24. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 866-915

Chapter 57: Esther's Narrative through Chapter 59: Esther's Narrative

Jarndyce wakes Esther to tell her that Bucket wants her to accompany him in the search for her mother. Bucket reads her the letter Lady Dedlock left behind, and she agrees to go with him.

She watches as Bucket makes inquiries of various policemen on the street, including a harrowing moment when he stops near the river where she sees on the wall a posted notice with "the words 'FOUND DROWNED'; and this, and an inscription about Drags, possessed me with the awful suspicion shadowed forth in our visit to that place." Bucket assures her that he is only being thorough in his investigation. And so they set out again into the night, following a lead that takes them on the road to Saint Albans and Bleak House.

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

Near Saint Albans, Bucket makes more inquiries and when he brings Esther a cup of tea he tells her that Lady Dedlock had been seen there, going on foot, at eight or nine that night. At Bleak House he tells her that she should ask if anyone has stopped there to ask for her or Jarndyce. As they climb the hill to the house, he "reminded me that I had come down it one night, as I had reason for remembering, with my little servant and poor Jo: whom he called Toughey." She is surprised that he should know this, until Bucket explains that she had passed him on the road. Bucket had come there to look for Jo, on commission from Tulkinghorn to prevent Jo from talking any more about the veiled lady. His task was to make sure that Jo stayed his distance from London. "I was regularly turned on my back when I found him taken up by your establishment."

At the house, Bucket asks her, "Do you generally put that elderly young gentleman in the same room, when he's on a visit here, Miss Summerson?" Esther realizes that he's talking about Skimpole. It was Skimpole, he tells her, who told him that Jo was staying at Bleak House, and who accepted five pounds for showing Bucket where Jo was sleeping. Esther observes, "I regarded this as very treacherous on the part of Mr Skimpole towards my guardian, and as passing the usual bounds of his childish innocence." Bucket advises her, "Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after you own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can.... Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail."

None of the staff at Bleak House recalls anyone asking for Esther, so they proceed to the brickmakers' cottage. They are greeted with the usual suspicion, though Jenny, the mother of the dead child, is not there. Esther "became conscious of being hurried and giddy. It was very difficult to begin, and I could not help bursting in tears." She begins to ask the other woman about Lady Dedlock, but Bucket interrupts to say that he knows she has been there, intimidating them into the truth. Esther asks where Jenny has gone, and the other woman's husband silences her with threats, but Jenny's husband tells them that Jenny has gone to London. The lady was there, and rested for a while. "Then she went -- it might be at twenty minutes past eleven, and it might be at twenty minutes past twelve; we ain't got no watches here to know the time by, nor yet clocks." Then Jenny went to London, and the lady went in the opposite direction: "Nor'ard by the high road. Ask on the road if you doubt me, and see if it warn't so."

As they leave, Bucket tells Esther that the men in the cottage have Lady Dedlock's watch: "Else why should he talk about his 'twenty minutes past,' and about his having no watch to tell the time by? Twenty minutes! He don't usually cut his time so fine as that. If he comes to half hours, it's as much as he does." But he wonders why Lady Dedlock would give him her watch. He suspects that Lady Dedlock sent Jenny to London with a message, and decides that they should continue in the northward direction the brickmaker indicated.

It begins snowing hard, and the roads are difficult. Bucket stops frequently to make inquiries, and is able to say that a woman, dressed like Lady Dedlock, has been spotted on the road, still on foot. But eventually he is surprised that he has lost track of the woman. They stop at an inn, and when Esther faints she is taken to a room to recover. Then they continue until Bucket realizes something and reverses course, to Esther's astonishment. He intends to follow Jenny's path back to London. He urges Esther to trust him, though she is distressed at the thought of abandoning the search for her mother.

In London rumors are already flying about Lady Dedlock's disappearance, though "It is given out that my Lady has gone down into Lincolnshire, but is expected to return presently." Sir Leicester "can speak a little, though with difficulty and indistinctness," and although he has been advised to rest, he can't sleep, constantly asking if there is any news from Bucket.

Mrs Rouncewell stays by him, but she confides her fears to her son George: "When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me -- and I may say at me too -- as if the step on the Ghost's Walk had almost walked her down." George scoffs at the old legend, but Mrs Rouncewell is convinced that "it's breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up."

When Mrs Rouncewell goes to take care of things, such as keeping the fires lit in Lady Dedlock's room, Volumnia sits with Sir Leiceseter. It's a calculated move: "Women will talk, and Volumnia, though a Dedlock, is no exceptional case. He keeps her there, there is little doubt, to prevent her talking somewhere else." When Mrs Rouncewell returns, Volumnia compliments her on the military bearing of her son, which confuses Sir Leicester until Mrs Rouncewell explains that Volumnia is referring to her son George. This causes Sir Leicester to break his silence: "George? You son George come home, Mrs Rouncewell?" He asks to see him, and is moved to tears when he enters. George helps Sir Leicester sit up straighter in the bed, and the baronet asks him to stay by his side. Under Sir Leicester's questioning, George expressed his desire to "remain unknown in general" because "I am not much to boast of." But when Sir Leicester comments that George has been a soldier "and a faithful one," George says, "I have done my duty under discipline, and it was the least I could do."

Now Sir Leicester wants to make it known that there has been only "a slight misunderstanding between my Lady and myself" and that the circumstances of it are "important only to ourselves." So he calls Mrs Rouncewell, George, and Volumnia to witness a statement, "that I am on unaltered terms with Lady Dedlock. That I assert no cause whatever of complaint against her." And, particularly directing himself at Volumnia, "If you ever say less than this, you will be guilty of deliberate falsehood to me." He continues to insist, "I revoke no disposition I have made in her favour." It is a "formal array of words" that "might have have at any other time, as it has often had, something ludicrous in it; but at this time it is serious and affecting." (Dickens knows that he has gone much too stagey here.)

