25. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 916-989

Chapter 60: Perspective through Chapter 67: The Close of Esther's Narrative

As one might expect from the shock and the exposure to the elements she has endured, Esther becomes ill, though not for a long time. When Esther recovers he tells her that he plans to stay on in London for as much as six months, because "Ada stands much in need of you." Jarndyce is concerned that, because of his estrangement from Richard, he has little contact with the wards in Jarndyce, so he cautions Esther, as he says he cautioned Woodcourt, not to bring up the subject of the case with Ada and Richard, lest she alienate herself from them: "She cannot afford, and he cannot afford, the remotest chance of another separation from a friend."

Then he mentions Mrs Woodcourt, who has been a guest at his house in London for some time. Esther admits that she finds her "more agreeable than she used to be," and that she hasn't harped on the Woodcourt pedigree as much as she used to. So he proposes to ask Mrs Woodcourt to stay a while longer. Esther has some mixed feelings about this that she can't articulate to herself, given that she doesn't want to admit that she is still in love with Woodcourt, but she agrees. She asks Jarndyce if Woodcourt still has plans to try his profession in another country, and he tells her that in about half a year there is to be an opening for "a medical attendant for the poor" in Yorkshire, and that Woodcourt is a strong candidate for it.

So Esther resumes regular visits to Ada and Richard, and on one of them meets Miss Flite, who has just been to see Ada. She tells Esther that Richard hasn't returned from the court yet, and that when she left he was in conference with Mr Vholes. She urges Esther, "Don't like Vholes. Dan-gerous man!" She has named Richard her executor, she says, "if I should wear out, he will be able to watch that judgment." Her previous executor was Gridley, "But he wore out." And then she mentions that she has added two birds to her collection and named them "the Wards in Jarndyce." Esther recalls, "Her manner of running over the names of her birds, as if she were afraid of hearing them even from her own lips, quite chilled me."

Richard brings Vholes to dinner with him, and the lawyer takes Esther aside to sound her out on how ill Richard is looking. But his manner is "So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser, and there were something of the Vampire in him." Vholes also comments that he thinks the marriage of Richard and Ada is "very ill-advised," to which Esther retorts that it would be much better "if Richard were persuaded to turn his back on the fatal pursuit in which you are engaged with him." Vholes "inclined his head as if he did not wholly dispute even that." His defense is that Richard "had laid down the principle of watching his own interests; and that when a client of mine laid down a principle which was not of an immoral (that is to say, unlawful) nature, it devolved upon me to carry it out. I have carried it out; I do carry it out." Esther can only reflect that she "well understood Mr Vholes's scrupulous way of saving himself and his respectability."

She observes of Richard, "There is a ruin of youth which is not like age; and into such a ruin, Richard's youth and youthful beauty had all fallen away." Richard sees Mr Vholes out. "On his return he told us, more than once, that Vholes was a good fellow, a safe fellow, a man who did what he pretended to do, a very good fellow indeed! He was so defiant about it, that it struck me he had begun to doubt Mr Vholes."

Woodcourt arrives, and takes Richard out for a walk, leaving Esther alone with Ada, who tells her she is perfectly aware of Richard's condition and their financial plight. "But when I married Richard I as quite determined, Esther, if Heaven would help me, never to show him that I grieved for what he did, and so to make him unhappy." And then she adds, "And something else supports me, Esther." She is pregnant. (Dickens doesn't say so in those words, of course, and the way in which Ada delivers the news is curiously oblique, as if designed to avoid shocking the most squeamish of Victorian readers.) But she can't help feeling dread when she looks at Richard: "That he may not live to see his child."

On one of Esther's visits Skimpole is there, and realizing what a potential drain on Richard and Ada's meager resources he can be, Esther decides to pay him a visit. She informs him that Richard is "in very embarrassed circumstance," which only delights Skimpole because he is, too. She hesitates to ask him outright not to go there anymore, but Skimpole anticipates the request: "Not go there? Certainly not, my dear Miss Summerson, most assuredly not. Why should I go there? When I go anywhere, I go for pleasure. I don't go anywhere for pain, because I was made for pleasure." Esther is "disconcerted" by Skimpole's backward logic, and then emboldened to bring up the matter of his ratting on Jo. He blithely falls back into the old "I'm just a child" routine, cheerfully admitting his irresponsibility. So Esther says "that it was not right to betray my guardian's confidence for a bribe." Skimpole retorts, "I can't be bribed." He doesn't understand money, so he has no idea of its value, therefore, he argues, bribing him is impossible. And he weaves an airy justification for turning Jo over to Bucket that is perfectly logical if based on the premise that Skimpole is a child and therefore by nature incapable of responsibility.

After Skimpole accompanies her home, Esther says, she never saw him again. Jarndyce broke with him, and he died five years later, leaving a diary and letters from which a biography was constructed. "It was considered very pleasant reading, but I never read more of it myself than the sentence on which I chanced to light on opening the book. It was this. 'Jarndyce, in common with most other men I have known, is the Incarnation of Selfishness.'"

The months pass, and one day after visiting Richard and Ada, Esther goes to the place where she usually meets Jarndyce for the return home. She is accompanied by Woodcourt, but Jarndyce is late, and after half an hour Woodcourt walks her home. When they get there, both Jarndyce and Mrs Woodcourt are out. Woodcourt takes the opportunity of being alone with Esther to declare his love for her. She reflects, "O, too late to know it now, too late, too late. That was the first ungrateful thought I had. Too late." She tells him that she is not free to accept him, but "never believe ... that while my heart beats, it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having been beloved by you." Esther also learns that he has accepted the position in Yorkshire, which Jarndyce helped him obtain. When she wishes him "Good night" and "good-bye," he understands her meaning: "The first, until we meet to-morrow; the second, as a farewell to this theme between us for ever."

Yeah, well, we'll see about that. Again, having locked himself into Esther's point of view, Dickens shows his uncertainty about how to handle the Woodcourt-Esther-Jarndyce triangle. The omniscient narrator could have presented the irony of Esther's situation -- love vs. respect, duty vs. passion -- without some of the mawkishness attendant on Esther's self-consciousness, as well as the awkwardness of her withholding an outcome she knows too well. We feel a genuine sympathy for Elizabeth when she thinks she has lost Darcy or Emma when she thinks she has lost Mr Knightley, but that's because Jane Austen has been able to view the situation with some measure of objectivity. Esther's emotion here seems false and sentimental by contrast.

So of course what Esther does is go to her room and cry and then take out Jarndyce's proposal letter, which, she says, she knows by heart. And then the next day to keep "as busy as possible," repressing her emotions. (Though still crabbing about Charley's inability to learn grammar.) Jarndyce congratulates her on how well she handles the household finances: In fact, he does it twice, repeating the sentence "There never was such a Dame Durden ... for making money last." His praise reminds us that Esther is not marrying Jarndyce so much as she is marrying Bleak House -- which becomes a key point later. Finally, she announces, "I will be the mistress of Bleak House when you please." She leaves the decision up to him, and when he proposes "Next month?" she agrees.

They are interrupted by the appearance of Mr Bucket, who brings with him "an old man in a black skull-cap, unable to walk" and therefore carried in a chair. They are introduced to Smallweed, and are informed that in rummaging through the papers at Krook's Smallweed has discovered another Jarndyce will. Jarndyce refuses to examine it, however, holding to his refusal to become involved in the case, but promises Smallweed that he will be remunerated for discovering it. Jarndyce and Esther go to Kenge's office, where the lawyer tells them that "it is a Will of later date than any in the suit. It appears to be all in the Testator's handwriting. It is duly executed and attested." It is "a perfect instrument!" Its effect would be to reduce Jarndyce's share of the estate in the favor of Richard and Ada. Vholes is summoned, and he agrees that it is "a very remarkable document" and "a very important document," and that it should be introduced in court when the term begins next month.

