Dickens affirms the value of humanity — humanity meaning all people, including the poorest; and humanity meaning humaneness, gentleness, compassion, and mercy. A book for our times
The court case drags on and on and on. A resolution, a result, a judgment would change lives, but there is no resolution or result or judgment. There are delays and postponements and motions. People hang on the proceedings, have hung on them for years. Obsession with the case is crazy-making, ruinous, and yet people continue to be obsessed: Justice has to prevail eventually, right? Right? Sometimes it looks as if there might be a hint of forward movement! But what happens next is nothing. Nobody wins, nobody benefits.
In the early days of 2024, if you are looking for topical reading, you couldn’t do better than to turn or return to Charles Dickens’s massive, panoramic, blistering, delectable 1852 novel “Bleak House.”
The novel pivots around the aforementioned court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Dickens brilliantly never spells out the details of the case and there is no courtroom drama; the point is the clogged inertia of the process and the impact on the people who have put their lives on hold waiting for an outcome. “I expect a judgment shortly,” insists Miss Flite, the mad old lady who has a bag full of documents and a shabby attic apartment full of caged birds she plans to set free the day the case is settled.
The legal system isn’t the only thing Dickens takes aim at. The self-congratulatory bluster and cronyism of rich politicians; the punitive moral judgment applied to any woman who has had an accidental pregnancy; the brutality of domestic abuse; and the callous treatment of the poor, who must be to blame for their own poverty, all come in for their share of satirical, or in some cases somberly emotional, skewering. There’s a vivid passage about what it’s like to be homeless and illiterate — to shuffle through the streets all day, constantly told by gruff policemen to “Move on, move on,” seeing the signs over shops and street crossings and wondering “What does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel … I have no business, here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too.”
Along with its still relevant portrayal of social injustices, this is the other reason to read this nearly 200-year-old novel in 2024, or anytime: the writing. The gorgeousness of the prose and the energy and inventiveness — the modernity, really — of the narrative structure are exhilarating.
Some chapters are written in a cool, almost journalistic voice — third-person, present tense — a panorama of different scenes and characters ranging from the haunted aristocrat to the seedy rag-and-bone shop proprietor to the taciturn family lawyer who collects secrets as a way of amassing power to the despairing law-writer who dies alone of an overdose.
Interspersed with these chapters is a very different kind of storytelling voice, the firstperson narrative of Esther Summerson. Esther is a young woman peripherally connected (but then, who in this novel isn’t peripherally connected?) to the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. Hers is a personal story of identity — she’s been raised as an orphan, with no known family — and of relationships; she’s kind and steady and the other characters rely on her good judgment. Her voice can admittedly get a little cloying and coy; it’s a relief whenever that neutral journalistic voice shows up again, as if a window has been opened and a cool breeze is blowing through the book. But Esther is the human, personal center of this jostling, crowded, complex social novel.
Through her, Dickens affirms the value of humanity — humanity meaning all people, including the poorest; and humanity meaning humaneness, gentleness, compassion, and mercy. Public life stinks and is full of brutality. Obsessing about it is poisonous. Do what you can to help, even in small ways.
Reading “Bleak House” in 2024 is a reminder that there are different kinds of topical reading and that the eternal can be just as illuminating as the up-to-the-minute news report — which really, so often these days, is just more of the same old thing.
JOAN WICKERSHAM