As night comes on, Sir Leicester becomes "worse; restless, uneasy, and in great pain." But he refuses to let them light candles, and Mrs realizes "that he is striving to uphold the fiction with himself that it is not growing late." Through the night, Mrs Rouncewell and George keep vigil, having sent the servants to bed, though Volumnia makes her maid stay up with her as she busies herself doing nothing. "The day comes like a phantom. Cold, colourless, and vague; it sends a warning streak before it of a deathlike hue, as if it cried out, 'Look what I am bringing you, who watch there! Who will tell him!'"

Esther and Bucket reach the outskirts of London about three a.m. and transfer to a hackney coach. Esther is soaked through, but Bucket praises her effusively. She notes that Bucket seems "to seek out the narrowest and worst streets in London," and he stops frequently to consult with police officers. At about five-thirty they reach Chancery Lane where they proceed on foot through the icy streets. Along the way they encounter Woodcourt, who is astonished to find Esther "out at this hour, and in such weather!" Woodcourt puts his cloak around Esther, and tells her that he has been sitting up with Richard since about ten last night. Richard is "not ill, but not quite well," but he was feeling "depressed and faint," so Ada sent for Woodcourt, who helped revive his spirits and get him to sleep some.

Bucket tells them that they are going to Snagsby's, where the servant, Guster, seems to have some new information that will help them. Unfortunately, Guster has also gone into one of her fits. Bucket asks Woodcourt, "Would you look to this girl and see if anything can be done to bring her round. She has a letter somewhere that I particularly want." Mr Snagsby leads them to the sitting room where Mrs Snagsby is waiting, "with very red eyes and a very severe expression of face." Bucket has Esther sit by the fire and puts her wet shoes to dry on the fender, then tries to smooth-talk Mrs Snagsby into cooperation, telling her, "Go and see Othello acted. That's the tragedy for you."

Mrs Snagsby doesn't get the reference to her jealousy, but Bucket persists, "you're what I call an intellectual woman -- with your soul too large for your body," and reminding her that they had seen each other earlier at the Dedlocks, informs Mrs Snagsby that Esther is the young lady who "was talked of in that circle." Esther observes, "Mrs Snagsby appeared to understand the reference better than I did at the time." He tells Mrs Snagsby that Jo "was mixed up in the same business, and no other," and that she formed some mistaken impressions because of it.

"Another person mixed up in that business and no other, a person in a wretched state, comes her to-night, and is seen a speaking ot your maid-servant; and between her and your maid-servant there passes a paper that I would give a hundred pound for, down. What do you do? You hide and you watch 'em, and you pounce upon that maid-servant -- knowing what she's subject to, and what a little thing will bring 'em on -- in that surprising manner, and with that severity, that, by the Lord, she goes off and keeps off, when a Life may be hanging upon that girl's words!"

Woodcourt enters, having found the paper in question, which he gives to Bucket, who sends Mrs Snagsby in with Woodcourt to tend to Guster. Bucket hands the paper to Esther, who identifies the handwriting as her mother's. In it, Lady Dedlock explains that she went to Saint Albans on the hope of seeing Esther once more, though "not to speak to her, or let her know that I was near," and "to elude pursuit, and to be lost." She asks Esther not to blame Jenny for the part she played in the deception. Then there is a later addition to the letter, in which she says she knows she is going to die and that it is right "that I should die of terror and my conscience." In a final section, she adds, "The place where I shall lie down, if I can yet get so far, has been often in my mind. Farewell. Forgive."

Bucket tells Esther to get her shoes on and be ready to go out again, but first they need to find out how the letter came into Guster's hands. Guster, constantly appealing to Mrs Snagsby not to be angry, explains that she had been out on an errand and when she came back she found "a common-looking person, all wet and muddy, looking up at our house." The woman told Guster that she had lost her way and wanted directions to "the poor burying-ground ... where there was an archway, and a step, and an iron gate." Esther notices the look of alarm on Bucket's face when he hears that. Guster realized, "She meant the burying-ground where the man was buried that took the sleeping stuff -- that you came home and told us of, Mr Snagsby." And then the woman gave her the letter and asked her to deliver it to Esther at Mr Jarndyce's. But when Guster came inside, "Mrs Snagsby came behind me from somewhere, and laid hold of me, and I was frightened."

They hurry out, and Esther recalls the hallucinatory character of their walk to the burying-ground, "and that the unreal things were more substantial than the real." When they reach their destination, "On the step at the gate, drenched in the fearful wet of such a place, which oozed and splashed down everywhere, I saw, with a cry of pity and horror, a woman lying -- Jenny, the mother of the dead child." Woodcourt and Bucket stop Esther from rushing forward, and Bucket asks her to "think a moment. They changed clothes at the cottage." Esther listens as he explains that Jenny and Lady Dedlock exchanged clothes, and that Lady Dedlock had returned to the city while Jenny "only went on a certain way agreed upon to deceive, and then turned across country, and went home."

But Esther is not ready to process the truth of what Bucket is telling her, so they let her go on by herself, hearing one of them say, "Her hands should be the first to touch her. They have a higher right than ours." And Esther discovers that the body is that of her mother.

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

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Phil Davis as Smallweed, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Richard Cant as Mercury, Nathaniel Parker as Harold Skimpole, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Anne Reid as Mrs Rouncewell, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Alun Armstrong as Mr Bucket, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Charlie Brooks as Jenny, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare.

20. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 719-752

Chapter 47: Jo's Will through Chapter 48: Closing In

Woodcourt and Jo make their way through London, Jo sticking to the shadows while Woodcourt walks in the open. Woodcourt "revolves in his mind how and where he shall bestow his companion. 'It surely is a strange fact,' he considers, 'that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog.'" The observation takes us back more than four hundred pages, to the passage in which Jo and a dog listen to music, and Dickens observes, "how far above the human listener is the brute!"