Meanwhile, Mr George, who has been at Chesney Wold tending to the recuperating Sir Leicester, goes to "the iron country farther north" to see his brother, and learns how prominent a name Rouncewell is there, which almost makes him back off from the encounter. But at the factory, which is "a place to make a man's head ache," in his opinion, he encounters his nephew, who is "devilish like me!" George thinks. He asks his nephew to take him to see Mr Rouncewell, and when the nephew asks what name he should tell his father, "George, full of the idea of iron, in desperation answers, 'Steel.'"

Presented to Rouncewell, George claims to have been in the army with Rouncewell's brother, but the ironmaster recognizes him and embraces him. Rouncewell tells George that he has come on an auspicious day: He is about to announce Watt's engagement to Rosa, who is leaving for Germany as part of her education tomorrow: The wedding will be in a year. George is astonished by his swift acceptance into the family, but balks when Rouncewell proposes to find a job for him in the business. He is also concerned that his return will disadvantage Rouncewell's children: He wants their mother to "scratch" him out of her will. Rouncewell assures him that their mother would never do such a thing, but if he feels so strongly about it, he can dispose of any inheritance however he sees fit, which George accepts. As for a job in the business, "I am a kind of a Weed, and it's too late to plant me in a regular garden.... But I shall get on best at Chesney Wold -- where there's more room for a Weed than there is here; and the dear old lady will be made happy besides."

George also asks his brother to send a letter he has written to Esther, but didn't want to mail to her from Chesney Wold because he was afraid the associations with the place would pain her. In it he apologizes for turning over to Tulkinghorn the paper in Hawdon's handwriting. Finally, the brothers part, "the ironmaster turning his face to the smoke and fires, and the trooper to the green country."

Jarndyce has given Esther two hundred pounds for the wedding preparations, with the understanding that the wedding would not take place until after the court hearing on the new will. Jarndyce goes to Yorkshire "on Mr Woodcourt's business," and sends for Esther. When she arrives, he tells her that he had wanted to do something to thank Woodcourt for "his humanity to poor unfortunate Jo, his inestimable service to my young cousins, and his value to us all," so he has found a house for him and he wants Esther to look it over, since she is so experienced as a housekeeper. Esther is so touched by the generosity, she tells us, that she starts to cry. Jarndyce tells her "I meant it as a pleasant surprise for the little mistress of Bleak House."

She cries again that night, she tells us, "but I hope it was with pleasure, though I am not quite sure it was with pleasure," and she repeats the words of Jarndyce's proposal letter twice, as a reminder of her duty. In the morning they tour the house, which is a perfect replica of "all the pretty objects, my little tastes and fancies, my little methods and inventions which they used to laugh at while they praised them, my odd ways everywhere." She is a little disturbed, she says, at the thought that it might remind Woodcourt of her, and "what he believed he had lost." Finally, Jarndyce tells her, there's the name of the house: "We went out of the porch; and he showed me written over it, BLEAK HOUSE."

He tells her, "I had no doubt of your being contented and happy with me, being so dutiful and so devoted; but I saw with whom you would be happier." Woodcourt had confided in him, but he hadn't confided in Woodcourt until yesterday. He had also taken Mrs Woodcourt "into a separate confidence," and had invited her to stay with them so she would get to know and appreciate Esther. And when Woodcourt made his declaration of love to Esther, "he spoke with my knowledge and consent -- but I gave him no encouragement, not I, for these surprises were my great reward, and I was too miserly to part with a scrap of it." So now Woodcourt enters. "My husband -- I have called him by that name full seven happy years now -- stood at my side."

Jarndyce's renunciation is barely credible, and only because we have never really known Jarndyce: We have seen him only through Esther's eyes. It exists as a plot device, and what satisfactions we may derive from it are from the outcome of a story, the resolution of a prickly dilemma.

From here on out, the novel largely consists of tying up loose ends. Guppy is one of those loose ends: a character so prominent in the narrative that he needs to be disposed of one way or another. So when Esther returns to London, she finds that he has called on her during her absence. She agrees to receive him, and he arrives with his mother and his "particular friend, Mr Weevle. that is to say, my friend has gone by the name of Weevle, but his name is really and truly Jobling." Guppy informs them that his apprenticeship is over and he is now "admitted ... on the roll of attorneys," and that he is setting up housekeeping in Lambeth, where Jobling, his clerk, and his mother will also reside. And so now he wants to renew his proposal to Esther.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Magnanimous Conduct of Mr Guppy (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

Jarndyce has been listening and responding to all of this on Esther's behalf.

"I take it upon myself, sir," said my guardian, laughing as he rang the bell, "to reply to your proposals on the part of Miss Summerson. She is very sensible of your handsome intentions, and wishes you good evening, and wishes you well." 

Guppy is uncertain whether this signifies "acceptance, or rejection, or consideration," and Jarndyce says, "decided rejection." Whereupon Mrs Guppy indignantly orders Jarndyce out of his own house, and has to be bodily ushered out by Guppy and Jobling.

Court resumes, and Esther and Woodcourt decide to be present at the hearing on the new will. "Richard was extremely agitated, and was so weak and low, though his illness was still of the mind, that my dear girl indeed had sore occasion to be supported." But on the way, Esther and Woodcourt are stopped by Caddy Jellyby, who is on her way to one of her dancing classes, so they are late arriving at the court. They find, to their amazement, that there is a great crowd that seems to be amused at something. They find that Jarndyce and Jarndyce is "over for good." They assume that this means there has been a ruling in favor of the new will, but then they meet Kenge and Vholes, who tell them that the will hasn't even been discussed. Finally Woodcourt figures out what they're saying: the estate has been found to be entirely absorbed by the costs of litigating it, and "thus the suit lapses and melts away."

Woodcourt realizes, too, what this will mean to Richard. Vholes tells them that he left Richard still in the courtroom, and then "gave one gasp as if he had swallowed the last morsel of this client, and his black buttoned-up unwholesome figure glided away." Woodcourt sends Esther to Jarndyce with the news, and then goes to find Richard. In the afternoon, Jarndyce accompanies Esther to Richard and Ada's, where Ada tells her that Woodcourt had found Richard "sitting in a corner of the court ... like a stone figure. On being roused, he had broken away, and made as if he would have spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his mouth being full of blood, and Allan had brought him home."

Richard is week but looks "handsomer than I had seen him look for many a day." He welcomes Esther, and promises to be at her wedding if he can stand. He dozes for a while, and then notices Jarndyce waiting in the hall and asks who it is. Richard admits him and Jarndyce comes in and puts his hand on Richard's. "'O sir,' said Richard, 'you are a good man, you are good man!' and burst into tears for the first time." He tells Jarndyce that he would like to see Esther and Woodcourt's house. "If I could be moved there when I begin to recover my strength, I feel as if I should get well there, sooner than anywhere." He talks of visiting the old Bleak House as well, and then of starting a new life: "'I will begin the world!' said Richard, with a light in his eyes." Esther notices that Woodcourt "drew a little nearer towards Ada, and I saw him solemnly life up his hand to warn my guardian." He speaks of being "a guide to my unborn child," and asks Ada to forgive him. She kisses him and he dies.

When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me that she had given her birds their liberty.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

At Chesney Wold, Sir Leicester is "invalided, bent, and almost blind, but of a worthy presence yet -- riding with a stalwart man beside him, constant to his bridle-rein." He still carries on his feud with Boythorn, but Boythorn is really humoring the old baronet, who doesn't know "how near together he and his antagonist have suffered, in the fortunes of two sisters; and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him."

Mr George has taken up lodging in the keeper's house where Esther took shelter from the rain and had her first encounter with her mother, and Phil Squod stays busy polishing "anything in the way of a stable-yard that will take a polish." The house is mostly shut up, and is not open to visitors anymore. "Volumnia, growing with the flight of time pinker as to the red in her face and yellower as to the white, reads to Sir Leicester in the long evenings," fighting off yawns; "passion and pride, even to the stranger's eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire, and yielded it to dull repose."

Ada gives birth to a boy who is named Richard, and goes to live at the old Bleak House. Esther and Woodcourt have two daughters. Charley marries a miller, and her little sister, Emma, takes over as Esther's maid. Their brother, Tom, is apprenticed to the miller. Caddy gives the dancing lessons now, because Prince is lame. Their daughter is deaf and dumb. Mrs Jellyby has turned against Africa because the King of Borrioboola tried "to sell everybody -- who survived the climate -- for Rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament."

Esther is still in love with Ada: Richard, Ada's son, "says that he has two mamas, and I am one."

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Alun Armstrong as Mr Bucket, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Alistair McGowan as Kenge, Dermot Crowley as Mr Vholes, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett, Sheila Hancock as Mrs Guppy, Ian Richardson as the Lord Chancellor, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite.

21. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 752-791

Chapter 49: Dutiful Friendship through Chapter 51: Enlightened

It's Mrs Bagnet's birthday, and we're going to spend a lot of time on that fact until Mr George arrives for the celebration. As the Bagnets go through their business, which is not particularly relevant to any of the major story-lines of the novel, Mr Bagnet does mention that George is "extra-drilled.... By a lawyer. Who would put the devil out." Since we know that lawyer is dead, we have all the more reason to await George's arrival. And when it comes, the Bagnets notice that he is "white" and "shocked." But he tries to brave it out, giving Mrs Bagnet a brooch for her present.

There is some talk of Jo's death, and then a surprise arrives in the form of Mr Bucket, who claims that he saw the musical instruments in the Bagnets' shop-window and is in the market for a second-hand cello -- or "wiolinceller." George introduces him to the Bagnets, who welcome him into their party, and Bagnet manages to ingratiate himself by making much of the Bagnet children.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Friendly Behaviour of Mr Bucket (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

But when Mrs Bucket tells him that "George has not been in his usual spirits" that evening, Bucket asks, "What should you be out of spirits for? You haven't got anything on your mind, you know." And after some chat about the children and how he and Mrs Bucket don't have any, Bucket repeats himself: "And you haven't got anything on your mind, you know, George; what could you have on your mind!"

Finally, it is time to go, and Bucket leaves with George. He conducts him into a room in a public house, closes the door behind himself, and says, "You must consider yourself in custody, George." He informs George that he is a suspect in the murder of Tulkinghorn. George expresses surprise: "Bucket! It's not possible that Mr Tulkinghorn has been killed, and that you suspect me?" But when Bucket tells him the murder took place at Tulkinghorn's office at ten o'clock the night before, George admits, "Why great Heaven, I was there, last night!"

Bucket says yes, he knows, and that George has "been seen hanging about the place" and that Tulkinghorn "may have been heard to call you a threatening, murdering, dangerous fellow." Sir Leicester Dedlock, he tells George, has offered a reward of a hundred guineas for the apprehension of the murderer. Bucket produces handcuffs and tells George he has to use them. "The trooper flushes angrily, and hesitates a moment; but holds out his two hands, clasped together, and says, 'There! Put them on!'" And, letting George pull down his hat so he doesn't have to meet the eyes of anyone, Bucket conducts him to jail.

And now back to Esther, and in fact back in time several weeks. Caddy Jellyby has been in poor health since giving birth to a baby, "a tiny old-faced mite, with a countenance that seemed to be scarcely anything but cap-border, and a little, lean, long-fingered hand, always clenched under its chin." Though it is her godchild and is named for her, Esther regards it as "quite a piteous little sight." Caddy and Prince have begged Esther to come help nurse Caddy back to health, and after she makes some exhausting day-trips into London, Jarndyce suggests that they move into their lodgings in the city for the duration. He also suggests that they persuade Woodcourt to look in on Caddy, which occasions some embarrassment on Esther's part. She recalls how much Ada and Caddy made of the flowers that Woodcourt sent her, and which she has now burned. 

Since Esther has still not told Ada of her engagement to Jarndyce -- or as she still puts it, "that I was going to be the mistress of Bleak House" -- she now feels more pressure than ever to do so. Ada is celebrating her twenty-first birthday, and Esther goes to her room at the stroke of midnight to be the first to wish her happy birthday. She also takes the opportunity to share the news with Ada, who is happy to hear it. Esther is "so comforted by the sense of having one right, in casting this last idle reservation away, that I was ten times happier than I was before. I had scarcely thought it a reservation a few hours ago; but now that it was gone, I felt as if I understood its nature better." The "as if" in that sentence is a very large one.

Once they get to London, Esther spends most of her time with Caddy, so she sees less of Ada. Mrs Jellyby visits her daughter and granddaughter "occasionally, with her usual distraught manner," taking little notice of the baby, "as if her attention were absorbed by a young Borrioboolan on its native shores." Mr Turveydrop is as demanding as ever: "If the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him uncomfortable." But he has taken a fancy to Peepy "and would take the child out walking with great pomp," though Peepy has to be expensively dressed, with the cost borne by Caddy and Prince. And because Woodcourt is often there to tend to Caddy, Esther inevitably sees a great deal of him.

But it seems to her that "Ada was not so frankly cheerful with me as she used to be," and "it came into my head that she was a little grieved -- for me -- by what I had told her about Bleak House." Notice that it's always Bleak House that Esther speaks of -- not Jarndyce, and never about being married to him. And how much of her sense that Ada was "grieved -- for me" is Esther's projection of her own feelings?

Finally, Jarndyce asks if "Woodcourt has restored Caddy Jellyby to the full enjoyment of life again?" Esther is pleased to be able to say yes, "and to be repaid by such gratitude as hers, is to be made rich, guardian." That she still calls her husband-to-be "guardian," may be one reason that Jarndyce says, "We would make him as rich as a Jew, if we knew how. Would we not, little woman?" The phrase he uses, with its strong whiff for us of antisemitism, was commonplace well into the twentieth century. It doesn't bother Esther, however, who laughs and says that "it might spoil him" to be rich. And Jarndyce continues this dance on a precipice by commenting, "Rich enough to have his own happy home, and his own household gods -- and household goddess too, perhaps?" He continues to say, "I have been sounding him delicately about his plans" and to observe that "he seems half inclined for another voyage."

Esther, who is holding so tightly on to her emotions that she doesn't betray them even to us, says, "It might open a new world to him."

"So it might," my guardian assented. "I doubt if he expects much of the old world. Do you know I have fancied that he sometimes feels some particular disappointment, or misfortune, encountered in it. You never heard of anything of that sort?"

Esther shakes her head, and Jarndyce continues by saying, "I should say it was likely at present that he will give a long trail to another country." She responds with something politely noncommittal.

This whole scene is fraught with tensions that Dickens unfortunately doesn't know how to express or exploit. Jane Austen or George Eliot or Henry James could have handled it skillfully. But in part because he has trapped himself into Esther's point of view, Dickens can't bring out the ironies in this dialogue as effectively as he might. It ends with Ada, who is listening in, in tears, which when Esther notices, she comments, "I felt that I had only to be placid and merry, once for all to undeceive my dear, and set her loving heart at rest. I really was so, and I had nothing to do but be myself." But does Esther really know herself?

Esther takes Ada upstairs, where Ada says, "if I could only make up my mind to speak to you and my cousin John, when you are together!" Esther doesn't pry into the source of this outburst, even when Ada continues, "O when I think of all these years, and of his fatherly care and kindness, and of the old relations among us, and of you, what shall I do, what shall I do?" Esther has noticed that Ada has been working on something that she puts away when Esther enters, and that the drawer in which she puts it is partly open, but she doesn't take the opportunity to find out what it is. And when she checks to see if Ada is asleep, she notices "that she lay with one hand under her pillow so that it was hidden."

When Woodcourt arrived in London, he sought out Richard, and found him lodging on the second floor of Symonds Inn, in which Vholes has his office. Vholes is full of warnings about Richard's finances, and the necessity of taking what he's owed out of the estate, if it's ever settled. Esther tells us that Woodcourt found Richard "in a dull room, fadedly furnished, "and he told me that he never could forget the haggardness of his face, and the dejection of his manner." He is sunk in self pity, telling Woodcourt, "you can pursue your art for its own sake; and can put your hand upon the plough, and never turn; and can strike a purpose out of anything. You, and I, are very different." He tells Woodcourt that his concern is for Ada as much as for himself.

When Woodcourt tells this to Esther, "It revived a fear I had had before, that my dear girl's property would be absorbed by Mr Vholes, and that Richard's justification to himself would be sincerely this." Now that Caddy has recovered, she proposes to Ada that they visit Richard and is surprised when she hesitates. But once they set out, on "a sombre day" on which "I thought there were more funerals passing along the dismal pavements, than I had ever seen before," Esther is surprised that Ada knows exactly where Richard is lodging. His name is "in great white letters on a hearse-like panel" in the door.

Ada opens the door without knocking, and they find Richard surrounded by "dusty bundles of papers which seemed to me like dusty mirrors reflecting his own mind. Wherever I looked, I saw the ominous words that ran in it, repeated. Jarndyce and Jarndyce." His obsession is visible, and he is open about expressing it: "Either the suit must be ended, Esther, or the suitor. But it shall be the suit, the suit, my dear girl!"

His hopefulness had long beenmore painful to me than his despondency; it was so unlike hopefulness, had something so fierce in its determination to be it, was so hungry and eager, and yet so conscious of being forced and unsustainable, that it had long touched me to the heart.

And now Ada reveals her secret: She and Richard have been married for more than two months. She will not be going home with Esther, but will stay with Richard. "And if ever in my life I saw a love that nothing but death could change, I saw it then before me."

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Light (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

They married because Richard would not accept her money, and Richard claims that they didn't tell Esther because she was so busy nursing Caddy at the time. So Esther gives them her blessing, and puts on a façade of cheerfulness. But when she goes downstairs she bursts into tears and "walked up and down in a dim corner, sobbing and crying." When she reaches home, Jarndyce is out: "The poor boy whom I had found at St Albans had reappeared a short time before, and was lying at the point of death; indeed, was then dead, though I did not know it. My guardian had gone out to inquire about him, and did not return to dinner." So Esther goes out, taking Charley with her, just to look at the lights in the window of the room where Ada and Richard are living. She even goes up to the second floor and kisses "the hearse-like panel of the door, as a kiss for my dear, and came quietly down again, thinking that one of these days I would confess to the visit."

When she gets home, Jarndyce is there. He has already guessed, from her tears and Ada's empty chair, that she and Richard are married. "Bleak House is thinning fast," he says, twice. Which causes her to renew her vow to remain there with him. But she thinks, "I feared I might not quite have been all I had meant to be, since the letter and the answer."

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Alun Armstrong as Mr Bucket, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Bryan Dick as Prince Turveydrop, Matthew Kelly as Mr Turveydrop, Nathalie Press as Caddy Jellyby, Brian Pettifer as Mr Growler, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Dermot Crowley as Mr Vholes, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Lilo Baur as Hortense.

19. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 687-718

Chapter 44: The Letter and the Answer through Chapter 46: Stop Him!

Esther and Jarndyce continue their discussion of the secret she has revealed to him and what they should do to keep it secret. She tells him that she has tried to prevent Guppy from pursuing the matter, but that she is also concerned about Mademoiselle Hortense after her eager offer to become her maid. Jarndyce tells her he will be aware from now on of any possible ways the secret might leak out.

And then he tells her, "You have wrought changes in me, little woman, since the winter day in the stage coach. First and last you have done me a world of good, since that time." He then says that he has something he would like to ask her, but he would like to do it in the form of a letter. Esther is no fool, and has already guessed what he's up to, so she agrees that a week from today she will send Charley to him "for the letter." This curious courtship ritual seems silly to us, but it is entirely coherent with the shyness and reticence -- as well as the sexlessness -- of both Jarndyce and Esther. So on the appointed night she sends for the letter:

I opened it and read it. It was so impressive in its love for me, and in the unselfish caution it gave me, and the consideration it showed for me in every word, that my eyes were too often blinded to read much at a time. But I read it through three times, before I laid it down. I had thought beforehand that I knew its purport, and I did. It asked me if would I be the mistress of Bleak House.

She's not marrying a man, she's marrying a house. What decides it for her is that "he could love me just as well as in my fairer days," and that the secret of her parentage is no problem for him. So she accepts the proposal, not without a lot of private tears. And then she performs a kind of symbolic self-immolation: She burns the flowers that Woodcourt had given her. But significantly, after she says yes, "it made no difference presently, and we all went out together, and I said nothing to my precious pet about it." The "precious pet" is Ada, of course, her true love, and the fact that she withholds the information of this engagement from her speaks volumes about her awareness that it is entirely unsuitable.

One morning, she spots Mr Vholes arriving at the house. She "inquired of Charley, as we went in, whether there was not a gentleman with Mr Jarndyce? To which Charley, whose grammar, I confess to my shame, never did any credit to my educational powers, replied, 'Yes, miss. Him as come down in the country with Mr Richard.'" (Dickens's essentially conservative attitude toward class is revealed when he locks some of his characters into their lower-class state, as he does with Charley's supposed ineducability.) Esther enters to find Jarndyce and Vholes in conversation about Richard, who is not only deeply in debt but has also decided to resign his commission. This will leave him with no income whatever, of course.

Esther volunteers to "go down to Deal, where Richard was then stationed, and see him, and try if it were possible to avert the worst." Vholes, who of course is protecting his own interests where Richard is concerned, takes his leave.

Mr Vholes put his dead glove, which scarcely seemed to have any hand in it, on my fingers, and then on my guardian's fingers, and took his long thin shadow away. I thought of it on the outside of the coach, passing over all the sunny landscape between us and London, chilling the seed in the ground as it glided along.

Charley goes with Esther to Deal, a port and garrison town on the Channel near Dover. There they notice that a ship has just arrived from India, and just in case we don't get the significance of that, Esther tells Charley that "people in such voyages were sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the intrepidity and  humanity of one man." First, however, they have to meet with Richard, who "was ever the same to me. Down to -- ah, poor fellow! -- to the end, he never received me but with something of his old merry boyish manner." (If we haven't already guessed that Richard is doomed, we know it now.)

He is resolved on leaving the army, having been pretty much written off by his superior officers anyway, and observes, "I only want to have been in the church, to have made the round of all the professions." He is still bitter about what he sees as mistreatment from Jarndyce however, and he tells Esther that Ada has offered him "the little inheritance she is certain of so soon -- just as little and as much as I have wasted -- and begs and prays me to take it, set myself right with it, and remain in the service." And he lashes out at Jarndyce for trying to separate him from Ada, stirring Esther's anger, if only for a moment. But he says he can't accept Ada's money if it involves staying in the army, "retaining me in what I am not fit for, can take no interest in, and am weary of."

So Esther's mission has been fruitless. Besides learning that his departure from the army is a fait accompli, "and having been the bearer of Ada's letter, and being (as I was going to be) Richard's companion back to London, I had done no good by coming down." But on the way back to her hotel she spots a familiar face, and surprises Charley by urging her to hurry.

It was not until we were shut up in our cabin-room, and I had had time to take breath, that I began to think why I had made such haste. In one of the sun-burnt faces I had recognised Mr Allan Woodcourt, and I had been afraid of his recognising me. I had been unwilling that he should see my altered looks. I had been taken by surprise, and my courage had quite failed me.

But she pulls herself together, and when Woodcourt and his friends show up at the hotel, she sends a card to him. "He came immediately. I told him I was rejoiced to be by chance among the first to welcome him home to England. And I saw that he was very sorry for me." She tells him that she sees Miss Flite often, and when he stammers in replying she reflects again, "He was so very sorry for me that he could scarcely speak." The reiteration of this point suggests that some of Woodcourt's emotion is a projection of Esther's: She is feeling sorry for herself. He tells her that he will probably not return to India: "He had not found himself more favoured by fortune there than here. He had gone out a poor ship's surgeon, and had come home nothing better."

And speaking of misfortune, Richard enters. "I saw that after their first greetings were over, and when they spoke of Richard's career, Mr Woodcourt had a perception that all was not going well with him. He frequently glanced at his face, as if there were something in it that gave him pain; and more than once he looked towards me, as though he sought to ascertain whether I knew what the truth was." The suggestion of shared consciousness between Woodcourt and Esther is one of the signals that their relationship will continue to develop.

Woodcourt has to stay with his ship a while longer, so he's forced to decline the offer to accompany them to London, but Esther steals a moment while Richard is looking after the luggage to clue Woodcourt in on Richard's "estrangement from Mr Jarndyce, and to his being entangled in the ill-fated Chancery suit." Woodcourt remarks that Richard is changed: "I  never saw so remarkable a look in a young person. One cannot say that it is all anxiety, or all weariness; yet it is both, and like ungrown despair." Esther asks if Woodcourt will be going to London, and when he says he will be there in a day or two she asks him to befriend Richard and try to help him. He vows to do so: "I will accept him as a trust, and it shall be a sacred one!" Esther accepts this at face value, not recognizing (or at least not admitting) that Woodcourt wouldn't make quite so emotional a vow if it were not for her sake.

And as they leave, Esther once again repeats the motif: "I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten." Does anyone feel glad to be pitied, even "gently?"

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Tom-all-Alone's (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

We are back to the decaying slum that is Tom-all-Alone's, and Dickens is writing about the social and political inertia that afflicts the place, which he now personifies as "Tom."

Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind, or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise, there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.

As with any great problem -- down to such contemporary ones as immigration or drug trafficking or global climate change -- there is an abundance of "somebody's theory" and of "nobody's practice." And as a result, the problem persists until it reaches a flashpoint, which in the case of Tom-all-Alone's has arrived in the form of communicable disease: "There is not a drop of Tom's corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere." So grave is the problem that Dickens actually sets it against imperial British pride: "The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom."

Enter "A brown sunburnt gentleman," i.e., Woodcourt, who has turned his back upon "the British dominions" and is investigating the problems he has seen abroad in his own land. He looks around Tom-all-Alone's and "seems to understand such wretchedness, and to have studied it before." He finds a woman dozing on a doorstep, and speaks to her.

A habit in him of speaking to the poor, and of avoiding patronage or condescension, or childishness (which is the favourite device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books), has put him on good terms with the woman easily.

(Perhaps Esther should take this approach with Charley, instead of criticizing her grammar.)

The woman has a bruise on her forehead, and he cleans and binds it. He deduces from the dust on her clothes that her husband is a brickmaker, and we recognize Jenny once again. When she mentions that they have journeyed here from Saint Albans, he betrays the surprise of recognition -- she is from the neighborhood of Bleak House. Woodcourt offers her money, but she says she has some, and is only waiting for her husband to arrive so they can go to their lodgings.

He walks away but then "a ragged figure" approaches, heading in the direction where Woodcourt has left Jenny. Woodcourt has "a shadowy belief that he has seen the boy before." After the boy passes him by, Woodcourt hears a sound of running and turns to see the boy, pursued by Jenny, coming toward him. She calls out for Woodcourt to stop him, which he finally does after giving chase and cornering him. When Jenny calls him "Jo," Woodcourt realizes that he saw him at the coroner's inquest after Nemo/Hawdon's death.

He asks Jenny if Jo had robbed her, and she says, "He did nothing but what was kind-hearted by me, and that's the wonder of it." She tells him that he was ill at her home in Saint Albans, and a young woman "took pity on him ... and took him home" to nurse him. "Allan shrinks back from him with a sudden horror," realizing the connection between Jo's illness and Esther's, which he has heard about from Richard. Jenny continues, "And that young lady that was such a pretty dear, caught his illness, lost her beautiful looks, and wouldn't hardly be known for the same young lady now, if it wasn't for her angel temper, and her pretty shape, and her sweet voice."

Woodcourt questions Jo, who reveals that he has been on the road since then, and has finally returned to Tom-all-Alone's because he's penniless and ill, and thinks he might get some money from Mr Snagsby. Woodcourt asks why Jo left Bleak House. Jo is reluctant to answer, having promised someone not to tell, but he finally admits that he was taken away in the night. Woodcourt asks who took him away. "'I dustn't name him,' says Jo. 'I dustn't do it, sir.'" He is clearly terrified, for even when Woodcourt says the person isn't here, Jo doesn't believe it: "He's in all manner of places, all at wunst." He says the man took him to a hospital, and when he was discharged gave him money and told him never to return to London.

Woodcourt says goodbye to Jenny and takes Jo with him, promising to find him "a better place than this to lie down and hide in."

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Lilo Baur as Hortense, Alun Armstrong as Mr Bucket, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Nathaniel Parker as Harold Skimpole, Dermot Crowley as Mr Vholes, Emma Williams as Rosa, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Harry Eden as Jo, Sean McGinley as Snagsby, Anne Reid as Mrs Rouncewell, Tim Dantay as Mr Rouncewell, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Charlie Brooks as Jenny, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Tom Georgeson as Clamb.

18. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 638-686

Chapter 40: National and Domestic through Chapter 43: Esther's Narrative

There has been a change in government, necessitating new elections, so "the London season comes to a sudden end" so that the members of Parliament may campaign for re-election. This brings Sir Leicester home to Chesney Wold, which means the house has to be opened up. Dickens indulges here in a rather lovely but somewhat sinister description of the sun shining into the empty house, illuminating the portraits of Dedlocks past and bringing them to a kind of life.

But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my lady's picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her.

As if the Ghost's Walk weren't enough haunting for one place.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Sunset in the Long Drawing-Room at Chesney Wold (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

A groom tells Mrs Rouncewell that Lady Dedlock has not been well since her last visit to the house, and now that she's there again she "takes no great pains to entertain the numerous guests, and, being still unwell, rarely appears until late in the day." There is much talk of politics, of course, in which she takes no interest.

She is sitting in a window looking out at the falling shadows in the park when the arrival of Mr Tulkinghorn is announced. This seems to attract her notice, but only for a moment. There is a gunshot that causes cousin Volumnia to give "her little withered scream," and ask what has happened. "'A rat,' says my Lady. 'And they have shot him.'" At this moment, Tulkinghorn enters. He announces that Sir Leicester's party has lost the seat for which the opposition wanted to put up Mrs Rouncewell's son. Sir Leicester was gratified that Mr Rouncewell chose not to run, but Tulkinghorn tells him that Rouncewell was active in the election -- "against you" and that his son, whom we know as Watt, was active also.

Sir Leicester turns to Lady Dedlock and says, "My Lady, let me suggest in reference to that young woman--" -- meaning Rosa, of course. But she cuts him off: "'I have no intention,' observes my Lady from her window, in a low but decided tone, 'of parting with her.'" Sir Leicester says he only wanted to ask that she "should exert your influence to keep her from these dangerous hands." Tulkinghorn observes "that these people are, in their way, very proud," and that he wouldn't be surprised if they "abandoned the girl ... supposing she remained at Chesney Wold." And then he proposes to tell a story.

"A townsman of this Mr Rouncewell, a man in exactly parallel circumstances as I am told, had the good fortune to have a daughter who attracted the notice of a great lady. I speak of really a great lady; not merely great to him, but married to a gentleman of your condition, Sir Leicester.... The lady was wealthy and beautiful, and had a liking for the girl, and treated her with great kindness, and kept her always near her. Now this lady preserved a secret under all her greatness, which she had preserved for many years. In fact, she had in early life been engaged to marry a young rake -- he was a captain in the army -- nothing connected with whom came to any good. She never did marry him, but she gave birth to a child of which he was the father."

Lady Dedlock remains "perfectly still" as Tulkinghorn tells this story, which ends with the lady betraying her secret through her "imprudence," causing not only "great domestic trouble and amazement," but also with the townsman removing his daughter from the lady's patronage, "as if the lady had been the commonest of commoners."

Perfectly aware why Tulkinghorn has told this story, Lady Dedlock sits through the conversation that follows, and when the other retire to bed, she does, too, "graceful" and "self-possessed." Tulkinghorn withdraws to his room, "sedately satisfied," because "To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant, would be do to him as great an injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment, or any romantic weakness." His room is at the top of a turret, and he goes out onto its balcony. But he returns when he realizes that Lady Dedlock is at his door. She enters, and he sees "a wild disturbance -- is it fear or anger? -- in her eyes." She sits down and finally asks, "Why have you told my story to so many persons?" He says he did so to inform her that he knew it, and that he only learned it recently. She asks if it has become common gossip, and he it hasn't. As for the girl in the story, he says it was only a hypothetical case.

She volunteers to write or sign anything that would protect her husband, and he assures her that will not be necessary. And she tells him that she is prepared to leave Chesney Wold that night, and that all of her valuables, her jewels and dresses, will remain where they are. But he tells her not to do that: "before you reach the staircase I shall ring the alarm-bell and rouse the house. And then I must speak out, before every guest and servant, every man and woman in it." She must not do anything so drastic because "The sole consideration in this unhappy case is Sir Leicester.... Your flight, Lady Dedlock, would spread the whole truth, and a hundred times the whole truth, far and wide. It would be impossible to save the family credit for a day. It is not to be thought of." For the sake of Sir Leicester, the whole business must remain "hushed up, if it can be."

She replies, "I am to remain upon this gaudy platform, on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?" And all he can say is that he will give her warning. His only concern, he insists is "Sir Leicester's feelings and honour, and the family reputation." She returns to her room where she paces the floor in anguish.

Tulkinghorn goes back to London where he finds Mr Snagsby waiting for him outside his office. Snagsby has been bedeviled by Mademoiselle Hortense, who has been regularly turned away from Tulkinghorn's offices, so she had decided to haunt Snagsby's, thinking that he can persuade Tulkinghorn to see her. Her continued presence there has driven Guster into fits and Mrs Snagsby into a jealous rage. So Tulkinghorn agrees to see her.

She arrives sooner than he anticipated, surprising him as he goes down to his wine cellar. She is furious that she was used by him to get the truth out of Jo and then paid off with two sovereigns -- which she now flings at him -- but is still unemployed: "Place me well. Find me a good condition! If you cannot, or do not choose to do that, employ me to pursue her, to chase her, to disgrace and to dishonour her." And she vows that she will keep coming back to annoy him until he does. He replies, "In this city, there are houses of correction (where the treadmills are, for women)" and that he has the power to see to it that she winds up in one if she continues to pester him or Snagsby. But she leaves angrily, making no promise not to keep bothering him.

Back at Bleak House, Esther is still worrying about Richard, and when she mentions to Jarndyce what a bad influence she thinks Skimpole is on Richard, Jarndyce doesn't take her seriously. "Who could be encouraged by Skimpole? .... Such an unworldly, uncalculating, gossamer creature, is a relief to him, and an amusement." But when she mentions that it was Skimpole who "introduced Richard to Mr Vholes, for a present of five pounds," Jarndyce looks troubled. Still, he is certain Skimpole is unaware that he might have done any harm by it, and proposes that they pay a visit to Skimpole at his home to discuss it with him.

Skimpole's household is as disorderly as one might expect. He greets them cheerfully, but when Jarndyce tries to reason with him about Richard's involvement with the Chancery suit, Skimpole blithely insists that it's all beyond his understanding. "I give you my word, Miss Clare and my dear Miss Summerson, I thought Mr Carstone was immensely rich. I thought he had only to make over something, or to sign a bond, or a draft, or a cheque, or a bell, or to put something on a file somewhere, to bring down a shower of money." He is surprised when Ada tells him that Richard is poor.

Esther is of two minds about Skimpole: "The more I saw of him, the more unlikely it seemed to me, when he was present, that he could design, conceal, or influence anything; and yet the less likely that appeared when he was not present, and the less agreeable it was to think of his having anything to do with anyone for whom I cared."

Skimpole presents his daughters, who are giddy young creatures, and his wife, "who had once been a beauty, but was now a delicate, high-nosed invalid suffering under a complication of disorders." One of their daughters has been "married these three years. Now, I dare say her marrying another child, and having two more, was all wrong in point of political economy, but it was very agreeable."

Skimpole returns with them to Bleak House, where they have a surprise visit from Sir Leicester Dedlock.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Sir Leicester Dedlock (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

He is there, he says, because he is concerned that his dispute with Boythorn may "have prevented you, still more ladies under your escort and charge, from seeing whatever little there may be to gratify a polite and refined taste, at my house, Chesney Wold." He had also heard that Skimpole had been with them, and was concerned that a man "who would appear to possess a cultivated taste for the Fine Arts, was likewise deterred, by some such cause, from examining the family pictures." As Skimpole is there, he is introduced and Sir Leicester extends his invitation in person.

When Sir Leicester has left, Esther decides that she has to tell Jarndyce the truth. "The possibility of my being brought into contact with my mother, of my being taken to her house, -- even of Mr Skimpole's, however distantly associated with me, receiving kindnesses and obligations from her husband -- was so painful, that I felt I could no longer guide myself without his assistance." So she goes to see him, and asks if he remembers the encounter with Lady Dedlock in which she spoke of Jarndyce's acquaintance with her sister. She asks him why the sisters went their separate ways.

Jarndyce is troubled by these questions, and replies, "Who could tell what the secrets of those two handsome and proud women were! You have seen Lady Dedlock. If you had ever seen her sister, you would know her to have been as resolute and haughty as she." Esther then says, "O guardian, I have seen her many and many a time!" He is puzzled by this response, but tells her that Lady Dedlock's sister was almost married to Mr Boythorn. It's her turn to be startled, and she asks why they didn't marry. Jarndyce says Boythorn conjectured that it had to do something with her quarrel with her sister.

Esther's characteristic response is to blame herself: "'O guardian, what have I done!' I cried, giving way to my grief; 'what sorrow have I innocently caused!'" Lady Dedlock's sister, she revealed, was the "godmother" who raised her. "And her sister is my mother!"

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Ian Richardson as Lord Chancellor, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Dermot Crowley as Mr Vholes, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Emma Williams as Rosa, Anna Maxwell Martin as Ether Summerson, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Lilo Baur as Hortense, Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Nathalie Press as Caddy Jellyby, Bryan Dick as Prince Turveydrop, Matthew Kelly as Mr Turveydrop, Sheila Hancock as Mrs Guppy, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Nathaniel Parker as Harold Skimpole.

16. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 555-608

Chapter 35: Esther's Narrative through Chapter 37: Jarndyce and Jarndyce

Esther's blindness turns out to have been nothing but a cliffhanger: She has gotten over it by the time Dickens resumes her narrative. It seems to have been one of those pitfalls of serial publication, betraying Dickens into a discontinuity for the sake of melodrama. It would have been a challenge for him to continue the narrative in her voice if she had remained unable to see, but the introduction and casual withdrawal of the blindness seems to me a considerable flaw.

Instead of blindness, then, we get disfigurement of some vaguely specified sort. It seems to trouble Esther far more than it does any of the other characters -- except for one small child who burbles out that she isn't pretty anymore. We can take Esther's sensitivity to her disfigurement as either an inconsistency in one who has been presented as self-deprecating, or a deepening of the character, showing that she is more complex than she likes to admit. For all my sense that introducing Esther as a narrator was a mistake in the first place, I incline to the latter view: that Esther becomes more interesting because of these inconsistencies. But the "Esther problem" is something for another discussion.

There are some haunting touches in Esther's account of her delirium, in which she "laboured up colossal staircases, ever striving to reach the top, and ever turned, as I have seen a worm in a garden path, by some obstruction, and labouring again." Or "that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing." These are genuine fever dreams.

Meanwhile, Ada has been crying at the door, wanting to be let in to share in the nursing. Ada is a remarkably uninteresting character in herself, but she serves a dual function: First, as Esther's one true love, a same-sex relationship lacking any hint of sexuality -- a "safe" relationship for the Victorians, a more provocative one for us. But she is also Esther's idealization of herself: beautiful and loved, which Esther can never truly believe herself to be. And so this alter ego has to be kept from the sickroom, and then, for a long time afterward, even when Esther gets well, kept from seeing the "changed" and disfigured Esther, as if Ada should be kept from the truth that only Esther knows. In fact, the truth has been kept from Esther as long as possible by the well-meaning Charley and by Jarndyce: They have taken the precautions of removing the mirrors.

When she has recovered enough for Jarndyce to visit, he tells her that he and Ada have "been perfectly forlorn and miserable; here has your friend Caddy been coming and going late and early; here has everyone about the house been utterly lost and dejected; here has even poor Rick been writing -- to me too -- in his anxiety for you!" I'm not sure you want to tell someone that they've been making other people miserable by your own involuntary illness, but it doesn't seem to bother Esther. She is more interested in Richard's writing to Jarndyce. And once again, Ada has been kept out of the loop: "I have thought it better not to mention it to her." Is this the best policy, especially in a world where secrets have so much power to disorder and destroy as the world Dickens has created?

Richard, Jarndyce says, has written "coldly, haughtily, distantly, resentfully" to Jarndyce, only because he was unable to write directly to Esther with any expectation that she could answer him. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce has warped him out of himself, and perverted me in his eyes," Jarndyce says. Esther clings to a "hope that a little experience will teach him what a false and wretched thing" the Chancery suit is, but Jarndyce is more realistic, having seen its effects before.

Meanwhile, they agree that Ada needs to be kept from the truth about Esther's "altered self." And Jarndyce tells her that Boythorn has offered his place for her recuperation. Esther is glad to accept, "for of all the places I could have thought of, I should have liked to go to none so well as Chesney Wold."

Now she receives a visit from Miss Flite, who had heard of her illness and walked the twenty miles from London "in a pair of dancing shoes" to inquire about her. They make arrangements for her to be brought by carriage. And chattering on, Miss Flite says something about a pocket-handkerchief, and then breaks off in embarrassment and looks at Charley, who had met the carriage, for a decision on whether she should continue to tell the story. Charley gives her the go-ahead, and Miss Flite says that they had been followed on the road by "a poor person in a very ungenteel bonnet," whom Charley identifies as Jenny, the brickmaker's wife. Jenny told them that "a lady with a veil" had stopped at the brickmaker's cottage to ask if they had any information on Esther's health, and that the lady took "a handkerchief away with her as a little keepsake," after learning that it had been Esther's.

Charley explains that it was the handkerchief that Esther had used to cover Jenny's dead baby on the evening of the Pardiggle invasion, and that Jenny had set it aside as a keepsake. "And Jenny wants you to know that she wouldn't have made away with it herself for a heap of money, but that the lady took it, and left some money instead." Miss Flite is convinced that it was "the Lord Chancellor's wife," but Esther "did not think very much about this lady then, for I had an impression that it might be Caddy."

Miss Flite inevitably wanders back into her favorite subject, Chancery, about which she says, "There's a cruel attraction in the place. You can't leave it. And you must expect." Her own father and brother had been drawn by it into bankruptcy, and "drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then my sister was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what!" (I.e., prostitution.) Miss Flite "was ill, and in misery; and heard, as I had often heard before, that this was all the work of Chancery. When I got better, I went to look at the Monster. And then I found out how it was, and I was drawn to stay there." And she warns about Richard: "Let some one hold him back. Or he'll b drawn to ruin."

Then she cheers up: "You have not congratulated me on my physician." Esther is puzzled, and then Miss Flite explains that she's talking about Allan Woodcourt, whose heroism during "a terrible shipwreck over in those East-Indian seas" has been in the news during Esther's illness. She has a clipping about the shipwreck that she gives Esther, who reads it over and over. Miss Flite proclaims, "my brave physician ought to have a Title bestowed upon him. And no doubt he will. You are of that opinion?" Esther says he should, but he won't be so honored:

I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great; unless occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money.

Miss Flite is shocked at Esther's cynicism, insisting "that all the greatest ornaments of England, in knowledge, imagination, active humanity, and improvement of every sort, are added to its nobility!" Esther reflects, "I am afraid she believed what she said; for there were moments when she was very mad indeed."  Once again, Dickens can't resist letting his own voice override Esther's.

All of this talk about Woodcourt leads Esther to a revelation of "the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr Woodcourt loved me." But now, she claims, she can be happy that they never avowed their love because "the poor face he had known as mine was quite gone from me," and she doesn't have to release him from the vows they never made to each other. (Dickens is clearly borrowing from Jane Austen's Persuasion, which hinges on the reunion of Anne Elliot with a former love after she has "lost her bloom.")

Esther and Charley take up lodgings at Boythorn's, and she delights in "everything in nature.... This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me." But now we learn that she still hasn't seen herself in the mirror, and she summons up her courage and does it: "I was very much changed -- O very, very much.... I had never been a beauty, and never had thought myself one; but I had been very different from this." And now she's "troubled" because she "had kept Mr Woodcourt's flowers. When they were withered I had dried them, and put them in a book that I was fond of. Nobody knew this, not even Ada." (Considering how much else Ada is being kept in the dark about, that's not surprising.) But she decides to keep them "only as a remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone, never to be looked back on any more, in any other light."

So then she and Charley set up a schedule of fresh air and exercise, leaving her "scarcely any time to think about that little loss of mine." And one day they are sitting in "a favourite spot of mine in the park-woods of Chesney Wold" that has a "picturesque" view of the "part of the Hall, called The Ghost's Walk." She has heard the legend and it "mingled with the view and gave it something of a mysterious interest." She has heard that the family is not at the mansion, so she is surprised when Lady Dedlock appears.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Lady Dedlock in the Wood (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

I was rendered motionless. Not so much by her quick advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great change in her manner, and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, as by a something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was a little child; something I had never seen in any face; something I had never seen in hers before.

Dickens is laboring mightily to indicate that the "something" is the look a mother gives her child. The scene that follows is inevitably mawkish, especially when Esther sees "in her hand my handkerchief, with which I had covered the dead baby," Esther being the baby that Lady Dedlock had thought dead. Lady Dedlock has her send Charley on ahead as she walks with Esther and reveals, "O my child, my child, I am your wicked and unhappy mother! O try to forgive me!"

She is possessed by a guilt -- over a child born out of wedlock -- that we find difficult to imagine. In a way, the muffling volume of Victorian dress, the layers and layers of cloth, in the Phiz illustration above best expresses the societal repressiveness under which Lady Dedlock and Esther labor. They have a secret that must be kept, partly, as Lady Dedlock exclaims, because "I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring creature that I am!"

This will have to be their only meeting, Lady Dedlock proclaims: "We could never associate, never could communicate, never probably from that time forth could interchange another word, on earth." She gives Esther a letter that she says must be destroyed: "I must evermore consider her as dead." And when Esther asks if their secret is safe, Lady Dedlock warns that "It may be lost by another accident -- tomorrow, any day." She is afraid of Tulkinghorn, "mechanically faithful without attachment, and very  jealous of the profit, privilege, and reputation of being master of the mysteries of great houses.... He is indifferent to everything but his calling. His calling is the acquisition of secrets, and the holding possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer or opponent in it." But, she says, "I will outlive this danger, and outdie it, if I can." ("Outdie" is Dickens's strange and foreboding coinage: It's not in the OED.)

Esther suggests that she might tell Mr Jarndyce, and Lady Dedlock gives her consent -- "a small gift from such a mother to her injured child" -- as long as Esther doesn't tell her that she has done so. "Some pride is left in me, even yet." And as they part, she tells her, "If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered; think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask!"

When she returns to Boythorn's, Esther tells Charley that she has overtired herself from walking after Lady Dedlock left, and that she wants to lie down. She goes to her room and reads the letter:

I had not been abandoned by my mother. Her elder and only sister, the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when I had been laid aside as dead, had, in her stern sense of duty, with no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid secrecy, and had never again beheld my mother's face from within a few hours of my birth.

As for Lady Dedlock's reaction on seeing Esther in the church, she had made her think of what her child might be like "if it had ever lived, and had lived on; but that was all, then."

The revelation makes Esther "heavily sorrowful to think that I had ever been reared.... I felt as if I knew it would have been better and happier for many people, if indeed I had never breathed.... I had a terror of myself, as the danger and the possible disgrace of my own mother, and of a proud family name." As evening comes on, she feels herself drawn toward Chesney Wold, and she goes out again, making her way toward The Ghost's Walk.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), The Ghost's Walk (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

When she reaches it, "my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost's Walk; that it was I, who was to bring calamity upon the stately house; and that my warning feet were haunting it even then." She turns and runs back to Boythorn's.

But in the morning she is cheered by a letter announcing that Ada is coming to visit, and another from Jarndyce complaining that "the housekeeping was going to rack and ruin" at Bleak House.

I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or I should never have lived: not to say should never have been reserved for such a happy life. I saw very well how many things had worked together, for my welfare; and that if the sins of the fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did not mean what I had in the morning feared it meant. 

In short, Esther experiences some of the optimism carried to an extreme by Skimpole.

Ada arrives, and the reunion is a flood of tears and kisses. Then one day Esther is summoned to meet "a gentleman" at the Dedlock Arms, the inn in the village. She goes there to find Richard, who is on leave. "I want to appear quietly in your country house  here, with you under my arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your loyalty to John Jarndyce will allow that?" He has made it clear to her that he is "not accountable to Mr Jarndyce, or Mr Anybody." She says he is welcome. When she asks how he likes his profession, however, he gives a familiar answer: "It does as well as anything else, for a time." Which causes her to reflect, "So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that passed over him, so dreadfully like her!" For he is more full than ever of the thought that Jarndyce and Jarndyce will be settled, and to his advantage.

Moreover, he has brought Skimpole along with him, and says, "He does me more good than anybody." In Esther's opinion, "Richard could scarcely have found a worse friend than this," but she welcomes him anyway. So they go to Boythorn's and surprise Ada, whose love for Richard seems unchanged. On the other hand, Esther reflects, "I almost mistrusted myself, as growing quite wicked in my suspicions, but I was not so sure that Richard loved her dearly." Richard tells Ada that he isn't there to change the terms between them that they had agreed on when they broke their engagement, but was just there to visit.

But inevitably he and Esther quarrel about Jarndyce, when she refers to his warnings about "the family curse," the Chancery suit: "My dear Esther, how can you be so blind? Don't you see that he is an interested party, and that it may be very well for him to wish me to know nothing of the suit, and care nothing about it, but that it may not be quite so well for me?" He has grown suspicious that Jarndyce hopes to benefit at his expense from the suit. "I don't say that he is not an honourable man, out of all this complication and uncertainty; I am sure he is. But it taints everybody. You know it taints everybody. You have heard him say so fifty times. Then why should he escape?" In fact, he says, from studying the conflicting wills, he has discovered that one of them gives him more money than it gives Jarndyce. That has aroused his suspicions about why Jarndyce wants him to stay out of the case. Esther continues to defend Jarndyce as kind and generous, but Richard is unpersuaded.

"I may find out, when it's over, that I have been mistaken in John Jarndyce. My head may be clearer when I am free of it, and I may then agree with what you say today. Very well. Then I shall acknowledge it, and make him reparation."

Esther asks if he is in debt again, and he says, "Why of course I am." He claims that in order to pursue the will most favorable to him and to Ada, he has some expenses.

Esther decides that her only recourse is to try to get Ada on her side, so she "told her exactly what reason we had to dread that Richard was losing himself, and scattering his whole life to the winds." It makes Ada unhappy, and she still believes he's capable of changing his ways, but she writes a letter to him saying, "You can do nothing for my sake that will make me half so happy, as for ever turning your back upon the shadow in which we both were born." It seems to have no effect on him, however.

Esther even tries to enlist Skimpole's help, but although he agrees that the suit is "nothing but fees, fraud, horsehair wigs, and black gowns," he is too childishly self-involved to be of any help in persuading Richard of that.

And then Esther discovers that Richard has a new "legal adviser," a man named Vholes, to whom Skimpole introduced him. Vholes himself comes down to see Richard and is introduced to Esther. He is "a sallow man with pinched lips that looked as if they were cold, a red eruption here and there upon his face, tall and thin, about fifty years of age, high-shouldered, and stooping. Dressed in black, black-gloved, and buttoned to the chin, there was nothing so remarkable in him as a lifeless manner, and a slow fixed way he had of looking at Richard." Rather like a vulture, it would seem. Vholes has come to see Richard because he has been told to let him know whenever the case is being heard in Chancery, and that it will be tomorrow.

So Richard gets ready to go, but when Esther asks Vholes if Richard's presence in court will make any difference, "'No, miss,' Mr Vholes replied. 'I am not aware that it can.'"

I never shall forget those two seated side by side in the lantern's light; Richard, all flush and fire and laughter, with the reins in his hand; Mr Vholes, quite still, black-gloved, and buttoned up, looking at him as if he were looking at his prey and charming it.

And Ada tells Esther "that the more he needed love from one unchanging heart, the more love that unchanging heart would have to give him."

_____

The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Phil Davis as Smallweed, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Anna Maxwell Martin as Ether Summerson, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Anne Reid as Mrs Rouncewell, Warren Clarke as Boythorn, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett.