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."

_____

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.

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.

_____

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.

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.

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.

_____

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.

11. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 366-406

Chapter 23: Esther's Narrative through Chapter 24: An Appeal Case

Jarndyce, Esther and Ada have returned to Bleak House after six weeks at Boythorn's, having had no more contact with Lady Dedlock, though they saw her in church. "I had a fancy," Esther says, "on more than one of those Sundays, that what this lady so curiously was to me, I was to her -- I mean that I disturbed her thoughts as she influenced mine, though in some different way."

One day, she is told that a person has come to see her, and is surprised to find that it's Mademoiselle Hortense. She tells Esther that she has left Lady Dedlock's service and pleads to be allowed to serve as Esther's maid. "I have an inexpressible desire to find service with a young lady who is good, accomplished, beautiful," and Esther fills the bill. Esther tries to persuade her that she doesn't want or need a maid, but Hortense says she'll work for her for free. She "seemed to bring visibly before me some woman from the streets of Paris in the reign of terror." Esther stands firm, however.

Before she leaves, Hortense says that her behavior on the day they encountered her at the keeper's lodge during the storm must have have surprised them. Esther admits that it did. "'I took an oath, mademoiselle,' she said, smiling, 'and I wanted to stamp it on my mind, so that I might keep it faithfully. And I will! Adieu, mademoiselle!'" They didn't see her again during their stay.

Meanwhile, Richard has been haunting Chancery and studying the Jarndyce and Jarndyce files and tells them that "nothing could be plainer than that the will under which he and Ada were to take, I don't know how many thousands of pounds, must finally be established, if there were any sense or justice in the Court of Chancery -- but O what a great if that sounded in my ears." He has become friends with Miss Flite, and Esther realizes "what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind."

One day, Esther goes into the city to meet Caddy Jellyby, who has asked her to come, and is met by Richard at the coach-office. He admits that he is not cut out for legal studies either, and that he is in debt: "I have taken rather too much to billiards, and that sort of thing." Finally he bursts into tears while talking about Ada: "I love her most devotedly; and yet I do her wrong, in doing myself wrong, every day and hour." But he persists in his belief that the suit will be settled in their favor, "and then you and Ada shall see what I can really be!" This disturbs Esther even more than his tears. Now, he says, he has decided that his real career should be the army. Esther accedes to this latest whim, but once again, "implored him, for Ada's sake, not to put any trust in Chancery."

Richard accompanies her to the meeting with Caddy and then takes his leave. Caddy announces that she and Prince Turveydrop are ready to announce their engagement, but they want Esther to be there when they approach by Mr Turveydrop and Mrs Jellyby. Esther agrees, so they go first to the dancing school. Mr Turveydrop is at first astonished when Caddy and Prince kneel before him and ask his blessing. He groans and sobs, "reclining on the sofa, and shutting out the sight with his hand, but when Prince vows, "with your approval and consent, father, we will devote ourselves to making your life agreeable." Esther notices that his attitude begins to change at this declaration, and when Prince says, "we shall always make you -- of course -- our first consideration," Mr Turveydrop gives in.

Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), A Model of Parental Deportment (Source: David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page)

"My son and daughter, your happiness shall be my care. I will watch over you. You shall always live with me"; meaning, of course, I will always live with you; "this house is henceforth as much yours as mine; consider it your home. May you long live to share it with me!"

Leaving Prince in attendance on his father, Esther and Caddy then go to the Jellyby residence, which "looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than ever," owing in part to the fact that Mr Jellyby has been forced to declare bankruptcy. Mrs Jellyby, of course, is unaffected by this turn of events: "He has been unfortunate in his affairs, and is a little out of spirits. Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time to think about it." She turns her scorn on Caddy, however: "She has almost deserted her old employment, and in fact obliges me to employ a boy." Caddy protests, "surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all my life," which raises her mother's ire: "A mere drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies of the human race, it would raise you high above any such idea." Caddy only adds fuel to the fire by saying that as concerns Africa she has no sympathies at all.

It takes Esther to prod Caddy into telling her mother the news that she is engaged. "'O, you ridiculous child!' observed Mrs Jellyby, with an abstracted air, as she looked over the dispatch last opened, 'what a goose you are!'" Caddy sobs out the truth, that she and Prince have obtained Mr Turveydrop's consent, "and I beg and pray you'll give us yours, Ma, because I never could be happy without it. I never, never could!" Mrs Jellyby is not happy, however, that Caddy should be "engaged to a dancing-master's son" when she could have had "Mr Quale, one of the first philanthropists of our time." But in the end, she decides that she can't "permit the film of a silly proceeding on the part of Caddy (from whom I expect nothing else), to interpose between me and the great African continent." And calling Caddy "a nonsensical child" and "a degenerate child," she decides that "the step is taken, and I have engaged a boy, and there is no more to be said," so she allows herself to be kissed so she can "clear off this heavy batch of papers before the afternoon post comes in!"

Esther cheers up Caddy as much as she can, by observing how much Caddy "would do for her unfortunate father, and for Peepy, when she had a home of her own," and then returns to Bleak House, where she has a surprise: Mr Jarndyce has hired Charley Neckett as her maid, and the other children are being taken care of: "Tom's at school, if you please, and learning so good! And little Emma, she's with Mrs Blinder, miss, a being took such care of!" Esther tells her never to forget who was their benefactor, and Charley says she won't: "It was all you, miss." Esther corrects her, "It was Mr Jarndyce, Charley." But Charley insists, "I am a little present with his love, and it was all done for love of you."

Meanwhile, Mr Jarndyce has has hands full with the mess Richard has made, extricating him from the arrangements with Mr Kenge. As ward of Chancery, Richard has to go before the Lord Chancellor to effect this latest revision in his career plans, and the Lord Chancellor is not pleased: He "described him, in open court, as a vexatious and capricious infant," and in chambers "very seriously reproved him for trifling with time, and not knowing his mind." But finally things are arranged for his entering the Horse Guards, applying for an Ensign's commission. He begins his military studies and in time "the commission was obtained, and Richard received directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland."

But before his departure, Jarndyce feels it necessary to have a serious talk with Richard and Ada about their future. He tells Ada, "Rick has now chosen his profession for the last time. All that he has of certainty will be expended when he is fully equipped. He has exhausted his resources, and is bound henceforward to the tree he has planted." But Richard persists in qualifying what Jarndyce has said: "I have exhausted my present resources," he insists, still clinging to the hope that a settlement will be reached. Jarndyce is appalled at this stubborn clinging to the Chancery case, and "with a sudden terror in his manner, and in an altered voice," pleads, "for the love of God, don't found a hope or expectation on the family curse! Whatever you do on this side the grave, never give one lingering glance towards the horrible phantom that has haunted us to manyh years. Better to borrow, better to beg, better to die!"

They are all shocked by Jarndyce's intensity. But he goes on further to propose that Richard and Ada release themselves of their commitment to each other, their engagement: "I ask you wholly to relinquish, for the present, any tie but your relationship.... Ada, it is better for him that he should be free, and that there should be no youthful engagement between you. Rick, it is better for her, much better; you owe it to her." He says that his experience with both of them has caused him to change his mind about the fitness of their engagement: "It is not right, and I must not recognise it."

Ada submits to the decision, and tells Richard, "I don't think you will fall in love with anybody else," and she is "not at all changeable," but she thinks Jarndyce is right in believing their engagement premature: "we are only cousins again, Richard -- for the time perhaps."

As Richard's departure for Ireland nears, he, Jarndyce, and Esther go to London to prepare. Ada remains behind at Bleak House. In London, Esther meets the man who has been training Richard with firearms and swords: Mr George. Jarndyce asks George how Richard's training has been going. "'Pretty good, sir,' he replied, folding his arms upon his broad chest, and looking very large. 'If Mr Carstone was to give his full mind to it, he would come out very good.... He did at first, sir, but not afterwards." It's a pattern Esther and Jarndyce have seen before in Richard. Then George suggests that perhaps he has "some young lady" on his mind, and looks at Esther. She hastens to assure him that she's not the young lady on Richard's mind.

Then Jarndyce tells George that she is Miss Summerson, and the look he gives her makes Esther ask if he has heard the name before. "No, miss. To my knowledge, I never heard it. I thought I had seen you somewhere." But both of them claim to remember faces well and that they've never seen each other before. Still, there is a moment of confusion before Jarndyce changes the subject, asking about the other pupils that George has trained. George mentions that one of them was, like Mr Jarndyce, a Chancery suitor. The man, "a small Shropshire farmer," he says, was so angry at how he had been treated by the law that George was afraid he intended to shoot someone and suggested he fine some other outlet for his anger.

"Was his name Gridley?" Jarndyce asks, and he and Esther are surprised at the coincidence when George says yes. Jarndyce says that he understands Gridley has gone too far in his protests about mistreatment by the court and is in hiding from the law. George admits as much, but adds that he's afraid Gridley "will be worn out soon," though he claims to know nothing about Gridley's whereabouts.

On the day of Richard's departure, everything having been taken care of, Richard proposes to Esther that they go watch the proceedings in the Court of Chancery. She has never been there, so she agrees. The scene is confusing and depressing, and "there seemed to be no reality in the whole scene, except poor little Miss Flite, the mad woman, standing on a bench, and nodding at us." She joins them, and they watch as "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" is called. "I counted twenty-three gentlemen in wigs, who said they were 'in it'; and none of them appeared to understand it much better than I." There is an hour of so of ineffectual business until the "huge volumes of affidavits" are bundled up and taken away again. "I glanced at Richard, on the termination of these hopeless proceedings, and was shocked to see the worn look of his handsome face."

Then Mr Guppy appears, and says that "there's a lady here, a friend of mine," who knows Esther. "As he spoke, I saw before me, as if she had started into bodily shape from my remembrance, Mrs Rachael of my godmother's house." She asks if Esther remembers her, and when Esther assures her she does, says, "'I am glad to see you, and glad you are not too proud to know me.' But indeed she seemed disappointed that I was not." When Esther calls her "Mrs Rachael," she "coldly" corrects her: She is now Mrs Chadband. Guppy and Mrs Chadband depart, but now Mr George makes his way through the crowd. He is looking for "a little cracked old woman," he says, unaware that Miss Flite is standing there beside Esther.

George asks Esther, "in a low whisper," if she recalls the conversation they had about Gridley. When she says yes, he tells her, "He is hiding at my place. I couldn't mention it. Hadn't his authority." But now Gridley is dying, and he wants to see Miss Flite. So Esther informs Miss Flite and they leave. On the way, Esther stops to write a note to Jarndyce about what's happening and sends it to him.

When they reach George's Shooting Gallery, "a very respectable old gentleman with grey hair" stops them and says that he is a physician who was sent for to attend a sick man at George's. Phil opens the door to admit them, and when they have entered, "the physician stopped, and, taking off his hat, appeared to vanish by magic, and to leave another and quite a different man in his place." It is Inspector Bucket, who has a warrant to arrest Gridley.

Bucket agrees to let George and Miss Flite go in to see Gridley first. As they wait, Mr Jarndyce arrives as well, and they all visit the dying man, who is no longer angry. Even Bucket speaks to him like an old friend:

"Why, Lord bless your soul, what times we have had together! Haven't I seen you in the Fleet over and over again, for contempt? Haven't I come into Court, twen-ty afternoons, for no other purpose than to see you pin the Chancellor like a bulldog? Do you remember, when you first began to threaten the lawyers, and the peace was sworn against you two or three times a week?" 

Quietly, George asks Bucket what he's going to do, and Bucket admits he doesn't know. "I only want to rouse him. I don't like to see an old acquaintance giving in like this." But a scream from Miss Flite announces that Gridley is dead: "'O no, Gridley!' she cried, as he fell heavily and calmly back from before her. 'Not without my blessing. After so many years!'"

The shadow of Gridley's death falls over Richard's departure, and as he leaves, Esther remembers what Gridley had said to Mr Jarndyce about Miss Flite: "There is a tie of many suffering year between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken!"

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The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Tony Haygarth as Gridley, Anne Reid as Mrs Rouncewell, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Hugo Speer as Mr George, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone, Michael Smiley as Phil Squod, Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett, Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Phil Davis as Smallweed, Loo Brealey as Judy Smallweed, Alistair McGowan as Kenge, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Nathalie Press as Caddy Jellyby, Bryan Dick as Prince Turveydrop, Matthew Kelly as Mr Turveydrop, Alun Armstrong as Inspector Bucket.

7. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, pp. 214-254

Chapter 14: Deportment through Chapter 15: Bell Yard

Richard goes off to his medical studies with Bayham Badger, vowing that when he is settled in his profession and he and Ada are married, Esther should come live with them and be their housekeeper. "I was to be made happy for ever and a day," Esther reports, not without, I suspect, a touch of irony. He adds, "And if the suit should make us rich, Esther -- which it may you know!" but is met with disapproval from Ada, who quite sensibly worries about the consequences of Richard's expectations of wealth -- "it may be better to forget all about it," she warns. He ignores the warning. 

One day, Caddy Jellyby comes to call, bringing Peepy with her, both of them dressed in such an odd assemblages of castoffs that Mr Jarndyce immediately feels the wind shift to the east and retires to "the temporary Growlery" as soon as he can. Things are still as chaotic as ever at the Jellybys: "Pa will be a bankrupt before long, and then I hope Ma will be satisfied.... His family is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles down-stairs, confusion and wretchedness." Moreover, Mrs Jellyby still has hopes of marrying Caddy off to Mr Quale: "A pretty thing, indeed, to marry a Philanthropist. As if I hadn't had quite enough of that!" 

But Caddy has thwarted that expectation: "I am engaged." Her parents know nothing of it however. She tells Esther that her visits to the house made her determined to improve herself, so she started taking dancing lessons at Mr Turveydrop's Academy. There are two Mr Turveydrops, she explains, father and son, and it's the son, who gives the lessons, to whom she is engaged. And thanks to that, she proclaims, "I shall never hear of Africa after I am married. Young Mr Turveydrop hates it for my sake; and if old Mr Turveydrop knows there is such a place, it's as much as he does." 

Caddy also tells her that she has "improved her acquaintance with Miss Flite, the little crazy old lady; and that she frequently went there early in the morning, and met her lover for a few minutes before breakfast." The younger Turveydrop, she tells her, is named Prince -- "I wish it wasn't, because it sounds like a dog, but of course he didn't christen himself. Old Mr Turveydrop had him christened Prince, in remembrance of the Prince Regent." 

Esther has been planning to visit Miss Flite, so she suggests that she go with Caddy and Peepy to the Academy and meet Prince Turveydrop, then join up with Ada and Jarndyce at Miss Flite's later. 

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

Prince turns out to be "a little blue-eyed fair man of youthful appearance, with flaxen hair parted in the middle, and curling at the ends all round his head.... His little dancing shoes were particularly diminutive, and he had a little innocent, feminine manner, which not only appealed to me in an amiable way, but made this singular effect upon me: that I received the impression that he was like his mother, and that his mother had not been much considered or well used." 

The elder Turveydrop is "a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig.... He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly  bear.... He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was like nothing in the world but a model of Deportment." 

That Esther feels a sympathy for the effeminate fiancé of her friend, but none for the falsity and affectation of his father is significant. Prince Turveydrop is no sexual threat, of course, and so Esther regards him as "safe." As for the elder Turveydrop, Esther's opinions are influenced in part by those of "an old lady of censorious countenance," who sits next to her in the dancing school and expresses her distaste for him. She informs Esther that the senior Turveydrop "had married a meek little dancing-mistress, ... (having never in his life before done anything but deport himself), and had worked her to death." He is now doing the same to Prince, who "now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a-day, and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle." Esther imbibes enough of this story to find Mr Turveydrop's salutation to "his sainted mother" as "a devoted creature" as filled with a "very disagreeable gallantry." 

As for Prince, "The few moments that were occupied by Prince in taking leave of us (and particularly of one of us, as I saw, being in the secret), enhanced my favourable impression of his almost childish character." Childishness in Bleak House is a double-edged characteristic. In Skimpole, it is irresponsible; in Prince Turveydrop, who is diligent and devoted, it becomes a virtue. Moreover, he is made for Caddy in the sense that she now has someone to whom she can devote herself: "You know what a house ours is. It's of no use my trying to learn anything that it would be useful for Prince's wife to know, in our house. We live in such a state of muddle that it's impossible, and I have only been more disheartened whenever I have tried." So she has taken Miss Flite as a project, helping clean her room and take care of her birds and learning to make coffee. "And since I have been engaged to Prince, and have been doing all this, I have felt better-tempered, I hope, and more forgiving to Ma." 

In Esther's world-view there are two cardinal virtues: diligence and selflessness. Esther herself is the perfect embodiment of them. And their opposites are the corresponding vices: negligence and selfishness. Her do-gooders, like Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle, think themselves diligent, dutiful to the needs of others, but that is because they neglect the duties close at hand: their own families. And their pride in what they see as doing good is selfish. Skimpole, of course, is the epitome of negligence and selfishness, although his conduct is mitigated by the amusement he provides others -- until, of course, it begins to do harm. 

This simple Victorian morality prevails only in Esther's part of the narrative. The omniscient narrator's account of what lies outside of Esther's point of view is far more morally complex, and in the end it brings much of Esther's moral vision into question. That is the point, of course, the whole reason for the narrative schism at the heart of Bleak House. 

So now Esther and Caddy go to Krook's, which is a portal between Esther's world and the omniscient narrator's world. As they ascend the stairs, they notice that the room on the second floor is to let. Caddy tells Esther that there has been a death there, and they can't help looking in on the room as they pass by. "A sad and desolate place it was; a gloomy, sorrowful place, that gave me a strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread. 'You look pale,' said Caddy, when we came out, 'and cold!' I felt as if the room had chilled me." 

But Miss Flite greets them warmly. Ada and Jarndyce have already arrived, as has "a medical gentleman who was so good as to attend Miss Flite with much solicitude and compassion." And so Allan Woodcourt sidles into the narrative again. The obliqueness with which Dickens introduces, and reintroduces, Woodcourt is coy and somewhat gratuitous, but it is meant to suggest Esther's diffidence about the man who is to play an increasingly significant role in her life. He is introduced to them by Miss Flite, and we finally learn the reason for his initial mysterious appearance at the deathbed of Nemo: Miss Flite "brought me here, in the first hurry of the discovery, though too late for me to be of any use to the unfortunate man." Why it was necessary to summon the other physician as well -- and then to drop him almost immediately from the narrative -- remains one of those curious anomalies of Dickens's storytelling. 

Woodcourt tells them that Miss Flite has had a stroke of good fortune: Every Saturday, Kenge or his clerk Guppy brings her a sum of money. Miss Flite thinks it come from the Lord Chancellor himself, but Esther suspects that the benefactor is Jarndyce, who is studiously contemplating Miss Flite's birds. He asks if they have names, but at that moment they are interrupted by the appearance of Krook and his cat, whom Miss Flite anxiously asks him to remove. Krook says that the cat would never harm "the birds when I was here, unless I told her to it." Krook proceeds to name the birds: 

"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach." 

The recitation causes Jarndyce to feel the east wind. And when Krook proclaims that if Miss Flite were ever to receive her judgment and release the birds, "if that ever was to happen -- which it won't -- the birds that have never been caged would kill 'em." Jarndyce feels the wind more sharply.

As they begin to leave Krook's, he latches onto Jarndyce, who notices in the shop that there are several alphabets pasted on the wall. Krook explains that he is trying to teach himself to read and write, but is not getting very far with it. Jarndyce suggests that having someone teach him might be more efficient. "'Aye, but they might teach me wrong!' returned the old man, with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye." 

Finally, they escape from Krook's and send Caddy and Peepy home. And then Esther adds a coda: "I have forgotten to mention -- at least I have not mentioned -- that Mr Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr Badger's. Or, that Mr Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or, that he came." And then there is a coy little bit suggesting, but not stating outright, that Ada made reference to an attachment between Esther and Woodcourt. 

During their stay, Jarndyce is beset by "the crowd of excitable ladies and gentlemen" seeking donations to their various causes. Mrs Pardiggle and Mr Quale provide an introduction to their friend Mr Gusher, "a flabby gentleman with a moist surface, and eyes so much too small for his moon of a face that they seemed to have been originally made for somebody else." Esther's voice is being overridden by Dickens's own here. Mr Gusher tells Jarndyce of his success in persuading the boys and girls of two charity schools to donate what little money they had to his causes. Esther notes, "I think the wind was in the east for three whole weeks." 

This kind of hypocrisy makes Jarndyce welcome the return of Skimpole, who, whatever else he may be, is no hypocrite. Skimpole has seen Boythorn, who Esther observes is almost Skimpole's antithesis: "Mr Boythorn attaching so much importance to many things, and Mr Skimpole caring so little for anything." Boythorn has told him that Jarndyce and Ada and Esther promised to visit him in Lincolnshire, and that he had invited Skimpole as well, even volunteering to pay Skimpole's way. 

And then Skimpole remembers to tell Esther something: "You remember our old friend Coavinses, Miss Summerson?" "Coavinses" was Skimpole's name for the debt collector who had pursued him to Bleak House. "Coavinses has been arrested by the great Bailiff," Skimpole says. Esther is a little shocked at the flippancy with which Skimpole delivers this news of the man's death, but she is more shocked when Skimpole tells them that the debt collector left three motherless children. 

Esther and Jarndyce decide to check on the condition in which the collector -- also known as a "follower" -- had left the children, so Skimpole directs them to his home. They find "a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a child of eighteen months." They have been left alone, locked in a room, while the oldest child, a girl named Charley (for Charlotte), goes out to find work to earn food for them. She turns up while they are there: "a very little girl, childish in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face -- pretty-faced too -- wearing a womanly sort of bonnet much to large for her, and drying her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron." She has been working in a laundry and has come to check on the others. 

Jarndyce asks her age, and she replies "Over thirteen, sir." She tells him, "Since father died, sir, I've gone out to work. I'm out washing to-day." Their mother had died after the baby was born. The landlady, Mrs Blinder, and the downstairs neighbor, Mr Gridley, look in on them while Charley is at work. The other neighbors disapproved of what Neckett, the children's father, did for a living, but people have been kind to them, though, Mrs Blinder says, "certainly not so many as would have been, if their father's calling had been different." Some people won't hire Charley because of her father, and some "perhaps pay her less and put upon her more." 

Mr Gridley, the choleric downstairs neighbor, now enters to chide them for what he assumes to be idle curiosity, and stays to reveal that he, too, is a victim of Chancery, having been dragged into a lawsuit over an estate that has been eaten up by legal costs. When Jarndyce mentions that he was hardly the only one to be "unjustly treated by this monstrous system," Gridley angrily replies, "The system! I am told on all hands, it's the system. I mustn't look to individuals. It's the system." But he is so furious at having been victimized by it that he continues to appear at court to "shame them. To the last, I'll shew myself in that court to its shame." But for now, he is there only to take the boy, Tom, and the baby, Emma, down to his room for a while. 

Skimpole's reaction is a Candide-like optimism: "He said, Well, it was really very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to purposes. Here was this Mr Gridley, a man of a robust will, and surprising energy ... and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was, years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his superfluous combativeness upon ... when the Court of Chancery came in his way, and accommodated him with the exact thing he wanted.... Otherwise he might have been a great general, blowing up all sorts of towns." And Skimpole observes of himself, "That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most deserving man; that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these social virtues!" 

There was something so captivating in his light way of touching these fantastic strings, and he was such a mirthful child by the side of the graver childhood we had seen, that he made my Guardian smile even as he turned towards us from a little private talk with Mrs Blinder.  

They bid goodbye to Charley as she runs off to work again. 

_____

The 2005 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre dramatization features Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther Summerson, Carey Mulligan as Ada Clare, Patrick Kennedy as Richard Carstone,  Denis Lawson as John Jarndyce, Burn Gorman as Guppy, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, Tom Georgeson as Clamb, Natalie Press as Caddy Jellyby, Bryan Dick as Prince Turveydrop, Matthew Kelly as Mr Turveydrop, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, Timothy West as Sir Leicester Dedlock, Ian Richardson as the Chancellor, Tony Haygarth as Gridley, Pauline Collins as Miss Flite, Richard Harrington as Allan Woodcourt, Johnny Vegas as Krook, Nathaniel Parker as Harold Skimpole, Billy Hill as Tom Neckett, Katie Angelou as Charley Neckett, Harry Eden as Jo, Richard Griffiths as Bayham Badger, Joanna David as Mrs Bayham Badger.