Jo is so ill that he can't even eat, and Woodcourt takes his pulse and listens to his chest, then, unable to find an apothecary, gives Jo some wine, which restores him enough that he can eat the bread he has been given. They talk, and Woodcourt hears of "the adventure of the lady in the veil, with all its consequences." He decides to take Jo to Miss Flite, but when he reaches the old rag-and-bottle shop, he finds that she has moved. Judy Smallweed is there, and tells Woodcourt "that Miss Flite and her birds are domiciled with a Mrs Blinder, in Bell Yard" -- the former home of Gridley and the Neckett children.

Miss Flite is of course delighted to see the heroic Woodcourt, and suggests that they take Jo to Mr George, who will know what to do with him. George welcomes them. Woodcourt explains, "I am unwilling to place him in a hospital, even if I could procure him immediate admission, because I foresee that he would not stay there many hours, if he could be so much as got there. The same objection applies to a workhouse ... which is a system that I don't take kindly to." He tells George that Jo has a terror of a "person who ordered him to keep out of the way," and reveals that the man is Bucket, whom George of course knows, and describes as "a -- rum customer."

When Woodcourt mentions that he wants to tell Esther about Jo's plight, George immediately agrees to take Jo in himself: "I can assure you that I would willingly be knocked on the head at any time, if it would be at all agreeable to Miss Summerson; and consequently I esteem it a privilege to do that young lady any service, however small." Woodcourt assures him that Jo is not contagious, but he also adds, quietly, "the boy is deplorably low and reduced; and that he may be -- I do not say that he is -- too far gone to recover."

As George and Phil Squod take Jo in, Dickens comments,

He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-born savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sorees are in him, homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish.

George, telling Jo that Phil Squod "was found, when a baby, in the gutter," sends the two of them off to get the boy a bath and some clean clothes. And then he talks to Woodcourt, revealing that the story about the lady in the veil took place in Tulkinghorn's offices. Woodcourt asks what sort of man Tulkinghorn is, and George replies, "a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood, than a rusty old carbine is."

When Jo and Phil return, Woodcourt goes to see Jarndyce, with whom he returns. Jo's condition is worsening, and as Jo keeps mentioning Mr Snagsby, who has been his benefactor, Woodcourt goes to his place of business. When Woodcourt mentions Jo, Snagsby gives a groan: "You couldn't name an individual human being -- except myself -- that my little woman is more set and determined against than Jo." But he can't explain why, when Woodcourt asks. Nevertheless, "being tender-hearted, and affected by the account he hears of Jo's condition, he readily engages to 'look round,' as early in the evening as he can manage it quietly."

Jo tells Snagsby that Esther has been to see him and that she doesn't blame him for making him sick. And then he asks Snagsby to write something for him:

"Wot I was a thinkin on then, Mr Sangsby, wos, that wen I was moved on as fur as ever I could go and couldn't be moved no furder, whether you might be so good p'raps, as to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to do it; and that though I didn't know nothink at all, I knowd was Mr Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he'd be able to forgiv me in his mind. If the writin could be made to say it wery large, he might."

Tearfully, Snagsby promises to do so, and, having already left three half-crowns for Jo, leaves another one.

At the end, Woodcourt asks Jo if he knows any prayers, and Jo says, as always, "Never know'd nothink, sir.... Mr Chadbands he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin' to his-self, and not to me." And the people who used to come to Tom-all-Alone's to pray for the people there "all mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a talking to theirsselves, or a passing blame on the t'others, and not a talkin to us." He says he would like to be buried next to "him as wos wery good to me," meaning Nemo. As Woodcourt says the Lord's Prayer, he dies, and Dickens makes his pronouncement:

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day. 

Meanwhile, Lady Dedlock is the brilliant center of every social event, for "it is not in her nature, when envious eyes are looking on, to yield or to droop." But she is planning an act of defiance. She calls Rosa to her one morning, and prepares her for dismissal: "There are reasons now known to me, reasons in which you have no part, rendering it far better for you that you should not remain here. You must not remain here. I have determined that you shall not. I have written to the father of your lover, and he will be here to-day." Rosa is distraught, and Lady Dedlock assures her that it gives her great pain as well.

When Mr Rouncewell is announced, she goes to the library, where she finds Sir Leicester in conference with Tulkinghorn. She tells her husband that Rouncewell is there because she has decided "that we had better make an end of the question of that girl. I am tired to death of the matter." So Sir Leicester tells the footman to show "the iron gentleman" -- his term for Rouncewell the factory owner -- in. Under Lady Dedlock's questioning, Rouncewell tells her that his son is still in love with Rosa. She says, "if you cannot give us the assurance that this fancy is at an end, I have come to the conclusion that the girl had better leave me."

Sir Leicester protests that Rosa has had the "good fortune ... to have attracted the notice and favour of an eminent lady," and wonders whether she should be deprived of this advantage, and as he sees it, be punished just because she "has attracted the notice of Mr Rouncewell's son." Rouncewell, however, reminds him that it was his idea in the first place that she should be taken from service and educated to a higher station. Sir Leicester is, of course, affronted by what he sees as a challenge to the social order, that service to the Dedlocks should be ranked lower than marriage to the son of a man who has made his fortune in manufacturing.

Lady Dedlock intervenes: "The girl is a very good girl; I have nothing whatever to say against her; but she is so far insensible to her many advantages and her good fortune, that she is in love -- or supposes she is, poor little fool -- and unable to appreciate them." Her calculated pose of indifference changes Sir Leicester's mind, so he decides that Rosa "had better go." She maintains this façade of coldness even when Rosa enters, still evidently in distress.

At this point, Tulkinghorn speaks up, "She seems after all ... as if she were crying at going away." Rouncewell says that is because "she is not well-bred," and accompanies her out, as Rosa "thanks my Lady over and over again." Lady Dedlock doesn't betray her true feelings even then. She "waves her off with indifference." Tulkinghorn knows she is acting, however. When Sir Leicester goes out, and Lady Dedlock is left to dine alone, he asks to see her. The dismissal of Rosa, he says, "is a violation of our agreement."

She replies that she has done what she can "to spare an innocent girl (especially, remembering your own reference to her when you told my story to the assembled guests at Chesney Wold) from the taint of my impending shame." And when he tells her that, since she has broken their agreement and that he now feels justified in taking his own course in the matter, she says, "I am quite prepared."

She asks if Tulkinghorn plans to reveal her secret to Sir Leicester that night, and he says no, but he can't promise that he won't do so tomorrow: "I would rather say no more." He takes his leave and heads for his home, as Dickens observes that there is nothing that tells Tulkinghorn, "Don't go home!"

As for Lady Dedlock, she asks a servant to open the garden gate and to give her the key. "She will walk there some time, to ease her aching head," she tells him. "She may be an hour; she may be more."

Tulkinghorn  reaches home and goes to his wine cellar, having to "cross a little prison-like yard." He "looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large moon, what multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too."

After a little while the quiet is disturbed. "What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?"

In Tulkinghorn's office, the allegorical Roman painted on the ceiling is still pointing.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), A New Meaning in the Roman (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

But, a little after the coming of the day, come people to clean the rooms. And either the Roman has some new meaning in him, not expressed before, or the foremost of them goes wild; for, looking up at his outstretched hand, and looking down at what is below it, that person shrieks and flies. The others, looking in as the first one looked, shriek and fly too, and there is an alarm in the street.... It happens surely, that every one who comes into the darkened room and looks at these things, looks up at the roman, and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were a paralysed dumb witness.

Tulkinghorn has been shot through the heart.

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Harry Eden as Jo, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Sean McGinley as Snagsby, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Lilo Baur as Hortense, Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Alun Armstrong as Mr Bucket.

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!"

_____

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.

15. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 520-554

Chapter 33: Interlopers through Chapter 34: A Turn of the Screw


Another coroner's inquest concerning a death at Krook's takes place at the Sol's Arms, with the usual gawping neighbors. Miss Flite, we learn "has been bravely rescued from her chamber, as if it were in flames, and accommodated with a bed at the Sol's Arms." Mr Guppy and Weevle/Jobling are there, too, and are joined by Snagsby with Mrs Snagsby in close pursuit. She has become so watchful of her husband's every move that Snagsby asks her, "Good lord, you don't suppose that I would go spontaneously combusting any person, my dear?" She replies, "I can't say." Finally, she takes him off home: "I think you may be safer there, Mr Snagsby, than anywhere else."

Guppy tries to persuade Jobling not to give up his room at "that place" -- meaning Krook's -- but Jobling vows, "I wouldn't pass another night there, for any consideration that you could offer me." Guppy is persuaded that although the secrets that went up in flames with Krook may have been lost, there are others that can be found among the papers that are left.

Then a hackney-coach arrives bearing Mr and Mrs Smallweed and their grandchildren. They reveal that Krook was Mrs Smallweed's brother. Mr Smallweed proclaims, "Unless he has left a will (which is not at all likely) I shall take our letters of administration. I have come down to look after the property; it must be sealed up; it must be protected." Tulkinghorn holds the title to the property.

The inquest is addressed by "men of science and philosophy," who affirm that it is a verifiable case of spontaneous combustion. Afterward, Guppy "can only haunt the secret house on the outside; where he has the mortification of seeing Mr Smallweed padlocking the door, and of bitterly knowing himself to be shut out." And then he has to deliver the news to Lady Dedlock that he has failed to obtain the letters he promised her. She is dressed to go out, and receives him impatiently.


"And the letters are destroyed with the person?" she asks him. And he is forced to say that he believes they were. "If he could see the least sparkle of relief in her face now? No, he could see no such thing, even if that brave outside did not utterly put him away, and if he were not looking beyond it and about it." She dismisses him with "You had better be sure that you wish to say nothing more to me; this being the last time you will have the opportunity."


As he is going out, Guppy encounters Tulkinghorn on the way in.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), The Old Man of the Name of Tulkinghorn (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

"Mr Guppy sneaks away. Mr Tulkinghorn, such a foil in his old-fashioned rusty black to Lady Dedlock's brightness, hands her down the staircase to her carriage. He returns rubbing his chin, and rubs it a good deal in the course of the evening."


Mr George has received a letter from Smallweed informing him that his debt, of "ninety-seven pounds four shillings and ninepence," has been called in, and if he fails to pay, the debt will fall on his guarantor, Matthew Bagnet. George tells Phil, "Do you know what would become of the Bagnets in that case? Do you know they would be ruined to pay off my old scores?" And just then the Bagnets themselves appear. When she learns of the letter, Mrs Bagnet urges George, "on account of the children," not to let the debt fall on them.


George is crushed by the situation, but he holds out hope that something can be done. "Give the word," he says, and he'll sell everything he has. Unfortunately, "If I could have hoped it would have brought in nearly the sum wanted, I'd have sold all long ago." Mr Bagnet proposes "that George and he should immediately wait on Mr Smallweed in person; and that the primary object is to save and hold harmless Mr Bagnet, who had none of the money." But as the narrator observes, "Whether there are two people in England less likely to come satisfactorily out of any negotiation with Mr Smallweed than Mr George and Mr Matthew Bagnet, may be very reasonably questioned."


Sure enough, Smallweed greets them with "an Ogreish kind of jocularity," and threatens, "I'll smash you. I'll crumble you. I'll powder you. Go to the devil!"

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Mr Smallweed Breaks the Pipe of Peace (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

So George decides to try a last resort: He goes to Tulkinghorn. He and Bagnet are told that "Mr Tulkinghorn is engaged, and not to be seen." They wait an hour and are told "that Mr Tulkinghorn has nothing to say to them, and they had better not wait." But they continue to wait, and finally the client comes out of Tulkinghorn's office: It is Mrs Rouncewell. Seeing them, she inquires if they are military men, and tells them that she "had a son once who went for a soldier."

Finally, Tulkinghorn agrees to see them. He disavows any involvement in the Smallweed debt, but George tells him that his chief concern is with the Bagnets, "And if I could bring them through this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any other consideration, what you wanted of me the other day" -- that is, his sample of Captain Hawdon's handwriting.

Tulkinghorn keeps up his façade of indifference, but tells George "In case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you -- I can replace this matter on its old footing, and I can go so far besides as to give you a written undertaking that this man Bagnet shall never be troubled in any way until you have been proceeded against to the utmost -- that your means shall be exhausted before the creditor looks to him."

George agrees to these terms, and hands over the paper with Hawdon's writing. Tulkinghorn betrays no change of emotion as he reads it. "He re-folds it, and lays it in his desk, with a countenance as imperturbable as Death." They are dismissed, and George returns to the Bagnets for dinner.

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Phil Davis as Smallweed, Peter Guinness as the Coroner, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett, Anna Maxwell Martin as Ether Summerson, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Tom Georgeson as Clamb.

14. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 486-519

Chapter 31: Nurse and Patient through Chapter 32: The Appointed Time

The brickmaker's family that Mrs Pardiggle belabored with charity early in the novel has returned to the vicinity of Bleak House, and Charley, Esther's maid, tells her that they need her help. As they leave for their visit to the brickmaker's hovel, Esther has a moment of heightened consciousness:

I had no thought, that night -- none, I am quite sure -- of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. I have every since connected the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.

Not quite a Proustian moment or a Joycean epiphany, but also something more than a conventional Victorian novel premonition.

They enter the cottage, which "was closer than before, and had an unhealthy, and a very peculiar smell." In it, in addition to the women we met earlier (and have seen since in London) is Jo, who "staggered up instantly, and stared at me with a remarkable expression of surprise and terror." He has mistaken her for Lady Dedlock, of course, and can hardly be persuaded that it isn't she.

The women explain that they had known Jo in London, in Tom-all-Alone's, and that he had ust turned up that morning in the town. Evidently, he has been hounded out of London by Mrs Snagsby, who's "always a watching, and a driving of me." He is clearly quite ill, but the women can't give him lodging because their husbands will disapprove of it. So Esther and Charley take him to Bleak House. Along the way, Jo whispers to Charley: "If she ain't the t'other one, she ain't the forrenner. Is there three of 'em then?"

They leave Jo in the hall and fetch Mr Jarndyce, who is accompanied by Skimpole, a recent arrival. Skimpole, who once studied medicine, says, "You had better turn him out.... He's not safe, you know. There's a bad sort of fever about him." Esther protests that "he is getting worse," and Skimpole argues that this is all the more reason for turning him out. Jarndyce comes up with a solution: "There is a bed in the wholesome loft-room in the stable; we had better keep him there till morning, when he can be wrapped up and removed."

But in the morning Jo is gone. Skimpole suggests "that it had occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him; and that he had, with great natural politeness, taken himself off." They search for him, but after five days Charley becomes sick too. Esther has her moved to her own room, and quarantines the two of them there.

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

But when Charley recovers, Esther herself falls ill, and nurse and patient exchange roles. Esther asks Charley to sit beside her, "and touch me with your hand. For I cannot see you, Charley; I am blind."

Cliffhangers come thick and fast now. We are back in the hands of the omniscient narrator, who is hanging about Krook's, where Jobling has taken Nemo's (i.e., Captain Hawdon's) room under the pseudonym Weevle. He is particularly on edge tonight, and Mr Snagsby finds him at the door of Krook's shop. He asks if Jobling is taking the air before going to bed, and Jobling observes, "Why, there's not much air to be got here; and what there is, is not very freshening." Snagsby agrees "that you're -- not to put too fine a point on it -- that you're rather greasy here." Jobling blames it on the "chops at the Sol's Arms," and Snagsby says the cook must have burnt them, and that they must not have been fresh to start with.

After some rather gloomy conversation, Snagsby moves on, leaving Jobling impatiently waiting for someone. That someone is Guppy, to whom he complains, "here have I been stewing and fuming in this jolly old crib, till I have had the horrors falling on me as thick as hail." Guppy goes to Jobling's room, where he admires the portrait of Lady Dedlock that Jobling has cut from "the Galaxy gallery of British beauty." And now we realize the reason for Guppy's visit and Jobling's impatience: At midnight, Krook has promised to give Jobling the bundle of letters that he filched from the portmanteau in Nemo/Hawdon's room.

Jobling says he last saw Krook about eight, when he helped shut up the shop, and "He has been as quiet, since, as an old rat asleep in his hole." They discuss the letters, and whether Krook has read them -- Jobling insisting that Krook can't read -- and whether they came from a man or a woman. It is Jobling's opinion, from what he has seen of the letters, that they are in a woman's hand.

And then Guppy ";happens to look at his coat-sleeve. It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast." It is covered in soot. "Confound the stuff, it won't blow off -- smears, like black fat." Jobling repeats what he told Snagsby about the chops at the Sol's Arms, and they try to change the subject. Guppy says, "You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That's the arrangement, isn't it, Tony?" Guppy proposes that they make a packet of dummy letters and swap them for the originals, but Jobling argues that Krook is too smart to fall for that. So then Guppy says they'll tell Krook that the letters aren't legally his anyway and that he put them in the hands of his "legal friend" -- i.e. Guppy.

The bell of Saint Paul's strikes eleven, and the other bells in the city follow suit. Then Jobling complains about the soot also, and opens the window. They go and sit on the window-sill and talk some more about Krook and the letters.

Mr Guppy sitting on the window-sill ... continues thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand, until he hastily draws his hand away.
"What, in the Devil's name," he says, "is this! Look at my fingers!"
A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight, and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder.
....
And yet look here -- and look here! When he brings the candle, here, from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away down the bricks; here, likes in a little thick nauseous pool
"This is a horrible house," says Mr Guppy, shutting down the window. "Give me some water, or I shall cut my hand off."

It is one of Dickens's most memorable and horrifying scenes. The ghastly residue of the spontaneously combusted Krook, defiling everything.

When Guppy's equanimity is restored by scrubbing and brandy, the bells strike midnight, and it is time for Jobling to go down and retrieve the letters. But he returns, terrified, only a minute or two later: "I couldn't make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there -- and the soot is there, and the oil is there -- and he is not there!"

Guppy goes down with him to see, and they find Krook's cat "snarling -- not at them; at something on the ground, before the fire." Jobling remembers that when he last saw Krook, at eight that evening, "I left him turning the letters over in his hand, standing just where that crumpled black thing is upon the floor." The cat is snarling at the something on the floor.

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

Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here it is -- is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here! and this, from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.... Call the death by any name Your Higness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say that it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally -- inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only -- Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Anne Reid as Mrs Rouncewell, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Johnny Vegas as Krook, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Sean McGinley as Mr Snagsby, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Peter Guinness as the Coroner.

12. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 406-445

Chapter 25: Mrs Snagsby Sees It All through Chapter 27: More Old Soldiers Than One

Mr Snagsby has so far been on the periphery of something momentous, and Mrs Snagsby wants to know what it is, which gives him "much of the air of air of a dog who has a reservation from his master, and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye." And so Mrs Snagsby has enlisted Mr Chadband in uncovering her husband's secret. Having located Jo again, Chadband hauls him before an assembly that includes Mrs Chadband, the Snagsbys, Mr Snagsby's apprentices, and Guster. And observing the glances that pass between Snagsby and Jo, Mrs Snagsby suddenly has a revelation: "It is as clear as crystal that Mr Snagsby is that boy's father."

But Chadband takes charge of the meeting, and having wrestled into submission Jo, who is under the impression that the preacher wants to cut his hair, Chadband launches into a sermon about what he pronounces "Terewth."

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Mr Chadband "Improving" a Tough Subject (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

Jo, quite fittingly, falls asleep as Chadband maunders on, but when the preacher speaks of "the unnatural parents of this slumbering Heathen -- for parents he had ... beyond a doubt," it's too much for Mrs Snagsby, who shrieks and then, "becoming cataleptic, she has to be carried up the narrow staircase like a grand piano." In the commotion Jo makes his escape, only to be stopped by Guster, who gives him her supper of bread and cheese and "patted him on the shoulder; and it is the first time in his life that any decent hand has been so laid upon him." Mr Snagsby appears as well and gives him another half-crown with thanks for not telling his wife about the others. But from now on, "into whatsoever atmosphere of secrecy his own shadow may pass, ... the watchful Mrs Snagsby is there too -- bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, shadow of his shadow."

At the Shooting Gallery, Mr George performs his morning ablutions and exercises and is conversing with Phil Squod when they are interrupted by the entrance of "a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two bearers, and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched mask." It is Smallweed and his granddaughter, Judy.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), Visitors at the Shooting Gallery (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

Smallweed reveals that George's pupil, Richard, has also been in debt to his "friend in the city," but his debts were settled before he left for the army. Smallweed is certain, however, that this isn't the end of it: "He has good friends, and he is good for his pay, and he is good for the selling price of his commission, and he is good for his chance in a lawsuit, and he is good for his chance in a wife, and .... I think my friend would consider the young gentleman good for something yet!"

But what Smallweed has really come for is a sample of the handwriting of George's friend Captain Hawdon. Tulkinghorn has commissioned him to produce it: "He wants to see some fragment in Captain Hawdon's writing. He don't want to keep it. He only wants to see it, and compare it with a writing in his possession." George professes to have no such sample, "But if I had bushels of it, I would not show as much as would make a cartridge, without knowing why." He agrees, however, to accompany Smallweed to Tulkinghorn's offices to discuss the request.

In the office, George notes the names of the clients on the file boxes: "Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet" and "Manor of Chesney Wold." Tulkinghorn makes his entrance and bids George be seated, which he does, "bolt upright and profoundly silent -- very forward in his chair." Tulkinghorn asks, "You served under Captain Hawdon at one time, and were his attendant in illness, and rendered him many little services, and were rather in his confidence, I am told." George agrees that this is so. And Tulkinghorn proceeds to ask George three questions: Whether he has any of Hawdon's writing, what he would take in compensation for producing it, and whether it resembles the writing on an affidavit that Tulkinghorn hands him. George repeats the three questions as each is asked, but doesn't even glance at the affidavit.

He stands up, "looking immense," and tells Tulkinghorn, "I would rather, if you'll excuse me, have nothing to do with this." Tulkinghorn asks why. "'Why, sir,' returns the trooper. 'Except on military compulsion, I am not a man of business. Among civilians I am what they call in Scotland a ne'er-do-weel. I have no head for papers, sir. I can stand any fire better than a fire of cross questions." He puts the affidavit back on Tulkinghorn's desk and puts "his hands behind him as if to prevent himself from accepting any other document whatever."

Smallweed is furious, but Tulkinghorn retains "an appearance of perfect indifference." Then George asks why Tulkinghorn wants the sample of Hawdon's writing, and Tulkinghorn declines to answer. So George asks if he may consult with "a friend of mine, who has a better head for business than I have, and who is an old soldier." He will talk with the friend and give Tulkinghorn an answer by the end of the day.

Smallweed requests a conference with Tulkinghorn, and George withdraws. Whereupon Smallweed furiously whispers to the lawyer that George has the writing buttoned up in his tunic. "Judy saw him put it there. Speak up, you crabbed image for the sign of a walking-stick shop, and say you saw him put it there!" Tulkinghorn "coolly" says, "Violence will not do for me, my friend," as Smallweed threatens to commit it. But Smallweed is put back in the carriage with some difficulty, and George departs to see his friend.

He is met by his friend's wife, Mrs Bagnet, who tells him, "I never ... consider Matthew Bagnet safe a minute when you're near him. You are that restless and that roving --." George admits that he is, but she allows him to wait until Mr Bagnet and his son come home. They are theatrical musicians: The father plays the bassoon and the son a fife. George accepts an invitation to stay for dinner, and Bagnet tells him that he'll consider what George wants to ask him, but the decision will have to be Mrs Bagnet's.

So after dinner, George lays out the case, and Bagnet asks his wife to "give him my opinion. You know it. Tell him what it is."

It is, that he cannot have too little to do with people who are too deep for him, and cannot be too careful of interference with matters he does not understand; that the plain rule is, to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing under-handed or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground. This, in effect, is Mr Bagnet's opinion as delivered through the old girl; and it so relieves Mr George's mind, by confirming his own opinion and banishing his doubts, that he composes himself to smoke another pipe on that exceptional occasion, and to have a talk over old times with the whole Bagnet family, according to their various ranges of experience. 

It is late when he returns to Tulkinghorn's to tell him of his decision, which Tulkinghorn already knows. But Tulkinghorn asks if he was the man who gave Gridley a hiding-place. George says he was, and Tulkinghorn says, "I don't like your associates. You should not have seen the inside of my door this morning, if I had thought of your being that man. Gridley? A threatening, murderous, dangerous fellow." Tulkinghorn "goes into his rooms, and shuts the door with a thundering noise."

George leaves "in great dudgeon; the greater, because a clerk coming up the stars had heard the last words of all, and evidently applies them to him." So "for five minutes he is in an ill humour. But he whistles that off, like the rest of it; and marches home to the Shooting Gallery."

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Hugo Speer as Mr George, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Emma Williams as Rosa, Tim Dantay as Mr Rouncewell, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Johnny Vegas as Krook, Burn Gorman as Guppy.

10. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 332-366

Chapter 21: The Smallweed Family through Chapter 22: Mr Bucket

Now it's time to introduce a whole lot of new characters. We've met Young Smallweed, whose name, it turns out, is Bartholomew, or Bart. Now we learn that he has a twin, Judith, and that they live with their grandparents. The grandmother is in "a childish state," which is unusual in the Smallweed family, in which even the children are never treated as children -- i.e., given toys or told stories or fairy tales. "With such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory, understanding and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall asleep over the fire and into it, Mr Smallweed's grandmother has undoubtedly brightened the family."

It's probably worth remarking on the peculiar ways in which childhood and adulthood are tumbled about in Bleak House. We have childish adults (Skimpole, Grandmother Smallweed) and children deprived of childhood (Jo, Charley Neckett, even Esther Summerson). We have neglected children (the Jellybys) and exploited children (the Pardiggles). And we have childless adults (the Dedlocks, John Jarndyce, Tulkinghorn, Miss Flite, et al.). Given that one of the central mysteries of the novel centers on Esther's parentage, and that the question of inheritance (i.e., the passing down of property from one generation to another) is what makes Chancery the tangled morass it is, it's not surprising that parenting or its absence is so prominent a theme in the book.

Grandfather Smallweed, to continue, retains his wits, but is physically impaired. So he and his wife, confined to their chairs by the fireplace, face off against each other in a kind of ongoing Punch-and-Judy routine. He is provided with "a spare cushion ... in order that he may have something to throw at" her "whenever she makes an allusion to money -- a subject on which he is particularly sensitive." But when he flings the cushion, he not only knocks her over in her chair, but he also slumps down in his, so that he has to be "shaken up like a great bottle, and poked and punched like a great bolster" to get him upright again.

The person tasked with the shaking and poking and punching is their granddaughter, Judy. All of the Smallweeds "have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds." Judy has "never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game.... It is very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen the thing done." Her twin, Bart, at least goes out in the world, where he keeps company with Mr Guppy. Judy does have help, and it turns out to be Charley Neckett, the orphaned daughter of Skimpole's old nemesis he called "Coavinses." So the Smallweeds have another tie to the novel's central characters.

Young Smallweed -- Bart -- arrives home, and we learn that he never knew his father, who died "fifteen years ago." (We learned earlier that Bart is not quite fifteen.) But he lives in the grandfather's memory as "a good accountant" and as his former partner.The twins' mother, whom the grandfather describes as "as dry as a chip," died not long after they were born. Bart is, as we know, apprenticed in a law office, and Judy, we now learn, "apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making." 

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

A knock is heard at the door, and Charley returns to inform them that it's Mr George.

He is a swarthy browned man of fifty; well made, and good-looking; with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty rough life.... His step too is measured and heavy, and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his broad brown hand upon it, is to the same effect. Altogether, one might guess Mr George to have been a trooper once upon a time.

The appearance of such a substantial, somewhat realistically drawn character at this point raises suspicions that he's more than just another comic foil, like Chadband or the Bayham Badgers. Dickens even stresses the point by comparing Mr George to the Smallweeds: "His developed figure, and their stunted forms; his large manner, filling any amount of room; and their little narrow pinched ways; his sounding voice, and their sharp spare tones; are in the strongest and the strangest opposition."

Mr George has evidently come to repay a loan from Old Smallweed: "Here's the new bill, and here's the two months' interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my business." When George remarks that Smallweed will "sell me up at last I suppose, when I am a day in arrear," the old man assures him, "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money -- he might!" George mutters, just below the old man's hearing, "The name of your friend in the city begins with a D." (I.e., the Devil.) Meanwhile, Grandmother Smallweed starts to chatter, "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty --" before her husband can fling the cushion at her and denounce her as "a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion -- a brimstone scorpion! Your a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!" He calls on George to shake him up in his chair again, which George is glad enough to do, "agitating him violently enugh to make his head roll like a harlequin's."

When the old man recovers from his shaking-up, he asks George if he has any relatives who could vouch for him so "I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance." But George indicates that he is "a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life," and that he is reluctant "to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to, and live upon them.... The best kind of amends then, for having gone away, is to keep away, in my opinion."

And then Smallweed observes, "If you could have traced out the Captain, Mr George, it would have been the making of you. If, when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisements in the newspapers -- when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance -- if, at that time, you could have helped us, Mr George, it would have been the making of you."

So we understand from this that Smallweed was in search of a certain Captain, whom George was unable to locate. He had responded to an advertisement asserting "that Mr Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying, Once a captain always a captain) was to hear of something to his advantage." George, a former trooper, had known this Captain Hawdon at one time, having"been at his right hand many a day, when he was charging upon ruin full gallop." And it was this that brought George into the money-lending orbit of Smallweed. The ad had been a ruse to ensnare the Captain, who "owed us immense sums, all round," Smallweed admits.

George had known the Captain "when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him, after he had run through everything and broken down everything beneath him -- when he held a pistol to his head." He should have fired it, Smallweed says, "and blow his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!" George says, "he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone by; and I am glad I never found him." He is convinced that the Captain "was drowned long before.... He went over a ship's side. Whether intentionally or accidentally, I don't know."

As he takes his leave, he asks again, "So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me, if I fail in a payment?" Old Smallweed says, "My dear friend, I am afraid he will." And so "Mr George strides through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough face." He stops in at Astley's Theatre, the home of the circus in London, and watches the performers.

Astley's in 1808 (Source: Wikipedia)

And then he makes his way to his home and place of business, "a great brick building, composed of bare walls, floor, roof-rafters, and skylights; on the front of which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S SHOOTING GALLERY, &C." He is joined there by his custodian, a small man named Phil, who seems "to have been blown up, in the way of business, at some odd time or times." (We will later learn that Phil's last name is Squod.)

In Lincoln's Inn Fields, Tulkinghorn is sharing a very old port with Mr Snagsby, who is telling him the story of Jo's encounter with the veiled lady/servant. Suddenly, Snagsby realizes that he and Tulkinghorn are not alone: "at a little distance from the table, a person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he himself came in, and has not since entered by the door or by either of the windows." Tulkinghorn reassures Snagsby, "This is only Mr Bucket." The unobtrusive Mr Bucket "is a stoutly-built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the middle age." He was modeled on Charles Frederick Field, a Scotland Yard detective and later private investigator, whose exploits Dickens also wrote about in several essays. When Snagsby begins to show reluctance to talk about Jo, Bucket assures him, "Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy."

After Snagsby concludes his story, Bucket says, "as far as I can understand it, there seems to be a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games respecting that property, don't you see!" Snagsby doesn't see, but he is persuaded by Bucket to accompany him to Tom-all-Alone's in search of Jo.

It turns out to be a harrowing journey for Snagsby, through filth and poverty and vice, and he "sickens in body and mind, and feels as if he were going, every moment deeper down, into the infernal gulf." Along the way they encounter a body being carried, and Snagsby learns that people there are dying from "the fever," as Bucket puts it, "like sheep with the rot." They finally get a lead that Jo might be known by the name of "Toughy, or the Tough Subject," and in their search they come upon two drunk men who have passed out and the two women with them, one of whom has a baby." The men, they learn, are brickmakers from Hertfordshire who have come to London in search of work but haven't found it. And when we learn that one of the women had a baby who died, we realize that these are the people who were the object of Mrs Pardiggle's "charity," and of Esther and Ada's subsequent attentions.

Then they come across Jo, "trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough." He has come to deliver some medicine for the baby, and having delivered it agrees to go to Tulkinghorn's office to tell him the story of the veiled woman.

When they enter Tulkinghorn's chambers, however, Jo cries out, "There she is!" "A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room, where the light falls upon it. It is quite still, and silent." When Bucket prompts him, Jo says he recognizes the veil and the bonnet and the gown that the figure is wearing. He is certain of it. Then Bucket asks him about the rings that the woman wore, and the figure takes off her glove and shows him her hand. "Jo shakes his head. 'Not rings a bit like them. Not a hand like that.... Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater and a deal smaller." Would Jo remember the lady's voice? He thinks he would.

The figure speaks. "Was it at all like this. I will speak as long as you like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this voice?"

Jo looks aghast at Mr Bucket. "Not a bit!" 

So what, Bucket asks, made him think it was the lady?  It was the veil, the bonnet and the gown, he says, but it isn't her hand or her rings or her voice. So Bucket gives Jo five shillings and sends him on his way, leaving an uncomfortable Snagsby alone with the woman. But they are joined by Tulkinghorn, and the woman raises her veil, revealing Lady Dedlock's former maid, Hortense. "I will give you no further trouble regarding this little wager," Tulkinghorn tells her, but before she leaves she reminds him that she is now unemployed and needs him "to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished recommendation." He assures her he will.

Bucket confirms what Tulkinghorn already knows: "There an't a doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on." That is, Lady Dedlock in Hortense's clothes. Snagsby is then sent home, "doubtful of his being awake and out -- doubtful of the reality of the streets through which he goes -- doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines above him." He is soon, however, confronted with "the unchallengeable reality of Mrs Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect beehive of curl-papers and nightcap."

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features  Sean McGinley as Snagsby, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Alun Armstrong as Inspector Bucket, Charlie Brooks as Jenny, Harry Eden as Jo, Lilo Baur as Hortense, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson.