the owners complain loudly of being ‘afflicted’ or ruined, while at the same time their profits grow. Another reference in this passage is ‘The eye of Heaven’, which is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet no. 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?’
Having looked at this passage in detail, our questions are: how far does this represent a Dickensian critique of society, and what are the features and grounds of such a critique? Then, bearing in mind that Hard Times opened with such an energetic attack upon the ‘fact’- based philosophy of Utilitarianism, how far can we see the present passage as a continuation or development of that theme?
This passage is a strong attack on Coketown, its appearance, polluting dirt and smoke; and the harshness of, and absence of nature from, the industrial urban landscape. The constant noise of machinery is also attacked, and we are given a glimpse of the exhausted workers who are subject to this unnatural environment, when the stokers and weavers are mentioned. Workers are uneducated, chopped up by machinery, and breathe unhealthy smoke. Owners are greedy, hypocritical, and termed ‘incapable and sordid’. They are blamed for hiding all the evils of an unchecked pursuit of profit from ‘the eye of Heaven’, and are ridiculed for their whingeing lies.
What should be done, then? And, what is to be blamed? By implication, Dickens would advocate education for all, cleaner and safer works, with protective shields around the machines; a clean town, river and air. He would presumably also ensure that some natural things would still thrive even in the town – perhaps by planting trees. As for blame, in this passage there is no doubt: the mill owners and manufacturers, like Bounderby, are to blame, together with the weakness of the political authority; and it is their hypocrisy and greed that is responsible for the evils of the industrial town. Very well, the bosses are the villains, the workers are victims, and the whole horrid system is designed to make whingeing, lying hypocrites richer and richer.
Thus far, Dickens’s analysis of a northern industrial town in the mid-nineteenth century would have few detractors today. Broadly, we accept as historical truth, the cruelty and ugliness of the industrial revolution, and we accept the brutality of which the bosses were often guilty, as well as the unbounded greed of capitalism when unchecked. Thus far, also, Dickens belongs with a benevolent element in his time. Philanthropists and campaigners, including Dickens, were working hard to bring about improvements. Dickens’s attack on the industrial north is appealing: we share his sympathy with the workers, and his anger at the bosses. On the other hand, making the workers’ lot safer and more humane, cleaning up the pollution and providing some greenery in their town, does not add up to a radical or even a trenchant agenda. It can be argued that Dickens enlists our emotions in the form of our sympathy and our anger, but that there is a fuzzy centre to his programme, an absence of analysis or any intellectual rigour. So, Dickens provokes us to feel a revulsion against industrial mechanisation and its attendant hardships, ugliness and dirt, but fails to analyse how such ills have come about, or how they could and should be dealt with.
What about the declared target of Hard Times – Utilitarianism? The passage we have just analysed stands at the opening of the second and middle ‘Book’, and is a panorama of Coketown. Furthermore, it leads to a ringing finale, a condemnation that implies the outraged agreement of God himself, or at least of Nature with a capital N. It begins the episode directly following Louisa’s marriage, a crucial hiatus in the plot. This, then, is a prominent set piece. Why is the ‘fact’ faction not even mentioned? Bounderby is referred to, but only for his ridiculous Golden Spoon complaints, not for any adherence to ‘facts’ but on the contrary for the sheer fantasy of his lies. The rest of the owners are the same: they lie about being ruined, about throwing away their factories and about their ‘patriotic’ stewardship. This has nothing to do with Utilitarianism, Dickens’s trumpeted theme. Instead, it has everything to do with good old-fashioned greed, cruelty, and therefore villainy.
Also, we remember the first set-piece description of Coketown, in Chapter 5, ‘The Key-Note’. In that passage, close to the start of the novel, many of the same ills and evils of Coketown are mentioned; but on that occasion the villain is unequivocally the ‘fact’ faction. Politicians with ‘tabular’ evidence prove ridiculous things about the workers, their beliefs and their habits, and they know what is best for the lower class. In short, ‘everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery’, while nothing else ever ‘should be, world without end, Amen’ (HT, 27). Dickens could hardly make a clearer accusation, and we recognise his habit of using a Christian reference in a heavily ironic context, to imply that his opponents’ views are against God’s will. Here, the reference is a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer.
In Chapter 5, then, the evils of Coketown are a consequence of Utilitarianism, an error shared by politicians, the owning and genteel classes of Coketown, and the misguided Thomas Gradgrind. In Chapter 17, by contrast, the evils proceed from villainously dishonest and greedy individuals, who abuse their power and exploit workers without mercy. In Chapter 17, the bosses’ cover story is self-pity and scaremongering: there is no mention of the Utilitarian faction. It is difficult to reconcile these two very different analyses of an industrial system; and it is possible to argue that Dickens had forgotten, or was re-casting, his polemic from Chapter 5, when, nearly two months later, he came to write the opening overview for Chapter 17.
We will consider this question more fully in our concluding discussion, later in the present chapter. For the moment, having raised this issue through our detailed analysis of one passage, it is time to turn our attention to another detailed study, this time from Bleak House. Here is the opening of Chapter 40, where Sir Leicester Dedlock becomes involved in a General Election:
England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between those two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off, because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle’s making the timely discovery that if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood. But Coodle knew the danger, and Doodle knew the danger, and all their followers and hangers-on had the clearest possible perception of the danger. At last Sir Thomas Doodle has not only condescended to come in, but has done it handsomely, bringing in with him all his nephews, all his male cousins, and all his brothers-in-law. So there is hope for the old ship yet.
Doodle has found that he must throw himself upon the country, chiefly in the form of sovereigns and beer. In this metamorphosed state he is available in a good many places simultaneously and can throw himself upon a considerable portion of the country at one time. Britannia being much occupied in pocketing Doodle in the form of sovereigns, and swallowing Doodle in the form of beer, and in swearing herself black in the face that she does neither – plainly to the advancement of her glory and morality – the London season comes to a sudden end, through all the Doodleites and Coodleites dispersing to assist Britannia in those religious exercises.
(BH, 589–590)
This is a gloriously funny passage. The names Coodle and Doodle are ridiculous, and Dickens’s assertion that they are the only two people in the country is neatly undercut by the bracketed ‘(to speak of)’. The two phrases ‘go out’ and ‘come in’, followed by the mutual insults, which are then undercut by insincere compliments, give a ludicrous picture of political activity, where the actors seem to resign out of pique and recant their statements on a whim. Dickens achieves a further undercutting, from England being ‘in a dreadful state’ with ‘no pilot’, to the ‘marvellous’ anti-climax because ‘England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood’.
Doodle is then depicted having ‘condescended to come in’, and throwing himself upon the country. The country actually receives, not Doodle himself, but a lot of sovereigns and beer as bribes for votes. Dickens then calls this Doodle in a ‘metamorphosed state’ and points out that he can thus ‘throw himself upon a considerable portion’ of the country all at once. Finally, there is a picture of mass ‘pocketing’ and ‘swallowing’ of money and beer respectively, and of the fashionable world also dispersing around the country, in order to take part. Finally, Dickens describes all this pocketing and swallowing as ‘religious exercises’.
The phrase ‘religious exercises’ is ironic, of course. It even implies that a ‘religion’ is an absurd and foolish belief, while we know that to take or give bribes, whether money or beer, is not ‘religious’ at all. However, the more telling biblical reference is the near-quotation concerning the world before the flood. This refers to the following passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter 24:
34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,
39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
(Matthew 24:34–39)
The reference is to verse 38, but we follow our usual practice of reading around a biblical reference enough for us to understand the context. In Matthew Chapter 24, the disciples ask Jesus about the end of the world. In these verses Jesus explains that nobody will be able to predict the Second Coming of Christ (i.e. and the end of the world): on the contrary, everybody will continue living their lives as normal, right up until the Apocalypse has already begun. Dickens’s outrageous joke is to compare the temporary political crisis to the end of the world; and to compare Doodle’s belated decision to ‘come in’, to the ‘coming of the Son of man’. To bring together the empty triviality of politics (whose hollowness has just been shown by both Coodle and Doodle in their sycophantic retractions) and the coming of the ‘Son of man’, when ‘shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven’ before Christ comes to earth ‘in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’ (The Bible, Matthew 24:29 and 30 respectively) is the most outrageous hyperbole possible to imagine. This satirical overstatement is simultaneously undercut, however, for people are paying no attention to the frightful crisis gripping the country: they continue to eat, drink, marry and so forth. What is the political crisis, then? Either, the end of the world, or (simultaneously), nothing at all.
Dickens’s attack upon the political system had contemporary relevance. Both Bleak House and Hard Times were written between the first Reform Bill (1832) and the second (1867). While there was some overdue relief from reformist pressure, because one Reform had belatedly been enacted after the long reactionary stagnation that accompanied and followed the Napoleonic War, there was still recognition that the first Bill did not go far enough, and it was clear to most thinking people that there would have to be more. So, although most of the ‘rotten borough’ problems1 had been addressed, the practices of bribery and ‘treating’ were still widespread. For example, in 1835 a commission on electoral bribery reported to the Commons that, in Stafford, £14 was paid for each vote. At Leicester in the same election, public houses were opened by each party, the voters were collected and locked in, and were thoroughly drunk by polling day. So, Dickens’s picture of universal pocketing and swallowing was easily recognised at the time. The picture is completed by the laughable behaviour of Coodle and Doodle. We should also note that Coodle is a Lord, and Doodle is ‘Sir Thomas’: in other words, they both belong to the privileged upper class.
The remainder of Chapter 40 of Bleak House further elaborates Dickens’s attack on the election. Volumnia makes the mistake of referring to bribes too openly; the cousin is a comic upper-class buffoon; and the attitude expressed by Sir Leicester Dedlock towards the new class of successful industrialists, and Mr. Rouncewell in particular, is representative of a reactionary, anti-reform class of political ostriches with their heads stuck firmly in the sand.
We have studied this passage because it is a fine example of Dickens’s satirical writing, and there are several passages, on different topics, similarly successful in attacking society’s faults or stupidities. We may think, for example, of Chapter 2, ‘In Fashion’, the powerful evocation of Jo’s illiteracy, or the Coroner’s inquests. On the other hand, what do such satires contribute to the central themes of Bleak House? When we consider plotting we may well ask whether this election passage is merely inserted to delay the confrontation between Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock, in order to stretch out and heighten suspense. Is the election satire simply padding, a target that offers Dickens an opportunity, a delaying digression on a topic that will be much more trenchantly treated via Gradgrind and Harthouse, in Hard Times, by Twemlow and Veneering, in Our Mutual Friend, or by the famous Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit?
Our next question, however, is the same one that we put to Hard Times: how far does Dickens develop his declared target, the Court of Chancery, as a theme of the novel? We will consider this question in relation to both texts in our concluding discussion below. Before we do so, we will look at another extract where Dickens attacks social ills: the description of Tom-all-Alone’s, the slum where Jo sleeps:
Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years – though born expressly to do it.
Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish. As several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone’s may be expected to be a good one.
This desirable property is in Chancery, of course. It would be an insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so. Whether ‘Tom’ is the popular representative of the original plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows. Certainly Jo don’t know.
‘For I don’t’, says Jo, ‘I don’t know nothink’.
(BH, 235–236)
The first paragraph of this extract contains powerful description. The opening appeal to our sympathy is concise and effective – the correction that Jo’s life is simply an absence of death up to now. Then the evocation starts, with ‘ruinous’, ‘black, dilapidated’, ‘crazy’, ‘decay’, ‘tumbling’ and ‘misery’. As he builds our sense of the place, Dickens introduces and elaborates his image comparing the inhabitants to parasites or insects: they are a ‘swarm’ like the ‘vermin parasites’ that feed off a ‘wretch’ – presumably a person far gone into poverty and filth. These people are ‘a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers’. Notice that Dickens refers to the people as ‘it’, and gives a vivid impression that they are an infestation as they carry ‘fever’ and ‘evil’ back and forth. The image is powerful and repulsive; but then its effect is enhanced by the sudden contrast with foolish joke names, as the ineffectual political class makes its appearance: ‘Coodle’, ‘Doodle’, ‘Foodle’ and all the rest as far as ‘Zoodle’.
The fact that Tom-all-Alone’s remains unaffected by the politicians or by the rest of society, and that society is not affected by Tom-all-Alone’s, is emphasised when two houses fall and the event gives no more than ‘a paragraph’ in the papers; and by the carelessness with which people look forward to several more houses coming down, because the crash might be ‘a good one’.
Dickens then ties this slum in to his Chancery theme: for Tom-all-Alone’s is ‘in Chancery’, as anyone would have realised just from knowing about it. Dickens then speculates about the name, and concludes that nobody knows who the ‘Tom’ who was ‘all-alone’ might have been. One of the suggestions tells us that this slum is ‘in’ Jarndyce and Jarndyce, so relating the place to the main plot of the novel. We remember the opening salvo attacking the Court of Chancery, ‘which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire’ (BH, 13), and we recognise Tom-all-Alone’s as representatively blighted and decaying. Perhaps more importantly we may sense that Tom-all-Alone’s is representative of all who are ‘in Chancery’. So, we may see the doomed destruction of this street as a visible emblem of the destruction that is wreaked upon Miss Flite, Mr. Gridley, and eventually upon Richard. We can argue that Dickens proposes Tom-all-Alone’s as a symbol: as an explicit, physical version of the effect being ‘in’ Chancery has upon a victim. According to this idea, we will watch later in the book as parts of Richard Carstone fall to pieces, and as Chancery like parasitical maggots lives on his decaying person.
The question of parasites is relevant because it returns us to the simile developed in the first paragraph. Certainly the idea of something feeding off another’s life, first proposed as a simple description of Tom-all-Alone’s, is directly suited to the analysis of Chancery Dickens proposes. We can easily see that Richard’s fixation on the outcome of the suit feeds on his good qualities by obstructing his mind, so that his obsession is like a kind of parasite. Then, the Chancery suit is more literally parasitic because, in the end, the lawyers have sucked out all the money that was ever bequeathed. Finally, Bleak House provides us with a living parasite – the lawyer Vholes – who preys on Richard in his gruesome manner.
Concluding discussion
We have looked at some of the elements of society that attract Dickens’s condemnation, but we should mention that he is also satirical about several other targets that we do not have time to analyse. In Hard Times, for example, there is the Trade Union and its orator, Slackbridge; and there is the boastful ‘bully’ Bounderby. In Bleak House there are fashion, illiteracy and the shameful condition of the poor, as well as reactionary Tory politics. In Bleak House there are a number of other lesser targets as well, as Dickens fills out the population and complicates the events of this very long novel. So, for example, there is the vanity of the footman Mercury, Miss Barbary’s religious cruelty, Chadband’s oily preaching, Skimpole’s self-excuse, both the Jellyby and Pardiggle mistreatments of children, and a host of other elements in society and among people that receive a jolt of contempt or hatred from the author, in passing. In this discussion we limit ourselves to considering the themes of each opening salvo; then to looking at the moral response Dickens gives to the social and political evils he describes.
Facts and Utilitarianism as a theme of Hard Times
In this chapter we have referred to two extracts, both overviews of Coketown, and we were led to wonder whether Dickens changed his attack on the industrial town, forgetting his early focus on Utilitarian philosophy, and turning instead to the wickedness of greedy, lying bosses.
How far has Dickens developed Hard Times as a coherent attack upon the ‘fact’ or Utilitarian philosophy? There are a number of elements and passages in the novel that further elaborate the ‘fact’ theme, showing that Dickens maintains his hostile attack throughout. Here is a broad survey of the main elements of the theme.
First, the ‘facts’ education is thoroughly discredited, its consequences demonstrated in the adult careers of Louisa, Tom, Sissy and Bitzer. Probably the one whose adult life most effectively demonstrates the errors of her education, is Louisa. When she marries Bounderby, she is persuaded that love does not exist; and she marries having reached the conclusion that nothing matters, and she pleases her father when she says ‘you have been so careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream’ (HT, 98). In her second crucial interview with her father, Louisa makes similar statements, but with the opposite opinion: ‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death?’ (HT, 200). Pages 201 and 202 are a comprehensive indictment of Louisa’s ‘factual’ upbringing. She explains that she was in conflict with her education throughout her childhood, but eventually submitted to the despairing idea that life would soon pass so nothing mattered. Louisa then explains that her upbringing left her vulnerable to Harthouse: the emotions she was trained to suppress proved too strong, and took their revenge. Louisa, then, demonstrates that it is not possible or sensible to suppress all that is not ‘fact’; and her devastating catechism somehow influences her father to change his philosophy completely. Louisa’s story is complicated by her only motive in marrying, which is to benefit Tom. It is a poor motive, but relevant to the ‘fact’ theme because it is the only natural emotion she has left: Tom is the ‘subject of all the little tenderness of my life’, she says (HT, 202).
There are two difficulties about the outcome of Louisa’s story. She twice tells her father ‘I don’t reproach you’, but says ‘I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny’! (HT, 201, 200). In fact, she accuses her father with such a devastating hatred of her childhood that her denial of reproaching him is ridiculous. This in turn may lead us to suspect that the emotion driving Louisa’s critique is not really hers, rather it is Dickens’s feelings that are being so cogently expressed: it is Dickens who wishes to bury the ‘fact’ faction so deeply in its own error, and who cannot resist driving the nails home in its coffin, despite his attempt to soften his desperate heroine (this is the girl who is about to swoon at her father’s feet). The second difficulty we have mentioned depends very much on each individual reader’s reaction: whether Mr. Gradgrind’s sudden conversion is believable or convincing. Dickens has prepared us, to an extent, by making occasional moderating remarks about Gradgrind, such as, ‘Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr. Bounderby’ (HT, 30). On the other hand, his appearance in the opening two chapters; together with the horrible discussion of love he conducts with Louisa in Chapter 15, ‘Father and Daughter’, have presented such a flinty personality that we can hardly believe that his world is turned upside down by the half hour during which he listens to Louisa before she faints. If we remember his forehead as a wall, above two eyes that are the ‘cellarage’; and we still have a vivid picture of Stone Lodge, that cold, square building – how can this man, the very champion of ‘facts’, suddenly become gentle, regretful and ready to concede the error of his whole life? If we do doubt this character development, we may think both that Dickens is the victim of his own success, because Gradgrind’s appearance at the start of the novel is so exceptionally memorable; and that Dickens is unfamiliar with the short format of Hard Times. In Bleak House, for example, Richard Carstone can be introduced as a charming, carefree, affectionate and even clever young man, and there is time for him to turn into an obsessed, self-absorbed, sick and dependent creature, broken and dying. This is because Bleak House is nearly a thousand pages long. Hard Times, by contrast, is only 274 pages, and Gradgrind’s conversion must consequently be abrupt, in order to fit in.
It can be argued that the adult career of Tom Gradgrind is also an outcome of his upbringing in the ‘fact’ philosophy. This argument would rest upon the Utilitarian concept of self-interest: the belief that all activities are part of a deal, or a contract, and that people only do things in order to benefit themselves. This idea is represented and verbally argued by Bitzer and countered by Sleary (see HT, 269), and there is no doubt that Tom Gradgrind is overwhelmingly selfish and self-interested. On the other hand, we are not struck by Tom as a product of the Gradgrind School: that distinction belongs much more to Bitzer. Tom is rather presented simply as a grumpy and selfish lout or ‘whelp’, ill-mannered and with a criminal tendency. Indeed, Tom’s financial improvidence is the opposite of the ‘fact’ faction’s emphasis on arithmetic. We can conclude that any contribution to the ‘fact’ theme made by the characterisation of Tom is limited and somewhat tenuous. He was educated with only ‘facts’ and he grows up to be a selfish thief. That is about as much as can be said.
Sissy Jupe is a problematic character in relation to this theme. She is the example of a child on whom the ‘fact’ education seems to have no effect, from her initial attempt to define a horse, right through to her continuing, irrational hope that her father will come to fetch her, discussed between Gradgrind and Sleary on page 269. Three aspects of Sissy seem to be important: first, she has the innocence and moral strength to face down Mr. Harthouse, defeating him in their dialogue and forcing him to go away by sheer power of her personality. Second, Sissy seems to act as a sort of guardian angel in the final third of the novel, bringing happiness and pity so she ‘shone like a beautiful light upon the darkness of the other [Louisa]’ (HT, 210) in a repeat of the image we remember being applied to Rachael and her effect upon Stephen. Her dismissal of Harthouse, the rescue of Stephen, and her facilitating Tom’s escape, all give a practical dimension to her benevolence. Third, Dickens repeatedly emphasises Sissy’s educational failure. We know that she has not learned about horses, from Chapter 2; Gradgrind observes, in Chapter 14, that her continuing at school would be ‘useless’, and she agrees; and when Louisa returns, Sissy tells her, ‘You knew so much, and I knew so little’, clearly conscious of her comparative ignorance. We can argue that Sissy’s humility in this respect shows her lack of pride, and her unassuming personality. On the other hand, Sissy’s role in disposing of Harthouse, and the active and commanding part she plays both with Rachael and in rescuing Stephen, are not the behaviour of a shy personality at all. Furthermore, her speech is that of a person confident in her intelligence, expressing herself in educated language. Dickens clearly intends to show that it is the ‘factual’ education that has failed Sissy, not she who has failed educationally. She is so perfect in the final chapters, on the other hand, that some readers will find her unconvincing.
Bitzer is arguably the most relevant and explicit embodiment of the ‘fact’ theme. His significant appearances at the beginning and end of the novel provide us with a measure for the intervening events, and an example of the ‘fact’ theme undimmed by experience. Bitzer is the successful pupil, who knows to call a horse a ‘graminivorous quadruped’, and who, at the end of the story, answers the question whether he has a heart by saying ‘The circulation, Sir, … couldn’t be carried on without one’ (HT, 264). Bitzer’s role in Book 3 Chapter 8, ‘Philosophical’, is to represent Utilitarianism, just as Sleary represents the opposite point of view: that of love, mercy, imagination and entertainment. The chapter gives full expression to Bitzer, who promulgates the philosophy he learned at Gradgrind’s school; then gives full expression to Sleary’s ‘there ith a love in the world, not all Thelf-interetht after all’ (HT, 269). The chapter is set up like a debate, to act as a conclusion to the novel’s stated theme, and it fulfils that function successfully.
Aside from the four young people we have considered, the ‘fact’ theme appears fitfully in the text of Hard Times, as we found for example from looking at the overview of Coketown in Book 2 Chapter 1, where we would expect it to appear but where it seems to be unaccountably absent. However, Dickens can be said to have sown his Utilitarianism theme into the remainder of Hard Times, particularly through the story of Louisa’s marriage and her flight; through formal structures such as the parallel meetings with Sleary at the start and the end of the novel; and the balanced debate between Bitzer and Sleary in the last-but-one chapter. Additionally, Dickens provides plentiful concise and precise definitions of his theme. So, for example, we read:
… which craving [i.e. for fancy and entertainment] must and would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the Creation were repealed.
(HT, 28)
Utilitarianism and other elements of Hard Times
Hard Times has been a controversial text ever since its publication: it is recognised as being different from Dickens’s other novels, and it has inspired both admiration and criticism to an unusual degree. Hard Times was Ruskin’s favourite Dickens novel;2 the work of one who did not understand the politics of his time, according to Macaulay;3 but, according to Walter Allen,4 it provided an unmatched ‘critique of industrial society’. In this section we will turn devil’s advocate and outline two arguments critical of Dickens’s achievement.
We have remarked that the ostensible aim of Hard Times, judging from that famous opening passage in the schoolroom, is as a moral fable about Utilitarianism. Our discussion of the development and conclusion of that fable has shown that Dickens follows through, and we can satisfactorily read such a moral fable in Hard Times. Nature, or ‘the laws of Creation’, as Dickens puts it, cannot be suppressed and denied: it inevitably bursts out, and takes its revenge on those who would confine it within a prison of fact.
If we sit back, having finished the novel, and ask ourselves whether such a reading tells us enough about Hard Times, we are likely to answer no, for two reasons. First, that there is another group of concerns that are strongly represented in the text, that often seem to obscure Utilitarianism, and to push it out of the consciousness of the reader (and perhaps of the writer as well). These concerns are about the evils of an industrial town and its society. What do we remember most vividly about Coketown? Is it the argument between mathematics and imagination? Or, is it not rather the ‘melancholy mad elephants’ constantly dipping their heads, and the dust, oil, filth and hellish fires among which the Coketowners live and work? According to this argument, Dickens’s chosen theme is a matter for philosophical argument and political demonstration, while the theme of industrial society appeals to us on a direct naturalistic level, as well as enlisting our outrage and our pity because it is a theme involving humanity and injustice. Consequently, while we read with our intellect about the ‘fact’ faction, we are engaged and moved on a more personal level, when we read of the Coketown mills, and an industrial society.
The second critical argument we outline, concerns the plot of the robbery from the bank. This is the main story driving the characters’ thoughts and actions through the second half of the novel, and it has the virtue of bringing the Gradgrinds and Bounderbys into the same action as Stephen, Rachael and Bitzer, after the breakdown of Louisa’s marriage has played itself out. The critical argument says that this plot, with its complicated set-up, the framing of Stephen, the subterfuge of Tom, suspicion and gradual revelation of clues, is a simple crime thriller, dependent on all the usual props, clues and tricks of suspense of any story of that genre.
These two arguments charge that Dickens fails to write a moral fable against Utilitarianism, because we remember Hard Times as a deeply affecting evocation of life in an industrial city with its lurid fires, smoke, black dust and oil, its injuries, suffering, and unremitting noise and labour; and because we have been gripped by a thrilling crime story with its attendant clues, detection and suspense – a story only very loosely connected to the Utilitarianism theme.
The Court of Chancery as a theme of Bleak House
Chancery is condemned in the opening pages, as the place which has ‘its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard’ because it is ‘most pestilent of hoary sinners’ (BH, 13, 12 respectively). As with Hard Times, we should acknowledge straight away that Dickens does a conscientious job of weaving the Chancery theme into the characters and events of his novel. Aside from Chancery’s ‘decaying houses and blighted lands’, represented by Tom-all-Alone’s as we have remarked, the Court’s main embodiment is in the lives of four of the characters: Miss Flite, Mr. Gridley, Mr. Jarndyce and Richard Carstone.
Miss Flite is Chancery’s ‘worn-out lunatic’. She has been driven mad by ‘expecting a judgment’ which she confuses with the last judgement, or the end of the world – an idea which seems to equate the Chancellor with God. Miss Flite appears several times. Apart from her obviously scrambled wits, her prattling about judgement, spending her days in Court and toting her bag full of ‘documents’, Miss Flite is significant because of her pet birds which act as a symbol of Chancery’s effect. She keeps them caged, and their names are ‘Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!’ (BH, 852). She adds two new birds called ‘the Wards in Jarndyce’ when she appoints Richard to be executor of her will. Finally, after Richard’s death, Miss Flite tells Esther that she has ‘given her birds their liberty’. The picture of Miss Flite’s birds flying out and up from her rooftop garret may bring to mind the traditional picture of a soul leaving the body and rising to Heaven in the form of a dove. It is a bitter idea that Richard’s death should set ‘Hope, Joy, Youth, … Dust, Ashes, Waste’ and the rest, free from their earthly cage: that these should represent Richard’s soul. Miss Flite’s birds are, then, a moving and effective symbol of the corrupting effect of Chancery.
Mr. Gridley, the ‘man from Shropshire’ whose life has been ruined by an endless suit, is brought to despair and death. Although his spirit has finally been broken by Chancery and he admits ‘I am worn out’, he asks those who are witnessing his death to ‘lead them [i.e. the lawyers, and so Chancery] to believe that I died defying them, consistently and perseveringly’ (BH, 372). Previously, Gridley appeared as a version of Boythorn, constantly angry, expressing himself in violent terms and apologising to Mr. Jarndyce for allowing his temper to impair his manners.
Mr. Jarndyce keeps himself free from the Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit. Of necessity he employs a lawyer because he is ‘in’ Chancery. However, he has no expectation of gain or even good sense from the Court and he does what he can to help three young people, two of whom are wards in the case. Mr. Jarndyce finds the Court to be hopeless, idiotic and ineffectual, and the business of the law to be only hurtful, misleading and incomprehensible to those who become caught up in its toils. He is the one who coins the word ‘wiglomeration’ for the deliberations, delays, speeches and obfuscations of lawyers and the Court. We can argue that it is easier for Mr. Jarndyce to take this view than it would be, for example, for Mr. Gridley, because the former is a rich man, who can afford to keep his distance from the suit, while the law has truly ruined Gridley’s livelihood. However, we cannot impeach Mr. Jarndyce for his opinions and practice: he represents an intelligent aversion to Chancery and its pernicious infections.
The three characters we have mentioned are embroiled in the Court of Chancery, so their stories present further iteration of that theme, and opportunities for Dickens to paint shocking pictures of the law’s effects. Also, Miss Flite and her birds carry a symbolic significance relevant to the theme. However, the central claim Bleak House can put forward for having pursued the condemnation of Chancery through the whole text, rides upon the story of Richard Carstone. We watch him throughout his journey and we are treated to a series of detailed discussions between Richard and Esther, which carefully chart the gradual but steady disintegration of his purposes in life. In our discussion of Hard Times above, we commented that some readers find Mr. Gradgrind’s conversion unconvincing because it is too sudden. There is no such problem attending Richard’s steady decline, which is fully charted and fully expounded. That he becomes suspicious of Mr. Jarndyce’s motives, becomes the victim of the ghastly lawyer Mr. Vholes, and foolishly keeps company with Mr. Skimpole, are developments we believe implicitly. Even Richard’s death has been amply prepared by Esther’s observation, together with contributions from Ada and Allan Woodcourt, and is convincing. We accept, then, that Richard’s story is a fable with a moral, and that the moral points out the baleful, even deadly, influence of the High Court of Chancery.
The Court of Chancery and other elements of Bleak House
As we have remarked, there are numerous social themes in this very long novel, where Dickens seems to take the opportunity, intermittently, to take aim at some other bêtes noires, such as ‘the fashionable intelligence’ and bribes and treats in electioneering. However, there seems to be sufficient room for multiple social concerns in this huge text, so that the Chancery topic is not overshadowed, and we can be comfortable that the vituperative opening salvo has been followed by a fable of sufficient weight and seriousness in the remainder of the novel. We will, however, remember the arguments we put forward criticising Hard Times: that Dickens develops another social theme that is more powerful and emotive than the philosophical theory he initially attacks; and that the plot in the second half of the novel is driven by a conventional crime story, not related to any social or political critiques.
Does either of these arguments apply to Bleak House? First, we ask: do any of the many other social targets Dickens takes on, effectively overshadow the evils condemned in the Court of Chancery? This is a question to which different readers will give different answers. Clearly, Chancery remains a central issue, and it can be argued that the characterisations of the lawyers – Kenge, Tulkinghorn and Vholes – and the clerks – Guppy, Jobling and Small – add to and broaden this theme considerably. Even when the legal business has nothing to do with Chancery (as is the case with much of Tulkinghorn’s activity), Dickens remains busy attacking the legal world. Furthermore, as we have remarked, there is sufficient space in this very large book for what we could consider the next most powerful social concern: Jo the crossing sweeper, his illiteracy and his lack of a place in society:
He seems to know that they have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he is, and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He is of no order and no place; neither of the beasts, nor of humanity.
(BH, 669)
Jo is lavished with some of the most powerful passages of writing in Bleak House, and for this reason the evils of a society where such ignorance and poverty are tolerated, becomes a moving strand in the novel. For another powerful passage about Jo, see the description of living illiterate, on pages 236–237, or the comparison to the butcher’s dog, pages 237–238. This is equally an indictment of the society that allows such a life to be lived.
Our second observation with regard to Hard Times, was that Dickens drives the second half of the novel with a conventional crime story which has no particular relevance to Utilitarianism. We are therefore not concerned with Dickens’s social and political critique, because the story is simply that of a selfish thief and the details of how he tries to escape detection by framing another man. It can be argued that Bleak House presents a similar problem, because the later stages of Richard’s decline happen at the same time as the story of Lady Dedlock’s scandal is building up towards its climax. The crisis occurs, and Esther and Bucket embark upon the pursuit that ends when Esther recognises her mother’s dead body. In Bleak House, the most complicated, mysterious and exciting part of the plot begins when Lady Dedlock recognises Captain Hawdon’s handwriting (BH, 23). From that moment on, the scandal of Lady Dedlock’s secret becomes more and more complicated and draws in a variety of characters including Tulkinghorn, Snagsby, the law-writer, Guppy, Tony Jobling, the Smallweeds, George, Jo, Hortense, Bucket and Esther of course: in short, almost everyone. This is the main plot that drives events and motivates the characters. Other interludes such as visits to Boythorn, Richard’s brief sojourn with the Bayham Badgers, or Esther’s visits to Caddy and the Turveydrops, are no more than that: interludes that provide some amusement and a rest from the intensity and drama of Lady Dedlock’s secret. Of course we feel increasing sympathy for Richard and Ada as his decline becomes more pronounced, but Richard’s story cannot compete with the high drama of a society scandal, including a murder and a detective, a secret hidden long ago, and the flight and pursuit of a beautiful lady who is found dead from despair. The point about Lady Dedlock’s secret, which is undeniably the main plot of Bleak House, is that it is not in any way at all connected to the Court of Chancery. It is a plain old love story of passion and loss, with a surviving child long thought to be dead. Just as the theft in Hard Times is merely a crime story, so Lady Dedlock’s scandal is merely a romantic melodrama, with murder added.
We may therefore conclude that Dickens has failed to integrate his social and political commentary into the plots of these two novels. There are powerful critiques of society; there are ways in which such social concerns impinge upon characters; there are regular polemic passages attacking social ills; but in both novels, the main plot that grips the reader with drama and suspense, is an ordinary plot that is not related to any of the highlighted social issues.
A moral response to society’s ills
In our analysis of Coketown above, we considered what Dickens says should be done about the ills of an industrial society, and we came up with a list largely constructed as the antithesis of those elements he attacks as wrong. So, there should be education (but not Utilitarianism) including imagination; the machines should be safer; the town should be cleaner; bosses should be less greedy and more honest; the Union should not ostracise individuals; and the town and factories should not be denuded of natural things such as trees, a cleaner river, and so forth. In brief, this prescription adds up to saying that industrial production ought to be much nicer than it is. The main serious reform Dickens proposes is education for all, and that education should encourage the imagination. Otherwise, we hear a voice raised in outrage against the conditions in which the workers live, and an insistence that things must improve, but we are not given guidance into how such improvements can come about. Dickens is critical of both the social institutions that might undertake such a task: the Union on the one hand, and government and the politicians on the other. There is no doubt that Hard Times arouses our sympathy and anger. What it does not do is to propose a solution.
There is a shadowy suggestion, which amounts to the idea that nature itself, under the influence of God, will return in the end because the ‘laws of the Creation’ (HT, 28) will eventually prevail. Also, we studied Rachael in Chapter 3, commenting on the angelic virtues of self-sacrifice, mercy and endurance that make her life a pattern for others. Such virtues, however, do not pretend to alter the social reality: even at the end, Rachael is praised for ‘working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do it as her natural lot’ (HT, 273), a phrase that even aligns nature on the side of the status quo.
Our final comment on the social themes of Hard Times is unavoidable: there is a serious problem with Rachael, Stephen and the Union. This is partly due to what seems to have been an ill-considered, or ill-executed revision on Dickens’s part. When preparing the text for publication, the passage in which Stephen promises not to pursue complaints about injuries in the factory was cut. As a result, we do not know why Stephen ‘passed a promess’ not to join in Union action; to whom he gave the promise; or for what reason. Even knowing the cancelled passage, we only know that they were discussing Rachael’s sister’s death from having an arm torn off by the machine; that he promised Rachael, because such ideas ‘only lead to hurt’; and therefore he will not take part in industrial action. Dickens has not provided an alternative explanation, so Stephen’s motive is left as a mystery. Not only did Dickens leave his character twisting in the wind through this mistake, but also there is a further difficulty. We know that Rachael works in the same mill as Stephen. Does she take part in the action with the rest of the workers? If she does, why does she not set Stephen free from his promise? If she does not, why is she not also sent to Coventry by her fellow-workers? There seems no way out of this riddle, and the treatment of the whole episode that culminates in Stephen being ostracised, seems thin, even if you reinsert the ‘promess’ passage into pages 86–87. It is as if Dickens was determined to rule out the solutions offered by Trade Unionists and Socialism, so he attacked Slackbridge; but at the same time this left Stephen’s character in an untenable position. The moral response to social ills is thus left as the contribution of angelic women, whose combination of virtues can be called a form of ‘divine goodness’ that influences everybody for the better.
In Bleak House, the two major social ills Dickens confronts are Jo’s destitute illiteracy, and the ‘most pestilent’ High Court of Chancery. What should be done about these two evils? In the case of Jo and others like him, Dickens does propose a measure. He clearly believes that English society should pay for the education of destitute children, and that money should be available to train them for an occupation. This solution is seen in action in the novel, for the bailiff’s three children are taken in hand by Mr. Jarndyce’s charity: Charley becomes Esther’s maid, Tom is sent to school and later apprenticed to a miller, and on Charley’s marriage, little Emma becomes Esther’s maid. It is a charming story, but of limited use to the thousands of destitute or near-destitute people whose hopeless and brutal lives Dickens describes in the persons of Jo, the Coavinses and the brick-makers. Dickens’s contribution to the issue is to insist that England should clear up the obscenities and injustices in its own society, before sending charity abroad. He is outraged that Mrs. Jellyby can collect so much for Borrioboola-Gha, while there are still boys like Jo wandering London’s streets and bedding down in London’s slums.
With regard to Chancery, Dickens expresses his anger with great power, as we saw from our analysis of the opening pages of the novel. The Court and its lawyers are accused of creating delay and confusion, bleeding their clients dry, sustaining cases by creating mountains of papers and never reaching a judgement, and being a laughing stock to all reasonable people. Our anger and frustration are aroused, and our sympathy is enlisted on behalf of the Court’s victims, and in particular Richard. On the other hand, Dickens’s prescription for reform is similar to the improvements he proposes for Coketown. The Court should be faster at dealing with cases, less confusing, clients should have some money left, there should be fewer papers: in short, the whole institution should be speeded up and radically improved. In very short: there should be less ‘wiglomeration’. That is Dickens’s agenda.
This discussion is not a complaint. The attack on Chancery, which expands implicitly to indict the rest of the legal world as well, gives rise to several passages of fine rhetoric and is devastatingly successful. Our point is not a criticism, only an observation of what Dickens’s critique of society does, and what it does not attempt to do. What Dickens does, perhaps better than any other writer, is to arouse our anger, indignation and outrage at suffering, injustice and idiocy in high places. What he does not do is to analyse and assign causes and solutions. Dickens works on the level of the emotions, appealing to the sense of fairness we may be said to feel in our ‘gut’. If we are looking for a programme to address the ills of Victorian society, however, or a penetrating intellectual analysis of what was wrong, we will do better to read, for example, Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), or North and South (1855), or Karl Marx’s Capital (Vol. 1, 1867). What Dickens will do is to rouse us up into a crowd, all ready to confront the authorities, and shout and stamp, insisting that things have to be better, in a civilised society.
Methods of analysis
1. As for the previous chapters, pay close attention to the way in which an extract is written, including such matters as vocabulary, diction, rhetorical or stylistic features, and imagery.
2. Consider the possibility that an image or a description may carry a symbolic significance that resonates through the text. We noticed, for example, that Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House could be read as a symbolic description of the destruction wreaked upon a person by the baleful influence of Chancery.
3. However, in this chapter we have also allowed ourselves to frame and ask questions that are potentially critical of the novels, and then to consider the novels as wholes when framing answers.
4. Opinions and thoughts in answer to such critical questions can lead us back to the text to reread and assess relevant passages.
Suggested work
In Hard Times, study Mr. Sleary’s role in the novel, his appearances at the beginning and the end. Consider particularly (a) how far Sleary can be said to articulate and represent a view of life robust enough to oppose that of Gradgrind and (b) how far Sleary’s view is incorporated into other characters and events (such as Sissy Jupe?) in between his two crucial appearances.
In Hard Times, re-examine the scene between Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind in Chapter XV: ‘Father and Daughter’ (HT, 93–98); then make a close study of the matching opposite scene, that is, the interview between Louisa and Mr. Gradgrind when she has abandoned her marriage, in Book 2, Chapter XII: ‘Down’ (HT, 200–204). Consider these two dialogues as contributions to the critique of Utilitarianism in the novel. Pay particular attention to Louisa’s descriptions of her thoughts and feelings at different times in her life, and to her ways of speaking to her father on these two occasions.
In Hard Times, study the scene between Rachael and Stephen on pages 86 and 87 (i.e. after Mrs. Blackpool is prevented from drinking poison), then read the passage about Stephen’s ‘promess’ that was cut (this is printed in the notes of the World’s Classics edition on pages 292–293); then study from the third paragraph on page 132 (‘The orator having refreshed himself, …’) to the end of paragraph 4 on page 136 (‘ … and left it, of all the working men, to him only’): the account of Stephen being sent to Coventry. How successful or unsuccessful do you find Dickens’s treatment of this part of the narrative? Consider what difference it would make to your assessment, to reinsert the cancelled passage about the ‘promess’.
In Bleak House, study the theme of hopeless poverty in the novel. Consider the role played by Jo the crossing sweeper; the two women from the brick-works; Charley and her siblings; and the passages set in Tom-all-Alone’s. Consider how well these threads are integrated with the book’s legal theme. This may lead you to return to the text to make a special study of the occasions when Tulkinghorn interviews Jo, and when Jo gives testimony at the inquest.
In Bleak House, study Chapter 15: ‘Bell Yard’, from its beginning on page 219 as far as the end of paragraph 2 on page 220 (‘ … in the east for three whole weeks’). Then compare this passage with the description of Mrs. Pardiggle’s visit to the brick-makers’ cottage (from page 118, paragraph 3, ‘Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way … ’, as far as page 123, the end of the first paragraph ‘… dealing in it to a large extent’). Consider the different ways in which Dickens adds to his critique of charity in these two passages, one narrative and the other reflective.
1 For example the 1832 Reform Bill abolished the ‘Rotten Borough’ of Old Sarum, with its electorate of seven voters returning two MPs.
2 John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the leading British art critic of the Victorian age.
3 Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), British historian and Whig politician.
4 Walter Allen (1911–1995), literary critic and writer.