Charles Dickens Bleak House. Charles Dickens House Museum in London Charles Dickens Bleak House with bibliographic description
London house of Charles Dickens
House in London where Charles Dickens lived
The Charles Dickens Museum is located in Holborn, London. It is located in the only house that has survived to this day, where the writer Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine once lived. They moved here in April 1837, a year after their marriage, and lived here until December 1839. The family had three children, and a little later two more daughters were born. In total, the Dickens had ten children. As the family grew, the Dickens moved to larger apartments.
It was here at the very beginning of the 19th century that Dickens created Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.
The museum contains exhibits telling both about Dickens's era as a whole, and about his writing career, about the writer's works and heroes, about his personal and family life. In 1923, Dickens's house on Doughty Street was under threat of demolition, but was bought by the Dickens Society, which had already existed for over twenty years. The building was renovated and the Charles Dickens House Museum opened here in 1925.
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Catherine Dickens - writer's wife
They married in the spring of 1836. The honeymoon of 20-year-old Catherine and 24-year-old Charles lasted only a week: obligations to publishers awaited him in London.
During the first years of their marriage, Mary, Catherine's younger sister, lived with the Dickens couple. Dickens adored her, lively, cheerful, spontaneous. She reminded Charles of his sister Fanny, with whom his most cherished childhood memories were associated. Her innocence made the writer experience a sense of guilt inherent in Victorian men... But he did his best to curb his natural passion. It is unlikely that Catherine liked such coexistence, but she was not in the habit of making a scene for her husband. One day the three of them returned from the theater and Mary suddenly lost consciousness. From that moment on, Charles did not let the girl out of his arms, and her last words were intended only for him. She died of a heart attack. He ordered the words “Young” to be engraved on the gravestone. Beautiful. Good." And he asked his loved ones to bury him in Mary’s grave.
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The Dickens Society, which had existed for more than 20 years by that time, managed to buy this building, where the Charles Dickens Museum was organized. For a long time, only specialists and students of literary faculties knew about him. However, interest in the writer’s work has recently begun to grow strongly, and on the eve of his 200th anniversary, very large sums were invested in the renovation and restoration of the museum. The updated and restored museum opened just a month after work began - December 10, 2012.
The restorers tried to recreate the authentic atmosphere of Dickens's house. Here all the furnishings and many things are genuine and once belonged to the writer. According to museum staff, specialists did everything to make the visitor feel that the writer had only left for a short time and would now return.
They tried to recreate the Charles Dickens Museum as a typical English home of a middle-income family of the 19th century, although Dickens himself was always afraid of poverty. There is a restored kitchen with all the attributes, a bedroom with a luxurious four-poster bed, a cozy living room, and a dining room with plates on the table.
Portrait of young Charles
Portrait of Charles Dickens by Samuel Drummond These Victorian plates feature portraits of Dickens and his friends. On the second floor there is his studio where he created, his wardrobe, his desk and chair, a shaving kit, some manuscripts and first editions of his books are carefully preserved. There are also paintings, portraits of the writer, personal belongings, and letters.
"The Shadow" by Dickens on the wall of the hall, as it were, invites you to examine the office, dining room, bedrooms, living room, kitchen.
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Writer's office
Catherine Dickens's room
Catherine Dickens's room interior
Catherine and Charles
Bust of Catherine
Portrait of Catherine with sewing
Under the portrait in the window lies the same sewing done by her hands... But the frame was not sharp... She was three years younger than him, pretty, with blue eyes and heavy eyelids, fresh, plump, kind and devoted. He loved and appreciated her family. Although Catherine did not arouse in him the same passion as Maria Beadnell, she seemed to be ideal for him. Dickens intended to make a big statement. He knew that he had to work long and hard, and he liked to do everything quickly. He wanted to have a wife and children. He had a passionate nature and, having chosen a life partner, sincerely became attached to her. They became one. She was “his better half,” “wifey,” “Mrs. D.” - in the first years of their marriage, he called Katherine just that and spoke about her with unbridled delight. He was definitely proud of her, and also that he had managed to get such a worthy companion as his wife.
Salon-studio where Dickens read his works
The needs of Dickens' family members exceeded his income. His disorderly, purely bohemian nature did not allow him to bring any kind of order into his affairs. Not only did he overwork his rich and fertile brain by over-working his creative mind, but being an extraordinarily brilliant reader, he endeavored to earn handsome fees by lecturing and reading excerpts from his novels. The impression from this purely acting reading was always colossal. Apparently, Dickens was one of the greatest reading virtuosos. But on his trips, he fell into the hands of some dubious entrepreneurs and, while earning money, at the same time brought himself to exhaustion.
Second floor - studio and personal office
On the second floor there is his studio where he created, his wardrobe, his desk and chair, a shaving kit, some manuscripts and first editions of his books are carefully preserved. There are also paintings, portraits of the writer, personal belongings, and letters.
Victorian painting
Dickens chair
Famous portrait in the red chair
Dickens' personal desk and manuscript pages...
Dickens and his immortal heroes
The museum houses a portrait of the writer known as Dickens's Dream, painted by R.W. R.W. Buss, illustrator of Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. This unfinished portrait shows the writer in his study, surrounded by the many characters he created.
Mary's young sister-in-law's bedroom
It was in this apartment that Dickens suffered his first serious grief. There, his wife’s younger sister, seventeen-year-old Mary Gogard, died almost suddenly. It is difficult to imagine that the novelist, who just a year and a half before had married for love, felt passion for the young girl, almost a child, who lived in his house, but there is no doubt that he was united with her by more than brotherly affection. Her death struck him so much that he abandoned all his literary work and left London for several years. He kept the memory of Mary throughout his life. Her image stood before him when he created Nellie in the “Antiquities Shop”; in Italy he saw her in his dreams, in America he thought about her with the noise of Niagara. She seemed to him the ideal of feminine charm, innocent purity, a delicate, half-blooming flower, cut down too early by the cold hand of death.
Bust and original documents
Charles's formal suit
Original lamp in Mary's room
four poster bed...
Translator from English...)))
The guide to the museum was issued for a time and only in English, so we are very grateful to Olga for her invaluable help...)))
Office for papers with documents...
Medical devices...
Dickens's favorite chair...
Exhibition room of quotes and sayings...
The Museum organized an exhibition “Dickens and London”, dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great English writer. Interesting installations are located under the roof and in the side rooms of the building.
Bust of Dickens' father
London in Dickens's time
Portraits of Dickens's children and their clothes
Catherine was a very persistent woman, she never complained to her husband, did not shift family concerns onto him, but her postpartum depression and headaches increasingly irritated Charles, who did not want to acknowledge the validity of his wife’s suffering. The domestic idyll born of his imagination did not correspond to reality. The desire to become a respectable family man went against his nature. I had to suppress a lot in myself, which only aggravated the feeling of dissatisfaction.
With children, Charles also showed the duality characteristic of his nature. He was gentle and helpful, entertained and encouraged, delved into all the problems, and then suddenly grew cold. Especially when they reached the age when his own serene childhood ended. He felt a constant need to take care, first of all, that his children would never experience the humiliations that befell him. But at the same time, this concern burdened him too much and prevented him from continuing to be a passionate and tender father.
After 7 years of marriage, Dickens increasingly began to flirt with women. Catherine's first open rebellion on this matter struck him to the core. Fat, with faded eyes, barely recovering from yet another birth, she sobbed muffledly and demanded that he immediately stop his visits to the “other woman.” The scandal erupted over Dickens's friendship in Genoa with the Englishwoman Augusta de la Roi.
A complete break with Catherine occurred after Charles began to show signs of attention to her younger sister Georgia.
The writer published a letter in his weekly “Home Reading”, which was called “angry”. Until now, the public had not suspected anything about the events in the writer’s personal life, but now he told everything himself. The main theses of this message are as follows: Katherine herself is to blame for their breakup with his wife; it was she who turned out to be unadapted to family life with him, to the role of wife and mother. Georgina was the one who kept him from breaking up. She raised the children, since Katherine, according to her husband, was a useless mother (“Daughters turned into stones in her presence”). Dickens did not lie - his feelings towards women were always particularly intense, either negative or positive.
All their actions that they performed from the moment he rewarded them with a negative “image” only confirmed in his mind that he was right. So it was with my mother, and now with Katherine. Much of the letter was dedicated to Georgina and her innocence. He also admitted to the existence of a woman for whom he “feels strongly.” With his public confession, which became extreme in its form and content after a long habit of keeping his spiritual secrets, it was as if he had won another “battle with life.” I won the right to break with the past. Almost all of the friends turned away from the writer, siding with Katherine. He did not forgive them for this until the end of his life. Then he composed another letter to refute the storm of gossip and rumors that had arisen. But most newspapers and magazines refused to publish it.
Once, in my presence, one of the Chancery judges kindly explained to a society of about one hundred and fifty people, whom no one suspected of dementia, that although prejudice against the Chancery Court is very widespread (here the judge seemed to glance sideways in my direction), this court almost flawless in fact. True, he admitted that the Court of Chancery had some minor mistakes - one or two throughout its activity, but they were not as great as they say, and if they happened, it was only because of “the stinginess of society” : for this evil society, until very recently, resolutely refused to increase the number of judges in the Court of Chancery, established - if I am not mistaken - by Richard the Second, and, however, it does not matter which king.
These words seemed to me a joke, and if it had not been so ponderous, I would have decided to include it in this book and put it in the mouth of Sloppy Kenge or Mr. Vholes, since it was probably either one or the other who invented it. They might even include a suitable quote from Shakespeare's sonnet:
But it is useful for a stingy society to know what exactly happened and is still happening in the judicial world, so I declare that everything written on these pages about the Chancery Court is the true truth and does not sin against the truth. In presenting the Gridley case, I have only recounted, without changing anything of substance, the story of one true incident, published by an impartial person, who, by the nature of his occupation, had the opportunity of observing this monstrous abuse from the very beginning to the end. There is currently a lawsuit going on in court that started almost twenty years ago; in which sometimes from thirty to forty lawyers appeared at the same time; which had already cost seventy thousand pounds in court fees; which is a friendly suit, and which (as I am assured) is no nearer the end now than the day it began. Another famous litigation is being tried in the Court of Chancery, still unresolved, and it began at the end of the last century and absorbed in the form of court fees not seventy thousand pounds, but more than twice as much. If further evidence were needed that litigation like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce exists, I could provide it in abundance in these pages to the shame of... a stingy society.
There is one more circumstance that I want to briefly mention. Ever since the day Mr. Crook died, certain persons have denied that so-called spontaneous combustion is possible; after Crook's death was described, my good friend, Mr. Lewis (who quickly became convinced that he was deeply mistaken in believing that specialists had already stopped studying this phenomenon), published several witty letters to me, in which he argued that spontaneous combustion could not happen Maybe. I should note that I do not mislead my readers either intentionally or through negligence and, before writing about spontaneous combustion, I tried to study this issue. About thirty cases of spontaneous combustion are known, and the most famous of them, which happened to Countess Cornelia de Baidi Cesenate, was carefully studied and described by the Verona prebendary Giuseppe Bianchini, a famous writer who published an article about this case in 1731 in Verona and later, in the second edition, in Rome. The circumstances surrounding the death of the Countess are beyond reasonable doubt and are very similar to the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Crook. The second most famous incident of this kind is one that took place at Reims six years earlier and was described by Dr. Le Ca, one of the most famous surgeons in France. This time, a woman died whose husband, through a misunderstanding, was accused of her murder, but was acquitted after he filed a well-reasoned appeal to a higher authority, since witness testimony irrefutably proved that death was caused by spontaneous combustion. I do not think it necessary to add to these significant facts and those general references to the authority of specialists which are given in Chapter XXXIII, the opinions and studies of famous medical professors, French, English and Scottish, published at a later time; I will only note that I will not refuse to recognize these facts until there is a thorough “spontaneous combustion” of the evidence on which judgments about incidents with people are based.
In Bleak House, I deliberately emphasized the romantic side of everyday life.
In the Chancery Court
London. The autumn session of the court - the Michaelmas Session - has recently begun, and the Lord Chancellor is seated at Lincoln's Inn Hall. Unbearable November weather. The streets were as slushy as if the waters of a flood had just subsided from the face of the earth, and if a megalosaurus forty feet long appeared on Holborn Hill, trailing like an elephant-like lizard, no one would be surprised. The smoke spreads as soon as it rises from the chimneys, it is like a fine black drizzle, and it seems that the soot flakes are large snow flakes, wearing mourning for the dead sun. The dogs are so covered in mud that you can’t even see them. The horses are hardly better - they are splashed up to their eyecups. Pedestrians, completely infected with irritability, poke each other with umbrellas and lose their balance at intersections, where, since dawn (if only it was dawn that day), tens of thousands of other pedestrians have tripped and slipped, adding new contributions to the already accumulated – layer on layer – dirt, which in these places tenaciously sticks to the pavement, growing like compound interest.
Fog is everywhere. Fog in the upper Thames, where it floats over green islets and meadows; the fog in the lower reaches of the Thames, where it, having lost its purity, swirls between the forest of masts and the coastal refuse of a large (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Moors, fog on the Kentish Highlands. Fog creeps into the galleys of the coal brigs; fog lies on the yards and floats through the rigging of large ships; fog settles on the sides of barges and boats. The fog blinds the eyes and clogs the throats of the elderly Greenwich pensioners wheezing by the fireplaces in the care home; the fog has penetrated the chibouk and the head of the pipe, which the angry skipper, holed up in his cramped cabin, smokes after dinner; the fog cruelly pinches the fingers and toes of his little cabin boy, trembling on the deck. On the bridges some people, leaning over the railings, look into the foggy underworld and, shrouded in fog, feel like they are in a hot air balloon hanging among the clouds.
On the streets, the light of gas lamps looms slightly here and there through the fog, just as sometimes the sun looms slightly, which the peasant and his worker look at from the arable land, wet as a sponge. In almost all the stores the gas was turned on two hours earlier than usual, and it seemed that he noticed this - the light was dim, as if reluctantly.
The damp day is the dampest, and the thick fog is thickest, and the dirty streets are dirtiest at the gates of Temple Bar, that lead-roofed ancient outpost that beautifully adorns the approaches, but blocks access to a certain lead-headed ancient corporation. And next door to Trumple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, in the heart of the fog, the Lord High Chancellor sits in his Supreme Court of Chancery.
Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich
CHARLES DICKENS
1812-1870
"BREAK HOUSE" (1852-1853).
Lectures on foreign literature / Trans. from English
edited by V. A. Kharitonov; preface to
Russian edition of A. G. Bitova - M.: Nezavisimaya Gazeta Publishing House, 1998.
http://www.twirpx.com/file/57919/
We are now ready to take on Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We're ready to enjoy Dickens. When reading Jane Austen, we had to make some effort to join her heroines in the drawing room. When dealing with Dickens, we remain at the table, sipping port.
It was necessary to find an approach to Jane Austen and her Mansfield Park. I think we found it and took some pleasure in contemplating her finely drawn patterns, her collection of elegant trinkets preserved in cotton wool - a pleasure, however, a forced one. We had to get into a certain mood, focus our eyes in a certain way. Personally, I don’t like either porcelain or arts and crafts, but I often force myself to look at precious translucent porcelain through the eyes of an expert and feel delighted when I do. Let's not forget that there are people who dedicated their entire lives to Jane - their ivy-covered lives. I am sure that other readers can hear Miss Austen better than me. However, I tried to be completely objective. My objective method, my approach, was, in part, that I looked through the prism of the culture that its young ladies and gentlemen gleaned from the cold well of the 18th and early 19th centuries. We also delved into the web-like composition of her novel: I want to remind the reader that the play rehearsal is central to the yarn of Manefield Park.
With Dickens we go out into the open. In my opinion, Jane Austen's prose is a charming re-imagining of earlier values. Dickens has new values. Modern authors still get drunk on the wine of his harvest. Here, as in the case of Jane Austen, there is no need to establish approaches, woo, or hesitate. You just need to succumb to Dickens' voice - that's all. If it were possible, I would spend the entire fifty minutes of each class silently thinking, concentrating, and simply admiring Dickens. But it is my duty to guide and systematize these reflections, this admiration. When reading Bleak House, you just need to relax and trust your own spine - although reading is a cerebral process, the point of artistic pleasure is located between the shoulder blades. The slight shiver running down the spine is the culmination of feelings that the human race is given to experience when encountering pure art and pure science. Let's honor the spine and its shivers. Let's be proud of being a vertebrate, because the brain is only an extension of the spinal cord: the wick runs along the entire length of the candle. If we are unable to enjoy this thrill, if we are unable to enjoy literature, let us abandon our venture and immerse ourselves in comics, television, “books of the week.”
I still think that Dickens will be stronger. Discussing Bleak House, we will soon notice that the romantic plot of the novel is an illusion and does not have much artistic significance. There is something better in the book than the sad story of Lady Dedlock. We'll need some information about English legal proceedings, but other than that it's all just a game.
At first glance, it may seem that Bleak House is a satire. Let's figure it out. When satire does not have great aesthetic value, it fails to achieve its goal, no matter how much that goal deserves it. On the other hand, when satire is imbued with artistic talent, its purpose is of little importance and fades away over time, while brilliant satire remains a work of art. Is it worth talking about satire in this case?
The study of the social or political influence of literature should have been invented for those who, by nature or under the burden of education, are insensitive to the aesthetic currents of genuine literature - for those in whom reading does not respond with a shiver between the shoulder blades. (I repeat again and again that there is no point in reading a book at all if you do not read it with your spine.) One can be quite satisfied with the thought that Dickens was eager to condemn the iniquities of the Court of Chancery. Litigations like the Jarndyces case occurred from time to time in the middle of the last century, although, according to legal historians, most of the facts date back to the 1820s and 1830s, so many of the targets were shot by the time Bleak House was written. And if the target has ceased to exist, let's enjoy the carving of a striking weapon. Moreover, as an indictment against the aristocracy, the image of the Dedlocks and their entourage is devoid of interest and meaning, since the writer’s knowledge and ideas about this circle are very meager and superficial, and artistically, the images of the Dedlocks, as sorry as it is to say, are completely lifeless. Therefore, let us rejoice in the web, ignoring the spider; let us admire the architectonics of the theme of atrocity, ignoring the weakness of satire and its theatricality.
After all, a sociologist, if he wants, can write an entire book about the exploitation of children in the period that historians call the dark dawn of the industrial age - about child labor and so on. But frankly, the long-suffering children depicted in Bleak House belong not so much to 1850, but to earlier times and their truthful reflections. From the point of view of literary nomenclature, they are more likely associated with the children of previous novels - the sentimental novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. If one re-reads those pages of Mansfield Park which deal with the Price family in Portsmouth, one cannot fail to notice a strong connection between the unfortunate children of Jane Austen and the unfortunate children of Bleak House. In this case, of course, other literary sources will be found. It's about the method. And from the point of view of emotional content, we also hardly find ourselves in the 1850s - we find ourselves with Dickens in his own childhood, and again the historical connection is broken.
It's clear that I'm more interested in a magician than a storyteller or teacher. With Dickens, only this approach, it seems to me, can keep him alive - despite his commitment to reform, cheap writing, sentimental nonsense and theatrical nonsense. It shines forever on the peak, the exact height of which, its outline and structure, as well as the mountain paths along which one can climb there through the fog, are known to us. Its greatness lies in the power of fiction.
There are a few things to pay attention to when reading the book:
1. One of the most striking themes of the novel is children, their anxieties, their insecurities, their small joys - and the joy they bring, but mainly their hardships. “I didn’t build this world. I wander in it, alien and sire,” to quote Houseman 1 . The relationship between parents and children is interesting, covering the topic of “orphanhood”: a missing parent or child. A good mother nurses a dead child or dies herself. Children take care of other children. I feel inexpressible tenderness when I hear the story of how Dickens, in the difficult years of his London youth, once walked behind a workman carrying a large-headed child in his arms. The man walked without turning around, the boy looked over his shoulder at Dickens, who was eating cherries from a paper bag along the way and slowly feeding the quietest child, and no one saw it.
2. Chancery court—fog—madness; this is another topic.
3. Each character has a characteristic feature, a certain color reflection that accompanies the appearance of the hero.
4. Involvement of things - portraits, houses, carriages.
5. The sociological side, brilliantly revealed, for example, by Edmund Wilson in the collection of essays “The Wound and the Bow,” is of no interest or importance.
6. Detective plot (with a detective promising Holmes) in the second part of the book.
7. The dualism of the novel as a whole: evil, almost equal in power to good, is embodied in the Chancery Court, a kind of underworld, with emissaries-demons - Tulkinghorn and Vholes - and many imps in identical clothes, black and shabby. On the side of good - Jarndyce, Hester, Woodcourt, Atsa, Mrs. Begnet; among them are those who succumbed to temptation. Some, like Sir Leicester, are saved by love, which rather artificially triumphs over vanity and prejudice. Richard is also saved; although he goes astray, he is essentially good. Lady Dedlock's redemption is paid for with suffering, and Dostoevsky gesticulates wildly in the background. Skimpole and, of course, the Smallweeds and Crooks are incarnate accomplices of the devil. As well as philanthropists, Mrs. Jellyby, for example, who sow grief around, convincing themselves that they are doing good, but in fact they are indulging their selfish impulses.
The point is that these people - Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle and others - spend their time and energy on all sorts of strange undertakings (paralleling the theme of the uselessness of the Court of Chancery, convenient for lawyers and destructive for its victims), while their own children are abandoned and unhappy. There is hope for salvation for Bucket and “Covinsov” (who perform their duty without unnecessary cruelty), but not for the false missionaries, the Chadbands and their ilk. “The good” often become victims of the “bad,” but this is the salvation of the former and the eternal torment of the latter. The collision of all these forces and people (often linked to the theme of the Chancery Court) symbolizes the struggle of higher, universal forces, right up to the death of Crook (spontaneous combustion), quite befitting the devil. These clashes form the “backbone” of the book, but Dickens is too much of an artist to impose or chew on his thoughts. His heroes are living people, not walking ideas or symbols.
There are three main themes in Bleak House.
1. The theme of the Court of Chancery, which revolves around the desperately boring trial of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, symbolized by the London fog and Miss Flight's caged birds. She is represented by lawyers and insane litigants.
2. The theme of unhappy children and their relationships with those they help and with their parents, mostly scammers and eccentrics. The most unfortunate of all is homeless Joe, vegetating in the disgusting shadow of the Chancery Court and, unknowingly, participating in a mysterious conspiracy.
3. The theme of mystery, a romantic interweaving of investigations, which are alternately conducted by three detectives - Guppy, Tulkinghorn, Bucket and their assistants. The theme of mystery leads to the unfortunate Lady Dedlock, the mother of Esther, born out of wedlock.
The trick that Dickens demonstrates is to keep these three balls in balance, to juggle them, to reveal their relationships, to prevent the strings from getting tangled.
I have tried to show with lines on the diagram the many ways in which these three themes and their performers are connected in the intricate movement of the novel. Only a few heroes are noted here, although the list of them is huge: there are about thirty children alone in the novel. Probably, they should have connected Rachel, who knew the secret of Esther’s birth, with one of the scammers, Reverend Chadband, whom Rachel married. Hawdon is Lady Dedlock's former lover (also called Nemo in the novel), and Esther's father. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock's lawyer, and Detective Bucket are detectives who unsuccessfully try to solve this mystery, which accidentally leads to the death of Lady Dedlock. The detectives find assistants such as Ortanz, Milady's French maid, and the old scoundrel Smallweed, brother-in-law of the strangest, most obscure character in the whole book - Crook.
I am going to trace these three themes, beginning with the theme of the Court of Chancery—the fog—the birds—the mad plaintiff; Among other objects and creatures, consider the crazed old lady Miss Flight and the terrifying Crook as representatives of this theme. Then I will come to the subject of children in detail, and show poor Joe at his best, and also the disgusting rascal, supposedly a big child, Mr. Skimpole. Next will be the theme of mystery. Please note: Dickens is both a magician and an artist when he turns to the fog of the Court of Chancery, and a public figure - again combined with an artist - in the theme of children, and a very intelligent storyteller in the theme of the mystery that moves and directs the story. It is the artist who attracts us; Therefore, having analyzed in general terms the three main themes and the characters of some of the characters, I will move on to an analysis of the form of the book, its composition, style, its artistic means, and the magic of language. Esther and her admirers, the incredibly good Woodcourt and the convincingly quixotic John Jarndyce, as well as such eminent persons as Sir Leicester Dedlock and others will be very interesting for us.
The initial situation of Bleak House in the Chancery Court theme is quite simple. The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce lawsuit dragged on for years. Numerous litigants are expecting an inheritance that will never come. One of the Jarndyces, John Jarndyce, is a kind-hearted man and expects nothing from a process that he believes is unlikely to end in his lifetime. He has a young ward, Esther Summerson, who is not directly connected with the affairs of the Chancery Court, but serves as a filtering intermediary in the book. John Jarndyce also takes care of cousins Ada and Richard, his opponents in the trial. Richard gets completely involved in the process and goes crazy. Two more litigants, old Miss Flight and Mr. Gridley, are already insane.
The theme of the Court of Chancery opens the book, but before going into it, let me attend to the peculiarity of Dickens's method. Here he describes the never-ending trial and the Lord Chancellor: “It is difficult to answer the question: how many people, even not involved in the Jarndyce versus Jarndyce litigation, were corrupted and led astray by its destructive influence. She corrupted all the judges, starting with the referee, who keeps piles of stiletto-heeled, dusty, ugly crumpled documents attached to the litigation, and ending with the last copyist clerk in the “House of Six Clerks”, who copied tens of thousands of sheets of the “Chancellor’s Folio” format under the unchanged with the heading "Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce." Under whatever plausible pretexts extortion, deception, mockery, bribery and red tape are committed, they are pernicious and can bring nothing but harm.<...>So in the thickest of the mud and in the very heart of the fog sits the Lord High Chancellor in his Supreme Court of Chancery."
Now let's return to the first paragraph of the book: “London. The autumn session of the court—the Michaelmas Session—has recently begun, and the Lord Chancellor is seated at Lincoln's Inn Hall. Unbearable November weather. The streets are so slushy, it’s as if the waters of a flood have just disappeared from the face of the earth.<...>The dogs are so covered in mud that you can’t even see them. The horses are hardly better - they are splashed up to their eyecups. Pedestrians, completely infected with irritability, poke each other with umbrellas and lose their balance at intersections, where, since dawn (if only it was dawn that day), tens of thousands of other pedestrians have tripped and slipped, adding new contributions to the already accumulated “layer upon layer of dirt, which in these places tenaciously sticks to the pavement, growing like compound interest.” And so, growing like compound interest, the metaphor connects the real dirt and fog with the dirt and confusion of the Chancery Court. To the one sitting in the very heart of the fog, in the thickest of the mud, in the confusion, Mr. Tangle addresses: “M”lord!” (Mlud).
In the very heart of the fog, in the thick of the mud, “My Lord” itself turns into “Mud” (“dirt”), if we slightly correct the lawyer’s tongue-tiedness: My Lord, Mlud, Mud. We must note right away, at the very beginning of our research, that this is a characteristic Dickensian technique: a verbal game that makes inanimate words not only live, but also perform tricks, revealing their immediate meaning.
On the same first pages we find another example of such a connection between words. In the opening paragraph of the book, the creeping smoke from chimneys is compared to a “blue-black drizzle” (a soft black drizzle), and right there, in the paragraph telling about the Court of Chancery and the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce trial, one can find the symbolic names of the lawyers of the Court of Chancery : “Chisle, Meezle - or whatever their names are? - used to make vague promises to themselves to look into such and such a protracted business and see if there was anything they could do to help Drizzle, who had been treated so badly, but not before their office got rid of the Jarndyce affair. Chizzle, Mizzle, Drizzle - ominous alliteration. And immediately further: “This ill-fated case has scattered the seeds of fraud and greed everywhere...” Shirking and sharking are the techniques of these lawyers living in the mud and drizzle of the Chancery Court, and if we return again to the first paragraph, we will see that shirking and sharking is a paired alliteration, echoing the squelching and shuffling of pedestrians in the mud.
Let's follow old Miss Flyte, an eccentric plaintiff who appears at the very beginning of the day and disappears when the empty court closes. The young heroes of the book - Richard (whose fate will soon strangely intertwine with the fate of the crazy old woman), Dce (the cousin he marries) and Esther - this trio meets Miss Flight under the colonnade of the Chancery Court: “... an outlandish little old lady in a rumpled hat and with a reticule in her hands” she approached them and, “smiling, made... an unusually ceremonious curtsey.
- ABOUT! - she said. - Wards of the Jarndyce litigation! I’m very glad, of course, that I have the honor to introduce myself! What a good omen it is for youth, and hope, and beauty, if they find themselves here and do not know what will come of it.
- Crazy! - Richard whispered, not thinking that she could hear.
- Absolutely right! Crazy, young gentleman,” she responded so quickly that he was completely at a loss. “I was once a ward myself.” “I wasn’t crazy then,” she continued, making deep curtsies and smiling after each short phrase. “I was gifted with youth and hope. Perhaps even beauty. Now none of this matters. Neither one, nor the other, nor the third supported me, did not save me. I have the honor to constantly attend court hearings. With your documents. I expect the court to make a decision. Soon. On the day of the Last Judgment... I ask you, accept my blessing.
Ada was a little frightened, and I (Esther tells this. - Note. Transl.), wanting to please the old lady, said that we were very obliged to her.
- Yes! - she said coyly. - I guess so. And here comes the Eloquent Kenge. With your documents! How are you, Your Honor?
- Wonderful, wonderful! Well, don't pester us, my dear! - Mr. Kenge said as he walked, leading us to his office.
“I don’t think so,” objected the poor old woman, mincing next to me and Ada. - I’m not pestering you at all. I will bequeath estates to both of them, and this, I hope, does not mean pestering? I expect the court to make a decision. Soon. On the day of the Last Judgment. This is a good omen for you. Please accept my blessing!
Having reached the wide steep staircase, she stopped and did not go further; but when we, going upstairs, looked back, we saw that she was still standing below and babbling, crouching and smiling after each of her short phrases:
- Youth. And hope. And beauty. And the Chancery Court. And the Eloquent Kenge! Ha! Please accept my blessing!”
The words - youth, hope, beauty - that she repeats are full of meaning, as we will see later. The next day, while walking around London, these three and another young creature meet Miss Flight again. Now a new theme is indicated in her speech - the theme of birds - songs, wings, flight. Miss Flight is keenly interested in the flight of 3 and the singing of the birds, the sweet-voiced birds in the garden of Lincoln's Inn.
We have to visit her home above Crook's shop. There is another lodger there - Nemo, who will be discussed later, he is also one of the most important characters in the novel. Miss Flight will show about twenty bird cages. “I brought these little ones with me for a special purpose, and my charges will immediately understand it,” she said. - With the intention of releasing the birds into the wild. As soon as a decision is made on my case. Yes! However, they die in prison. Poor fools, their lives are so short in comparison with chancellor proceedings that they all die, bird by bird - my entire collections died out one after another. And, you know, I’m afraid that not one of these birds, even though they’re all young, will live to see liberation either. It’s very unfortunate, isn’t it?” Miss Flyte opens the curtains and the birds chirp for the guests, but she does not say their names. The words: “Next time I will tell you their names” are very significant: here lies a touching secret. The old woman again repeats the words youth, hope, beauty. Now these words are associated with birds, and it seems that the shadow from the bars of their cages falls like fetters on the symbols of youth, beauty, and hope. To further understand how subtly Miss Flyte is connected to Hester, note that when Hester leaves home as a child to go to school, she takes with her only a caged bird. I urge you to remember here the other bird in the cage that I mentioned in connection with Mansfield Park, referring to the passage from Sterne's Sentimental Journey, the starling - and at the same time about freedom and captivity. Here we again trace the same thematic line. Cages, birdcages, their bars, the shadows of the bars, crossing out, so to speak, happiness. Miss Flight's birds, we note in conclusion, are larks, linnets, goldfinches, or, what is the same thing, youth, hope, beauty.
When Miss Flight's guests pass the door of the strange tenant Nemo, she says to them several times: "Shhh!" Then this strange tenant subsides on his own, he dies “by his own hand,” and Miss Flight is sent for a doctor, and then she, trembling, looks out from behind the door. The deceased tenant, as we learn later, is connected with Esther (her father) and Lady Dedlock (her former lover). Miss Flight's thematic arc is fascinating and educational. A little later we find mention of another poor enslaved child, one of the many enslaved children in the novel, Caddy Jellyby meeting her lover, the Prince, in Miss Flight's little room. Even later, during the visit of the young people, accompanied by Mr. Jarndyce, we learn from Crook the names of the birds: “Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Ashes, Ashes, Waste, Need, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Stupidity, Words, Wigs, Rags, Parchment, Robbery, Precedent, Gibberish and Nonsense." But old man Crook misses one name - Beauty: Esther will lose it when she falls ill.
The thematic connection between Richard and Miss Flight, between her madness and his madness, is revealed when he is completely caught up in the legal battle.
Here is a very important passage: “According to Richard, it turned out that he had unraveled all her secrets and he had no doubt that the will, according to which he and Ada should receive I don’t know how many thousand pounds, would finally be approved if the Court of Chancery there is at least a drop of reason and a sense of justice... and the matter is nearing a happy ending. Richard proved this to himself with the help of all sorts of hackneyed arguments that he read in the documents, and each of them plunged him deeper into the quagmire of delusion. He even began to visit the court every now and then. He told us that every time he sees Miss Flight there, chats with her, does small favors for her and, secretly laughing at the old woman, pities her with all his heart. But he had no idea - my poor, dear, cheerful Richard, who at that time was given so much happiness and such a bright future! - what a fatal connection arises between his fresh youth and her faded old age, between his free hopes and her caged birds, a wretched attic and not entirely sound mind.”
Miss Flight makes the acquaintance of another demented plaintiff, Mr. Gridley, who also appears at the very beginning of the novel: “Another ruined plaintiff who comes from Shropshire from time to time, always trying with all his might to get a conversation with the Chancellor after the end of the meetings, and to whom it is impossible to explain , why the chancellor, who had poisoned his life for a quarter of a century, now has the right to forget about him, - another ruined plaintiff stands in a prominent place and follows the judge with his eyes, ready, as soon as he gets up, to cry out in a loud and plaintive voice: “My Lord!” Several law clerks and other persons who know this petitioner by sight linger here in the hope of having fun at his expense and thereby alleviating the boredom caused by the bad weather.” Later this Mr. Gridley launches into a long tirade about his situation to Mr. Jarndyce. He is ruined by the litigation over the inheritance, the legal costs have consumed three times more than the inheritance itself, and the litigation is not yet over. The feeling of resentment develops into convictions from which he cannot give up: “I was in prison for insulting the court. I was in jail for threatening this attorney. I had all sorts of troubles and will again. I am a "Shropshire man," and it is a sport to them to put me in custody and bring me to court under arrest and all that; but sometimes I not only amuse them, sometimes it’s worse. They tell me that if I restrained myself, it would be easier for me. And I say that I’ll go crazy if I hold back. I think I was once a pretty good-natured person. My fellow countrymen say that they remember me like this; but now I’m so offended that I need to open an outlet, give vent to my indignation, otherwise I’ll go crazy.<...>But wait,” he added in a sudden fit of rage, “I’ll disgrace them someday.” Until the end of my life I will go to this court to shame him.”
“He was,” notes Esther, “terrible in his fury. I would never have believed that one could become so angry if I had not seen it with my own eyes.” But he dies in Mr. George's shooting gallery in the presence of the cavalryman himself, Bucket, Esther, Richard and Miss Flight. “Don’t, Gridley! - she screamed. when he fell heavily and slowly on his back, moving away from her. - How could it be without my blessing? After so many years!"
In a very weak passage, the author trusts Miss Flight to tell Hester about the noble behavior of Dr. Woodcourt during the shipwreck in the East Indian seas. This is not a very successful, although brave, attempt by the author to connect the crazy old woman not only with Richard’s tragic illness, but also with the happiness awaiting Esther.
The bond between Miss Flight and Richard grows stronger, and finally, after Richard’s death, Esther writes: “Late in the evening, when the noise of the day had died down, poor crazy Miss Flight came to me all in tears and said that she had set her birds free.”
Another hero connected with the theme of the Court of Chancery appears when Hester, on her way with friends to Miss Flight, lingers at Crook's shop, above which the old woman lives - "... at the shop, above the door of which was the inscription "Crook, rag and bottle store" , and another in long, thin letters: “Kruk, trade in used ship supplies.” In one corner of the window hung a picture of a red paper mill building, in front of which a cart with sacks of rags was being unloaded. Nearby there was an inscription: “Buying bones.” Next - “Buying worthless kitchen utensils.” Next - “Buying scrap iron.” Next - “Buying waste paper.” Next - “Buying ladies’ and men’s dresses.” One would think that they buy everything here, but sell nothing. The window was completely covered with dirty bottles: there were blackening bottles, medicine bottles, ginger beer and soda water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles. Having named the latter, I remembered that from a number of signs one could guess that the shop was close to the legal world - it, so to speak, seemed like something of a dirty hanger-on and a poor relative of jurisprudence. There were a great many ink bottles in it. At the entrance to the shop there was a small rickety bench with a pile of tattered old books and the inscription: “Law books, ninepence a hook.” A connection is established between Crook and the theme of the Court of Chancery with its legal symbolism and shaky laws. Pay attention to the juxtaposition of the inscriptions “Buying bones” and “Buying ladies’ and men’s dresses.” After all, a litigant is nothing more than bones and shabby clothes to the Chancery Court, and torn robes of the law are torn laws - and Kruk also buys waste paper. This is exactly what Esther herself notes, with some help from Richard Carston and Charles Dickens: “And the rags - and what was dumped on the only pan of the wooden scales, the yoke of which, having lost its counterweight, hung crookedly from the ceiling beam, and what lay under the scales , may have once been lawyer's breastplates and robes.
All that remained was to imagine, as Richard whispered to Ada and me, looking into the depths of the shop, that the bones piled in the corner and gnawed clean were the bones of the court’s clients, and the picture could be considered complete.” Richard, who whispered these words, is himself destined to become a victim of the Court of Chancery, since, due to weakness of character, he abandons one after another the professions in which he tries himself, and ultimately gets drawn into insane confusion, poisoning himself with the ghost of an inheritance received through the Court of Chancery.
Crook himself appears, emerging, so to speak, from the very heart of the fog (remember Crook's joke, calling the Lord Chancellor his brother - indeed a brother in rust and dust, in madness and dirt): “He was small in stature, deathly pale, wrinkled; his head sunk deep into his shoulders and sat somewhat askew, and his breath escaped from his mouth in clouds of steam - it seemed as if a fire was burning inside him. His neck, chin and eyebrows were so thickly overgrown with bristles as white as frost and were so furrowed with wrinkles and swollen veins that he looked like the root of an old Tree covered with snow.” Twisted Crook. Its resemblance to the snow-covered root of an old tree should be added to the growing collection of Dickensian similes, as discussed later. Another theme that emerges here, which will later develop, is the mention of fire: “as if there was a fire burning inside him.”
It's like an ominous omen.
Later, Crook names Miss Flight's birds - symbols of the Chancery Court and suffering, this passage has already been mentioned. Now a terrible cat appears, tearing the bundle of rags with its tiger claws and hissing so that Esther becomes uneasy. And by the way, old Smallweed, one of the heroes of the mystery theme, green-eyed and with sharp claws, is not only Krook’s brother-in-law, but also a kind of human version of his cat. The theme of birds and the theme of cats gradually come closer - both Crook and his green-eyed tiger in a gray fur are waiting for the birds to leave their cages. There is a hidden hint here that only death frees those who have tied their fate with the Chancery Court. This is how Gridley dies and is freed. This is how Richard dies and is freed. Crook frightens listeners with the suicide of a certain Tom Jarndyce, also a Chancery complainant, citing his words: “After all, this ... is like falling under a millstone that barely turns, but will grind you into powder; It’s like being roasted over low heat.” Celebrate this “slow fire.” Crook himself, in his twisted way, is also a victim of the Chancery Court, and he, too, is about to burn. And we are definitely hinted at what his death will be. A person is literally soaked in gin, which is characterized in dictionaries as a strong alcoholic drink, a product of distillation of grain, mainly rye. Wherever Crook goes, he always has a kind of portable hell with him. Portable hell is not Dickensian, it is Nabokovian.
Guppy and Weave head to Weave's home (the very closet where Lady Dedlock's lover, Hawdon, committed suicide, in the house where Miss Flight and Crook live) to wait until midnight, when Crook promised to give them letters. On the way they meet Mr. Snagsby, the owner of a stationery shop. There is a strange smell in the heavy, cloudy air.
“Do you breathe fresh air before you go to bed? - the merchant inquires.
“Well, there’s not much air here, and no matter how much there is, it’s not very refreshing,” Weavle answers, looking around the entire alley.
- Quite right, sir. “Don’t you notice,” says Mr. Snagsby, pausing to take a sniff and sniff, “don’t you notice, Mr. Weave, to put it bluntly, that you smell something fried in here, sir?”
- Perhaps; “I noticed myself that there’s a strange smell here today,” Mr. Weave agrees. - This must be from the Sun Crest - the chops are fried.
- The chops are fried, you say? Yes...so chops? - Mr. Snagsby takes another breath and sniffs. “Perhaps it is so, sir.” But, I dare say, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring up the cook of the “Solar Coat of Arms.” She got them burnt, sir! And I think,” Mr. Snagsby sniffs the air again and sniffs, then spits and wipes his mouth, “I think, to put it bluntly, that they were not the first freshness when they were put on the rasper.”
The friends go up to Weavle's room, discuss the mysterious Crook and the fears that Weavle experiences in this room, in this house. Weave complains about the oppressive atmosphere of his room. He notices how “a thin candle with a huge soot burns dimly and is all swollen.” If you remain deaf to this detail, it is better not to take on Dickens.
Guppy accidentally glances at his sleeve.
“Listen, Tony, what’s going on in this house tonight? Or was it the soot in the pipe that caught fire?
— Did the soot catch fire?
- Well, yes! - Mr. Guppy answers. - Look how much soot has accumulated. Look, there it is on my sleeve! And on the table too! Damn it, this disgusting thing, it’s impossible to brush it off... it smears like some kind of black fat!”
Weave goes down the stairs, but there is peace and quiet everywhere, and, returning, he repeats what he said earlier to Mr. Snagsby about the chops that were burnt at the Sun Arm.
“So...” begins Mr. Guppy, still looking with noticeable disgust at his sleeve when the friends resume their conversation, sitting opposite each other at the table by the fireplace and stretching their necks so that their foreheads almost collide, “so he then- then I told you that I found a stack of letters in my tenant’s suitcase?”
The conversation continues for some time, but when Weevle begins to stir the coals in the fireplace, Guppy suddenly jumps up.
“- Ugh! There’s even more of this disgusting soot,” he says. - Let's open the window for a minute and take a breath of fresh air. It’s unbearably stuffy here.”
They continue the conversation, lying on the windowsill and half leaning out. Guppy pats the window sill and suddenly quickly pulls his hand away.
“What the hell is this? - he exclaims. - Look at my fingers!
They are stained with some kind of thick yellow liquid, disgusting to the touch and sight, and even more disgustingly smelling of some kind of rotten, sickening fat, which excites such disgust that friends shudder.
- What were you doing here? What were you pouring out the window?
- What did you pour out? I didn’t pour anything out, I swear to you! “I’ve never poured anything out since I’ve lived here,” exclaims Mr. Crook’s tenant. And yet look here... and here! Mr. Weave brings a candle, and now you can see how the liquid, slowly dripping from the corner of the window sill, flows down, along the bricks, and in another place stagnates in a thick, fetid puddle.
“It’s a terrible house,” says Mr. Guppy, jerking down the window frame. “Give me some water, or I’ll cut off my hand.”
Mr. Guppy washed, rubbed, scrubbed, sniffed, and washed his dirty hand again for so long that he did not have time to refresh himself with a glass of brandy and stand silently in front of the fireplace, like the bell on the Cathedral of St. Paul began to strike twelve o'clock; and now all the other bells also begin to strike twelve on their bell towers, low and high, and the polyphonic ringing echoes in the night air.”
Weevle, as agreed, goes downstairs to receive the promised stack of Nemo's papers - and returns in horror.
“—I couldn’t call him, I quietly opened the door and looked into the shop. And there it smells like burning... there is soot and this fat everywhere... but the old man is not there!
And Tony groans.
Mr. Guppy takes the candle. Neither alive nor dead, the friends go down the stairs, clinging to each other, and open the door of the room next to the shop. The cat went right to the door and hissed, not at the aliens, but at some object lying on the floor in front of the fireplace.
The fire behind the bars has almost gone out, but something is smoldering in the room, it is full of choking smoke, and the walls and ceiling are covered with a greasy layer of soot.” An old man’s jacket and hat are hanging on the chair. There is a red ribbon lying on the floor that was used to tie the letters, but there are no letters themselves, but something black.
“What’s wrong with the cat? - says Mr. Guppy. - Do you see?
- She must have gone mad. And no wonder - in such a terrible place.
Looking around, the friends slowly move forward. The cat stands where they found her, still hissing at what is lying in front of the fireplace between two armchairs.
What is this? Higher candle!
Here is a burnt spot on the floor; here is a small bundle of paper that has already been burnt, but has not yet turned to ashes; however, it is not as light as burnt paper usually is, but... here is a firebrand - a charred and broken log, showered with ash; Or maybe it's a pile of coal? Oh, horror, it's him! and this is all that remains of him; and they run headlong away into the street with the extinguished candle, bumping into one another.
Help, help, help! Run here, to this house, for God's sake!
Many will come running, but no one will be able to help.
The "Lord Chancellor" of this "Court", faithful to his title to his last act, died the death that all Lord Chancellors die in all courts and all those in power in all those places - whatever they are called - where hypocrisy reigns and injustice happens. Call, your lordship, this death by any name you wish to give it, explain it by whatever you want, say as much as you like that it could have been prevented - it is still forever the same death - predetermined, inherent in all living things, caused by the putrefactive juices themselves vicious body, and only by them, and this is Spontaneous combustion, and not some other death from all those deaths that one can die.”
Thus, the metaphor becomes a real fact, the evil in man destroyed man. Old Man Crook disappeared into the fog from which he had emerged - fog to fog, mud to mud, madness to madness, black drizzle and greasy witchcraft rubs. We physically feel it, and it doesn't matter in the slightest whether, from a scientific point of view, you can burn while soaked in gin. Both in the preface and in the text of the novel, Dickens fools us by listing alleged cases of spontaneous combustion, when gin and sin flare up and burn a person to the ground.
There is something more important here than the question of whether this is possible or not. Namely, we should compare the two styles of this fragment: the lively, colloquial, jerky style of Guppy and Weave and the long-winded apostrophic alarm of the final phrases.
The definition of “apostrophic” is derived from the term “apostrophe,” which in rhetoric means “an imaginary appeal to one of the hearers, or to an inanimate object, or to a fictitious person.”
Answer: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), and especially his History of the French Revolution, published in 1837.
What a pleasure to plunge into this magnificent work and discover there an apostrophe sound, a rumble and an alarm on the theme of fate, vanity and retribution! Two examples are enough: “Most Serene Monarchs, you who keep protocols, issue manifestos and console humanity! What would happen if once every thousand years your parchments, forms and state prudence were scattered by all the winds?<...>... And humanity itself would say what exactly is needed to console it (Chapter 4, Book VI “La Marseillaise”).”
“Unhappy France, unhappy in her king, queen and constitution; I don’t even know what’s more unfortunate! What was the task of our so glorious French Revolution, if not that when deception and delusion, which had long killed the soul, began to kill the body<...>a great people has finally risen”, etc. (Chapter 9, Book IV “Varennes”) 4.
It's time to sum up the topic of the Chancery Court. It begins with a description of the spiritual and natural fog that accompanies the actions of the court. In the first pages of the novel, the word “My Lord” takes the form of mud (“mud”), and we see the Chancery Court mired in lies. We have discovered symbolic meaning, symbolic connections, symbolic names. The demented Miss Flyte is related to two other Chancery Court plaintiffs, both of whom die during the course of the story. Then we moved on to Crook, the symbol of the slow fog and slow fire of the Court of Chancery, of filth and madness, whose astonishing fate leaves a sticky sense of horror. But what is the fate of the trial itself, the case of Jarndyce against Jarndyce, which drags on for many years, creating demons and destroying angels? Well, just as Crook's end turns out to be quite logical in the magical world of Dickens, so the trial comes to a logical end, following the grotesque logic of this grotesque world.
One day, on the day when the trial was to resume, Esther and her friends were late for the start of the meeting and, “approaching Westminster Hall, learned that the meeting had already begun. To make matters worse, there were so many people in Chancery Court today that the room was so packed that you couldn’t get through the door, and we couldn’t see or hear what was going on inside. Obviously, something funny was happening - from time to time there was laughter, followed by an exclamation: “Hush!” Obviously, something interesting was happening - everyone was trying to squeeze closer. Obviously something was greatly amusing the gentlemen lawyers - several young lawyers in wigs and sideburns stood in a group away from the crowd, and when one of them said something to the others, they put their hands in their pockets and laughed so hard that even They doubled over with laughter and began stamping their feet on the stone floor.
We asked the gentleman standing next to us if he knew what kind of litigation was currently being resolved? He replied that it was "Jarndyce against Jarndyce." We asked if he knew what stage it was at. He replied that, to tell the truth, he did not know, and no one had ever known, but, as far as he understood, the trial was over. Finished for today, that is, postponed until the next meeting? - we asked. No, he replied, it’s completely over.
After listening to this unexpected answer, we were taken aback and looked at each other. Is it possible that the found will has finally brought clarity to the matter and Richard and Ada will get rich? 5 No, that would be too good - it couldn’t happen. Alas, this did not happen!
We didn't have to wait long for an explanation; soon the crowd began to move, people rushed to the exit, red and hot, and with them the stale air rushed out. However, everyone was very cheerful and more reminiscent of spectators who had just watched a farce or a magician's performance than of people present at a court hearing. We stood on the sidelines, looking out for someone we knew, when suddenly huge piles of papers began to be carried out of the hall - piles in bags and piles so large that they did not fit into the bags, in a word - immense piles of papers in bundles of various formats and completely shapeless, under the weight of which the clerks dragging them staggered and, throwing them for the time being on the stone floor of the hall, ran for other papers. Even these clerks laughed. Looking at the papers, we saw on each the heading “Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce” and asked some man (apparently a judge) standing among these paper mountains if the litigation was over.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s finally over!” - and also burst out laughing.”
Court fees absorbed the entire litigation, the entire disputed inheritance. The fantastic fog of the Chancery Court dissipates - and only the dead do not laugh.
Before moving on to real children in Dickens's significant topic of children, it is worth looking at the conman Harold Skimpole. Skimpola, this false diamond, is introduced to us in the sixth chapter by Jarndyce as follows: “... you will not find another like him in the whole world - this is a most wonderful creature ... a child.” This definition of a child is important for understanding the novel, in the innermost, essential part of which we are talking about the misfortune of children, about the suffering experienced in childhood - and here Dickens is always at his best. Therefore, the definition found by a good and kind man, John Jarndyce, is quite correct: a child, from Dickens’ point of view, is a wonderful creature. But it is interesting that the definition of “child” cannot in any way be attributed to Skimpole. Skimpole misleads everyone, misleads Mr. Jarndyce that he, Skimpole, is innocent, naive and carefree like a child. In fact, this is not at all the case, but this fake childishness of his sets off the merits of the real children - the heroes of the novel.
Jarndyce explains to Richard that Skimpole, of course, is an adult, at least his peer, “but in the freshness of his feelings, his simplicity, his enthusiasm, his charming, ingenuous inability to engage in everyday affairs, he is a mere child.”
“He’s a musician, though only an amateur, although he could become a professional. In addition, he is an amateur artist, although he could also make painting his profession. A very gifted, charming person. He is unlucky in business, unlucky in his profession, unlucky in his family, but this does not bother him... he is a mere baby!
- You said that he is a family man, does that mean he has children, sir? asked Richard.
- Yes, Rick! “Half a dozen,” replied Mr. Jarndyce. - More! Perhaps there will be a dozen. But he never cared about them. And where is he? He needs someone to take care of him. A real baby, I assure you!”
We first see Mr. Skimpole through Hester's eyes: “A small, cheerful man with a rather large head, but fine features and a gentle voice, he seemed unusually charming. He talked about everything in the world so easily and naturally, with such infectious gaiety that it was a pleasure to listen to him. His figure was slimmer than Mr. Jarndyce's, his complexion fresher, and the gray in his hair less noticeable, and therefore he seemed younger than his friend. In general, he looked more like a prematurely aged young man than a well-preserved old man. A kind of carefree negligence was visible in his manners and even in his suit, his knotted tie fluttered, like those of artists in the self-portraits I know), and this involuntarily inspired me with the idea that he looked like a romantic young man who had strangely become decrepit. It immediately seemed to me that his manners and appearance were completely different from those of a person who, like all older people, had gone through a long path of worries and life experience.” For some time he was a family doctor for a German prince, who then broke up with him, since “he was always a mere child “in terms of weights and measures”, he did not understand anything about them (except that they were disgusting to him).” When they sent for him to help the prince or one of his entourage, “he usually lay supine in bed and read newspapers or drew fantastic sketches with a pencil, and therefore could not go to the sick person. In the end, the prince got angry - “quite reasonably,” Mr. Skimpole frankly admitted - and refused his services, and since for Mr. Skimpole “there was nothing left in life except love” (he explained with charming gaiety), he "fell in love, got married and surrounded himself with rosy cheeks." His good friend Jarndyce and some other good friends from time to time found him this or that occupation, but nothing useful came of it, since he, I must confess, suffers from two of the most ancient human weaknesses: firstly, he does not know what it is "time", secondly, does not understand anything about money. Therefore, he never showed up anywhere on time, could never conduct any business, and never knew how much this or that cost. Well!<...>All he asks from society is not to interfere with his life. It's not that much. His needs are insignificant. Give him the opportunity to read newspapers, talk, listen to music, admire beautiful scenery, give him mutton, coffee, fresh fruit, a few sheets of Bristol cardboard, a little red wine, and he needs nothing more. In life he is a mere baby, but he does not cry like children, demanding the moon from the sky. He tells people: “Go in peace, each on your own path! If you want, wear the red uniform of an army man, if you want, the blue uniform of a sailor, if you want, the vestments of a bishop, if you want, the apron of a craftsman, but if not, then put a feather behind your ear, as clerks do; strive for glory, for holiness, for trade, for industry, for anything, just... don’t interfere with Harold Skimpole’s life!”
He expressed all these thoughts and many others to us with extraordinary brilliance and pleasure, and spoke about himself with a kind of animated impartiality - as if he had nothing to do with himself, as if Skimpole was some kind of stranger, as if he knew that Skimpole, of course, has his own oddities, but he also has his own demands, which society must take care of and does not dare neglect. He simply charmed his listeners,” although Esther never ceases to be confused as to why this man is free from both responsibility and moral duty.
The next morning at breakfast, Skimpole starts a fascinating conversation about bees and drones and frankly admits that he considers drones to be the embodiment of a more pleasant and wiser idea than bees. But Skimpole himself is not a harmless, stingless drone, and this is his deepest secret: he has a sting, but it is hidden for a long time. The childish impudence of his statements greatly pleased Mr. Jarndyce, who suddenly discovered a straightforward man in a two-faced world. The straightforward Skimpole simply used the kind Jarndyce for his own purposes.
Later, already in London, something cruel and evil will appear more and more clearly behind Skimpole’s childish mischief. An agent of the bailiff of Covins, a certain Nekket, who once came to arrest Skimpole for debts, dies, and Skimpole, striking Esther, reports this as follows: “'Covins' is himself arrested by the great bailiff - by death,' said Mr. Skimpole. “He will no longer insult the sunlight with his presence.” While fingering the piano keys, Skimpole jokes about the deceased who left his children as orphans. “And he told me,” Mr. Skimpole began, interrupting his words with soft chords where I put periods (says the narrator. - V.N.). — What “Kovinsov” left behind. Three children. Orphans. And since it’s his profession. Not popular. Growing "Covinsovs". They live very poorly."
Note the stylistic device here: the cheerful swindler punctuates his jokes with light chords.
Then Dickens does something very clever. He decides to take us to the orphaned children and show us how they live; in the light of their lives, the falsity of Skimpole’s “mere baby” will be revealed. Esther says: “I knocked on the door, and someone’s clear voice was heard from the room:
- We're locked. Mrs. Blinder has the key. Putting the key in the keyhole, I opened the door.
In a wretched room with a sloping ceiling and very sparse furnishings stood a tiny boy of about five or six years old, who was nursing and rocking in his arms a heavy one and a half year old child (I like this word “heavy”, thanks to it the phrase settles in the right place. - V.N.) . The weather was cold, and the room was not heated; however, the children were wrapped in some kind of old shawls and capes. But these clothes, apparently, did not warm well - the children shrank from the cold, and their noses turned red and pointed, although the boy walked back and forth without rest, rocking and cradling the baby, who leaned her head on his shoulder.
Who locked you here alone? - Naturally, we asked.
“Charlie,” the boy answered, stopping and looking at us.
— Charlie is your brother?
- No. Sister - Charlot. Dad called her Charlie.<...>
-Where is Charlie?
“I went to do the laundry,” the boy answered.<...>
We looked first at the kids, then at each other, but then a very short girl ran into the room with a very childish figure, but an intelligent, no longer childish face - a pretty face, barely visible from under her mother’s wide-brimmed hat, too big for such a child. crumbs, and in a wide apron, also her mother’s, on which she wiped her bare hands. They were covered in soapy foam, which was still steaming, and the girl shook it off her fingers, wrinkled and white from the hot water. If it were not for these fingers, she could be mistaken for a smart, observant child who plays washing, imitating the poor woman worker.”
Skimpole is thus a vile parody of a child, while this little one touchingly imitates a grown woman. “The little one, whom he (the boy - V.N.) was nursing, reached out to Charlie and screamed, asking to be held in her arms.” The girl took it in a completely motherly way - this movement matched the hat and apron - and looked at us over her burden, and the little one tenderly pressed herself against her sister.
“Really,” whispered (Mr. Jarndyce. - V.N.)... is this baby really supporting the rest with her labor? Look at them! Look at them, for God's sake!
Indeed, they were worth watching. All three children clung tightly to each other, and two of them depended on the third for everything, and the third was so small, but what an adult and positive look she had, how strangely it did not fit with her childish figure!
Please note the pitiful intonation and almost awe in Mr. Jarndyce's speech.
“Ah, Charlie! Charlie! - my guardian began. - How old are you?
“The fourteenth year has begun, sir,” answered the girl.
- Wow, what a respectable age! - said the guardian. - What a respectable age, Charlie! I cannot express with what tenderness he spoke to her - half jokingly, but so compassionately and sadly.
“And you live here alone with these kids, Charlie?” - asked the guardian.
“Yes, sir,” answered the girl, looking trustingly straight into his face, “since dad died.”
- What do you all live for, Charlie? - asked the guardian, turning away for a moment. “Eh, Charlie, what do you live for?”
I would not like to hear an accusation of sentimentality based on this characteristic feature of Bleak House. I undertake to assert that the detractors of the sentimental, the “sensitive,” as a rule, have no concept of feelings. There is no doubt that the story of a student who became a shepherd for the sake of a girl is a sentimental, stupid and vulgar story. But let's ask ourselves a question: aren't there differences in the approaches of Dickens and writers of past times? How different, for example, is the world of Dickens from the world of Homer or Cervantes? Does Homer's hero experience a divine thrill of pity? Horror - yes, it does, and also a certain vague compassion, but a piercing, special feeling of pity, as we understand it now - did the past, laid out in hexameters, know it? Let us not be mistaken: no matter how much our contemporary has degraded, on the whole he is better than Homeric man, homo homericus, or the man of the Middle Ages.
In the imaginary single combat americus versus homericus 6, the first to win the prize for humanity. Of course, I am aware that a vague emotional impulse can be found in the Odyssey, that Odysseus and his old father, meeting after a long separation and exchanging insignificant remarks, will suddenly throw back their heads and howl, murmuring dully at fate, as if they were not entirely aware of their own grief. That's right: their compassion is not fully aware of itself; this, I repeat, is a kind of common experience in that ancient world with pools of blood and soiled marble - in a world whose only justification is the handful of magnificent poems that remain from it, the always receding horizon of verse. And it’s enough to frighten you with the horrors of that world. Don Quixote tries to stop spanking the child, but Don Quixote is a madman. Cervantes calmly accepts the cruel world, and belly laughter is always heard at the slightest manifestation of pity.
In the passage about Neckett’s children, Dickens’s high art cannot be reduced to lisp: here there is real, here piercing, directed sympathy, with overflows of fluid nuances, with the immense pity of spoken words, with a selection of epithets that you see, hear and touch.
Now Skimpole's theme must intersect with one of the most tragic themes of the book - the theme of poor Joe. This orphan, completely sick, is brought to Jarndyce's house by Hester and Charlie, who has become her maid 7, to warm up on a cold rainy night.
Joe sat in the corner of the window niche in Jarndyce's hall, looking ahead with an indifferent expression that could hardly be explained by the shock of the luxury and peace into which he had found himself. Esther speaks again.
“It’s rubbish,” said the guardian, after asking the boy two or three questions, feeling his forehead and looking into his eyes. -What do you think, Harold?
“The best thing to do is throw him out,” said Mr. Skimpole.
- That is, how is it - over there? — the guardian asked in an almost stern tone.
“Dear Jarndyce,” replied Mr. Skimpole, “you know what I am—I’m a child.” Be strict with me if I deserve it. But by nature I cannot stand such patients. And I never could stand it, even when I was a doctor. He can infect others. His fever is very dangerous.
Mr. Skimpole explained all this in his characteristic light tone, returning with us from the hall to the drawing room and sitting down on a stool in front of the piano.
“You will say that this is childish,” continued Mr. Skimpole, looking at us cheerfully. “Well, I admit, it’s possible that it’s childish.” But I really am a child and never pretended to be considered an adult. If you drive him away, he will go his own way again; that means you will drive him back to where he was before, that’s all. Understand that he will be no worse off than he was. Well, let him be even better, if that’s what you want. Give him sixpence, or five shillings, or five pounds and a half—you know how to count, but I don’t—and get away with it!
- What will he do? - asked the guardian.
“I swear on my life I have not the slightest idea what exactly he will do,” answered Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders and smiling charmingly. “But he will do something, I have no doubt about that.”
It’s clear what poor Joe will do: die in a ditch. In the meantime, he is placed in a clean, bright room. Much later, the reader learns that the detective looking for Joe easily bribes Skimpole, who indicates the room where the tramp is, and Joe disappears for a long time.
Then Skimpole's theme merges with Richard's theme. Skimpole begins to live off Richard and finds him a new lawyer (from whom he receives five pounds for this) who is ready to continue the useless litigation. Mr. Jarndyce, still believing in Harold Skimpole's naivety, goes to him with Esther to ask him to be careful with Richard.
“The room was quite dark and not at all neat, but furnished with some kind of absurd, shabby luxury: a large footstool, a sofa piled with pillows, an easy chair stuffed with cushions, a piano, books, drawing supplies, sheet music, newspapers, several drawings and paintings. The window panes here were dimmed by dirt, and one of them, broken, was replaced with paper glued with wafers; however, on the table there was a plate with hothouse peaches, another with grapes, a third with sponge cakes, and in addition a bottle of light wine. Mr. Skimpole himself was reclining on the sofa, dressed in a dressing gown, and, drinking fragrant coffee from an antique porcelain cup - although it was already about noon - he contemplated a whole collection of pots of wallflowers that stood on the balcony.
Not at all embarrassed by our appearance, he stood up and received us with his usual ease.
- So this is how I live! - he said when we sat down (not without difficulty, for almost all the chairs were broken). - Here I am in front of you! Here's my meager breakfast. Some people demand roast beef or a leg of lamb for breakfast, but I don’t. Give me peaches, a cup of coffee, red wine, and I'm done. I don’t need all these delicacies for their own sake, but only because they remind me of the sun. There is nothing sunny about cow's or lamb's feet. Animal satisfaction is all they give!
- This room serves as our friend’s doctor’s office (that is, it would serve if he practiced medicine); this is his sanctuary, his studio,” the guardian explained to us. (Parodic reference to Dr. Woodcourt's theme. - V.N.)
“Yes,” said Mr. Skimpole, turning his beaming face to us all in turn, “and it can also be called a birdcage.” This is where the bird lives and sings. From time to time, her feathers are plucked and her wings are trimmed; but she sings, sings!
He offered us grapes, repeating with a radiant look:
- She sings! Not a single note of ambition, but still he sings.<...>“We will all remember this day here forever,” said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, pouring himself some red wine into a glass, “we will call it the day of St. Clare and St. Summerson.” You should meet my daughters. I have three of them: the blue-eyed daughter is Beauty (Arethusa. - V.N.), the second daughter is Dreamer (Laura. - V.N.), the third is Mocker (Kitty. - V.N.). You need to see them all. They will be delighted."
There's something significant thematically going on here. Just as in a musical fugue one theme can parody another, so here we see a parody of the theme of the crazy old lady Miss Flight's caged birds. Skimpole is not actually in a cage at all. He is a painted, mechanically winding bird. His cage is a sham, just like his childishness. And the nicknames of Skimpole's daughters - they also parody the names of Miss Flight's birds. Skimpole the child turns out to be Skimpole the rogue, and Dickens uses purely artistic means to reveal Skimpole's true nature. If you understand the course of my reasoning, then we have taken a certain step towards comprehending the mystery of literary art, since it must have already become clear to you that my course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation into the mystery of literary architectonics. But do not forget: what we manage to discuss with you is by no means exhaustive. There is a lot - themes, their variations - you will have to discover for yourself. The book is like a travel chest, tightly packed with things. At the customs house, the hand of an official casually shakes its contents, but the one who is looking for treasure goes through everything to the last thread.
Towards the end of the book, Esther, worried that Skimpole is robbing Richard, comes to him with a request to end this acquaintance, to which he cheerfully agrees, having learned that Richard was left without money. During the conversation, it turns out that it was he who contributed to Joe’s removal from Jarndyce’s house - the boy’s disappearance remained a secret to everyone. Skimpole defends himself in his usual manner:
“Consider this case, dear Miss Summerson. Here is a boy who was brought into the house and laid on the bed in a state that I really don’t like. When this boy is already on the bed, a man comes... just like in the children's song "The House That Jack Built". Here is a man who asks about a boy brought into the house and laid on the bed in a state that I really do not like.<...>Here is Skimpole, who accepts a note offered by a man who asks about a boy brought into the house and laid on the bed in a state that I do not like very much. Here are the facts. Wonderful. Should the above-mentioned Skimpole have refused the banknote? Why did he have to refuse the banknote? Skimpole resists, he asks Bucket: “Why is this needed? I don’t understand anything about this; I don’t need it; take it back.” Bucket still asks Skimpole to accept the banknotes. Are there any reasons why Skimpole, unperverted by prejudice, can take the banknote? Available. Skimpole is aware of them. What are these reasons?
The reasons boil down to the fact that the policeman, who guards the law, is full of faith in money, which Skimpole can shake by refusing the offered banknote, and thereby making the policeman unsuitable for detective work. Moreover, if it is reprehensible for Skimpole to accept the banknote, it is much more reprehensible for Bucket to offer it. “But Skimpole strives to respect Bucket; Skimpole, although he is a small man, considers it necessary to respect Bucket in order to maintain the social order. The state urgently requires him to trust Bucket. And he trusts. That's all!"
Ultimately, Esther characterizes Skimpole quite accurately: “The guardian and he grew cold towards each other mainly because of the incident with Joe, and also because Mr. Skimpole (as we later learned from Ada) callously ignored the guardian’s requests not to extort money from Richard . His large debt to his guardian had no effect on their breakup. Mr. Skimpole died about five years after this, leaving a diary, letters and various autobiographical materials; all this was published and painted him as a victim of the insidious intrigue that humanity had planned against the simple-minded baby. They say that the book turned out to be entertaining, but when I opened it one day, I read only one phrase from it that accidentally caught my eye, and I didn’t read any further. Here is this phrase: “Jarndyce, like almost everyone I have known, is Self-love incarnate.” In fact, Jarndyce is the most excellent, kindest person in all of literature.
Finally, there is the almost undeveloped contrast between the real doctor, Woodcourt, who uses his knowledge to help people, and Skimpole, who refuses to practice medicine and, on the one occasion consulted, correctly identifies Joe's fever as dangerous, but advises him to be kicked out of the house, undoubtedly dooming him to death.
The most touching pages of the book are devoted to the topic of children. You will note the discreet story about Esther's childhood, about her godmother (actually her aunt) Miss Barbery, who constantly instilled a feeling of guilt in the girl. We see the neglected children of the philanthropist Mrs. Jellyby, the orphaned children of Neckett, the little apprentices—“an unkempt lame girl in a see-through dress” and a boy who “waltzed alone in an empty kitchen”—taking lessons at Turveydrop's dance school. Together with the soulless philanthropist Mrs. Pardiggle, we visit the brickmaker's family and see a dead child. But among all these unfortunate children, dead, alive and half-dead, the most wretched one is, of course, Joe, who, unknown to himself, is closely connected with the theme of mystery.
At the coroner's inquest into Nemo's death, it is discovered that the deceased was talking to a boy who was sweeping the intersection on Chancery Street. They bring the boy.
"A! here comes the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very dirty, very hoarse, very ragged. Well, boy!.. But no, wait. Be careful. The boy needs to be asked a few preliminary questions.
Name is Joe. That's what they call it, but nothing else. He doesn’t know that everyone has a first and last name. I've never heard of it. Doesn't know that "Joe" is a diminutive of some long name. A short one is enough for him. Why is it bad? Can you spell it how to spell it? No. He can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Didn't go to school. Residence? And what is it? A broom is a broom, and lying is bad, he knows that. He doesn’t remember who told him about the broom and the lies, but that’s how it is. He can’t say exactly what they will do to him after death if he lies to these gentlemen now - they will probably be punished very severely, and rightly so... - so he will tell the truth.”
After an inquest, at which Joe is not allowed to testify, Mr. Tulkinghorn, a lawyer, listens to his testimony privately. Joe only remembers “that one day, on a chilly winter evening, when he, Joe, was shivering from the cold at some entrance, not far from his crossroads, a man looked back, turned back, questioned him and, having learned that he had there is not a single friend in the world, he said: “I don’t have one either. Not a single one!” - and gave him money for dinner and overnight stay. He remembers that since then the man often talked to him and asked whether he slept soundly at night, and how he endured hunger and cold, and whether he wanted to die, and asked all sorts of other equally strange questions.”
“He really pitied me,” says the boy, wiping his eyes with his torn sleeve. “Just now I looked at how he was lying stretched out - like this - and I thought: so that he could hear me telling him about this. He pitied me very much, very much!”
Dickens then writes in the style of Carlyle, with funeral repetitions. The parish overseer “with his company of beggars” carries away the body of the resident, “the body of our newly deceased beloved brother, to a cemetery squeezed into a back street, fetid and disgusting, a source of malignant ailments infecting the bodies of our beloved brothers and sisters who have not yet passed away... To a nasty piece of land , which a Turk would reject as a horrific abomination, at the sight of which a Kaffir would shudder, the beggars bring our newly departed beloved brother to bury him according to Christian rites.
Here, in the cemetery, which is surrounded on all sides by houses and to the iron gates of which a narrow, fetid covered passage leads, - in the cemetery, where all the filth of life does its work in contact with death, and all the poisons of death do its work in contact with life, - they bury our beloved brother at a depth of one or two feet; here they sow it in decay, so that it will rise in decay - a ghost of retribution at the bedsides of many sick, a shameful testimony to future centuries of the time when civilization and barbarism together led our boastful island.
Joe's shadowy silhouette appears in the night fog. “Along with the night, some clumsy creature comes and sneaks along the yard passage to the iron gate. Grabbing the bars of the grille, he looks inside; He stands and watches for two or three minutes.
Then he quietly sweeps the step in front of the gate with an old broom and clears the entire passage under the arches. He sweeps very diligently and carefully, looks at the cemetery again for two or three minutes, then leaves.
Joe, is that you? (Carlyle’s eloquence again. - V.N.) Well, well! Although you are a rejected witness, unable to “tell exactly” what hands more powerful than human will do to you, you are not completely mired in darkness. Something like a distant ray of light apparently penetrates your vague consciousness, for you mutter: “He was very sorry for me, very!”
Joe is told by the police to “not linger,” and he makes his way out of London, develops smallpox, is given shelter by Esther and Charlie, infects them, and then mysteriously disappears. Nothing is known about him until he reappears in London, broken by illness and hardship. He lies dying in Mr. George's shooting gallery. Dickens compares his heart to a heavy cart. “For the cart, which is so hard to drag, is nearing the end of its journey and is dragging along the rocky ground. For days on end she crawls up steep cliffs, shaky and broken. Another day or two will pass, and when the sun rises, it will no longer see this cart on its thorny path.<...>
Often Mr. Jarndyce comes here, and Allen Woodcourt sits here almost the whole day, and both of them think a lot about how bizarrely Fate (with the brilliant help of Charles Dickens. - V.I.) has woven this pathetic renegade into the network of so many life paths.<...>
Today Joe sleeps or lies unconscious all day, and Allen Woodcourt, who has just arrived, stands next to him and looks at his exhausted face. A little later he quietly sits down on the bed, facing the boy... taps his chest and listens to his heart. The “carriage” has almost stopped, but still it’s barely moving.<...>
- Well, Joe! What happened to you? Do not be afraid.
“It seemed to me,” says Joe, shuddering and looking around, “it seemed to me that I was again in Lonely Tom (the disgusting slum in which he lived. - V.K.). Is there anyone here except you, Mr. Woodcott? (note the significant distortion of the doctor’s surname: Woodcot is a wooden house, that is, a coffin. - V.K).
- Nobody.
“And they didn’t take me back to Lonely Tom?” No, sir?—
Joe closes his eyes and mutters:
- Thank you very much.
Allen looks at him carefully for a few moments, then, bringing his lips close to his ear, he says quietly but clearly:
- Joe, don’t you know a single prayer?
“I never knew anything, sir.”
- Not a single short prayer?
- No, sir. None at all.<...>We never knew anything.<...>
Having fallen asleep or forgotten for a short time, Joe suddenly tries to jump out of bed.
- Stop, Joe! Where are you going?
“It’s time to go to the cemetery, sir,” the boy answers, staring at Allen with crazy eyes.
- Lay down and explain to me. Which cemetery, Joe?
- Where they buried him, he was so kind, very kind, he felt sorry for me. I’ll go to that cemetery, sir, it’s time, and I’ll ask them to put me next to it. If I need to go there, let them bury it.<...>
- You'll make it, Joe. You'll have time.<...>
- Thank you, sir. Thank you. I'll have to get the key to the gate to get me in there, otherwise the gate is locked day and night. And there is a step there - I swept it with my broom... It’s already completely dark, sir. Will it be light?
- It'll be light soon, Joe. Soon. The "cart" is falling apart, and very soon the end of its difficult journey will come.
- Joe, my poor boy!
“Even though it’s dark, I can hear you, sir... but I’m groping... groping... give me your hand.”
- Joe, can you repeat what I say?
“I’ll repeat everything you say, sir, I know it’s good.”
- Our Father...
- Our Father!.., yes, this is a very good word, sir. (Father is a word that he never had to utter. - V.N.)
- Like you are in heaven...
- If you are in heaven... will it be light soon, sir?
- Very soon. Hallowed be your name...
“Hallowed be yours...”
Now listen to the bell-like sound of Carlyle's rhetoric: “A light has shone on a dark, gloomy path. Died! Died, Your Majesty. He is dead, my lords and gentlemen. He is dead, you reverend and unworthy ministers of all cults. Died, you people; but heaven has given you compassion. And so they die around us every day.”
This is a lesson in style, not empathy. The theme of mystery-crime provides the main action of the novel, represents its framework, and holds it together. In the structure of the novel, the themes of the Chancery Court and fate give way to it.
One of the Jarndyce family lines is represented by two sisters. The elder sister was engaged to Boythorne, an eccentric friend of John Jarndyce. Another had an affair with Captain Hawdon and gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock. The older sister deceives the young mother, assuring her that the child died during childbirth. Then, having broken up with her fiancé, Boythorn, and her family and friends, the older sister leaves with the little girl for a small town and raises her in modesty and severity, believing that this is the only thing a child born in sin deserves. The young mother subsequently marries Sir Leicester Dedlock. After many years of living in the late marital prison, the Dedlock family lawyer Tulkinghorn shows Lady Dedlock several new, not very important documents on the Jarndyce case. She is unusually interested in the handwriting, how one piece of paper is whitewashed. She tries to explain her questions about the census taker as simple curiosity, but almost immediately faints. This is enough for Mr. Tulkinghorn to begin his own investigation. He goes on the trail of a scribe, a certain Nemo (which means “Nobody” in Latin), but does not find him alive: Nemo has just died in a squalid closet in Crook’s house from too large a dose of opium, which at that time was more accessible than Now. Not a scrap of paper was found in the room, but Crook managed to steal a bunch of the most important letters even before he brought Tulkinghorn to the tenant’s room. During the investigation into Nemo's death, it turns out that no one knows anything about him. The only witness with whom Nemo exchanged friendly words, the little street sweeper Joe, was rejected by the authorities. Then Mr. Tulkinghorn interrogates him privately.
From a newspaper article, Lady Dedlock learns about Joe and comes to him, dressed in the dress of her French maid. She gives Joe money when he shows her places associated with Nemo (she recognized Captain Hawdon from his handwriting); and most importantly, Joe takes her to the cemetery with the iron gates where Nemo is buried.
Joe's story reaches Tulkinghorn, who confronts him with the maid Ortanz, dressed in the dress that Lady Dedlock used when secretly visiting Joe. Joe recognizes the clothes, but is absolutely sure that this voice, hand and rings do not belong to that first woman. Thus, Tulkinghorn's guess that Joe's mysterious visitor was Lady Dedlock is confirmed. Tulkinghorn continues his investigation, not forgetting to make sure that the police tell Joe to “not linger” because he does not want others to loosen his tongue too. (This is why Joe ends up in Hertfordshire, where he falls ill, and Bucket, with the help of Skimpole, takes him away from Jarndyce's house.) Tulkinghorn gradually identifies Nemo with Captain Hawdon, which is facilitated by the seizure of a letter written by the captain from the trooper George.
When all the loose ends come together, Tulkinghorn tells the story in the presence of Lady Dedlock, as if about some other people. Realizing that the secret is out and that it is in Tulkinghorn's hands, Lady Dedlock comes to the lawyer's room at the Dedlocks' country estate, Chesney Wold, to inquire about his intentions. She is ready to leave her home, her husband and disappear. But Tulkinghorn tells her to stay and continue to play the role of a society woman and the wife of Sir Leicester until he, Tulkinghorn, makes a decision at the right moment. When he later tells Milady that he is going to reveal her past to her husband, she does not return from her walk for a long time, and that same night Tulkinghorn is killed in her own home. Did she kill him?
Sir Leicester hires Detective Bucket to find his attorney's killer. First, Bucket suspects the cavalryman George, who threatened Tulkinghorn in front of witnesses, and arrests him. Then a lot of evidence seems to point to Lady Dedlock, but they all turn out to be false. The real killer is Ortanz, a French maid, she willingly helped Tulkinghorn find out the secret of her former mistress, Lady Dedlock, and then hated him when he did not pay her enough for her services and, moreover, insulted her by threatening her with prison and literally throwing her out of his house .
A certain Mr. Guppy, a law clerk, is also conducting his own investigation. For personal reasons (he is in love with Esther), Guppy tries to get letters from Crook, which he suspects fell into the hands of the old man after the death of Captain Howden. He almost achieves his goal, but Crook dies an unexpected and terrible death. Thus, the letters, and with them the secret of the captain’s love affair with Lady Dedlock and the secret of Esther’s birth, end up in the hands of blackmailers led by old man Smallweed. Although Tulkinghorn bought the letters from them, after his death they strive to extort money from Sir Leicester. Detective Bucket, the third investigator, an experienced police officer, wants to settle the case in favor of the Dedlocks, but at the same time is forced to reveal to Sir Lester the secret of his wife. Sir Leicester loves his wife and cannot help but forgive her. But Lady Dedlock, whom Guppy warned about the fate of the letters, sees this as the punishing hand of Fate and leaves her home forever, not knowing how her husband reacted to her “secret.”
Sir Leicester sends Bucket in hot pursuit. Bucket takes Esther with him, he knows that she is my lady's daughter. In a snowstorm, they trace Lady Dedlock's path to a brickmaker's cottage in Hertfordshire, not far from Bleak House, where Lady Dedlock came to see Hester, not knowing that she had been in London all along. Bucket finds out that shortly before him, two women left the brickmaker's house, one north and the other south, towards London. Bucket and Esther set off in pursuit of the one who went north, and pursue her for a long time in a snowstorm, until the astute Bucket suddenly decides to turn back and look for traces of another woman. The one who went north was wearing Lady Dedlock's dress, but Bucket realizes that the women could have swapped clothes. He's right, but he and Esther show up too late. Lady Dedlock, in a poor peasant's dress, reached London and came to the grave of Captain Hawdon. Clinging to the iron bars of the grate, she dies, exhausted and exposed, having walked a hundred miles without rest through a terrible snowstorm.
From this simple retelling it is clear that the detective plot of the book is inferior to its poetry.
Gustave Flaubert vividly expressed his ideal of a writer, noting that, like the Almighty, a writer in his book should be nowhere and everywhere, invisible and omnipresent. There are several important works of fiction in which the presence of the author is unobtrusive to the extent that Flaubert wanted it, although he himself failed to achieve his ideal in Madame Bovary. But even in works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he is nevertheless dispersed throughout the book and his absence turns into a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, “il brille par son absence” - “it shines with its absence.” In Bleak House we are dealing with one of those authors who, as they say, are not the supreme gods, diffuse in the air and impenetrable, but idle, friendly, compassionate demigods, who visit their books under various masks or send many intermediaries, representatives, henchmen, spies and dummies.
There are three types of such representatives. Let's look at them.
Firstly, the narrator himself, if he narrates in the first person, is “I” - the hero, the support and mover of the story. The narrator can appear in different forms: it can be the author himself or the hero on whose behalf the story is told; or the writer will invent the author he quotes, just as Cervantes invented the Arab historian; or a third-rate character will temporarily become the narrator, after which the writer takes the floor again. The main thing here is that there is a certain “I” on whose behalf the story is being told.
Secondly, a certain representative of the author - I call him a filtering intermediary. Such a filtering mediator may or may not coincide with the narrator. The most typical filter media that I know of are Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Emma Bovary in the ball scene. These are not first-person narrators, but characters spoken about in the third person. They may or may not express the thoughts of the author, but their distinctive property is that everything that happens in the book, any event, any image, any landscape and any character is seen and felt by the main character or heroine, an intermediary who filters the narrative through his own emotions and representation.
The third type is the so-called "perry" - perhaps from "periscope", ignoring the double "r", and perhaps from "parry", "defend", somehow related to the fencing rapier. But this is not the point, since I myself invented this term many years ago. It denotes the author's henchman of the lowest level - a hero or heroes who, throughout the book or in some parts of it, are, perhaps, on duty; whose sole purpose, whose raison d'être is that they visit places that the author wants to show the reader and meet those with whom the author wants to introduce the reader; in chapters like these, Perry hardly has a personality of his own. He has no will, no soul, no heart - nothing, he is just a wandering perry, although, of course, in another part of the book he can restore himself as a person. Perry visits a family only because the author needs to describe the household members. Perry is very helpful. Without a perry, it is sometimes difficult to direct and set the narrative in motion, but it is better to immediately put down the pen than to allow the perry to drag the thread of the story, like a lame insect dragging a dusty cobweb.
In Bleak House, Esther plays all three roles: she is partly the narrator, like a nanny replacing the author - I will say more about this later. She is also, at least in some chapters, a filtering medium who sees events in her own way, although the author's voice often overwhelms her, even when the story is told in the first person; and thirdly, the author uses it, alas, as a perry, moving it from place to place when it is necessary to describe this or that character or event.
There are eight structural features noted in Bleak House.
I. ESTHER'S TALE
In the third chapter, Esther, raised by her godmother (Lady Dedlock's sister), first appears as a narrator, and here Dickens makes a mistake for which he will later have to pay. He begins the story of Esther in ostensibly childish language (“my dear little doll” is a simple device), but the author very soon sees that this is an unsuitable means for a difficult story, and we very soon see how his own powerful and colorful style breaks through the pseudo-childish speech, as here, for example: “Dear old doll! I was a very shy girl - I didn’t often dare to open my mouth to say a word, and I didn’t open my heart to anyone except her. You want to cry when you remember how joyful it was when you returned home from school, run upstairs to your room, shout: “Dear, faithful doll, I knew you were waiting for me!”, sit on the floor and, leaning against the armrest of a huge chair, telling her everything I've seen since we broke up. Since childhood, I was quite observant, but I didn’t understand everything right away, no! — I just silently watched what was happening around me, and I wanted to understand it as best as possible. I can't think fast. But when I love someone very tenderly, I seem to see everything more clearly. However, it’s possible that it only seems to me because I’m vain.”
Notice that in these first pages of Esther's story there are no rhetorical figures or living comparisons. But the child’s language begins to lose ground, and in the scene where Esther and her godmother are sitting by the fireplace, Dickens’s alliteration 8 introduces confusion into Esther’s schoolboy style of narration.
When her godmother, Miss Barbery (actually her aunt), dies and the lawyer Kenge takes up the case, Hester's story style is absorbed into Dickens's style. “Haven't you heard of the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce lawsuit? - Mr. Kenge said, looking at me over his glasses and carefully turning their case with some caressing movements.
It is clear what is happening: Dickens begins to paint the delightful Kenge, the insinuating, energetic Kenge, the Eloquent Kenge (that is his nickname) and completely forgets that all this is supposedly written by a naive girl. And already on the next few pages we meet Dickensian figures of speech that crept into her story, abundant comparisons and the like. “She (Mrs. Rachel. - V.N.) touched my forehead with a cold farewell kiss, which fell on me like a drop of melted snow from a stone porch - it was bitterly cold that day - and I felt such pain...” or “ I... began to look at the trees covered with frost, which reminded me of beautiful crystals; onto the fields, completely flat and white under a veil of snow that had fallen the day before; in the sun, so red, but radiating so little warmth; onto the ice, casting a dark metallic sheen where skaters and people gliding around the rink without skates swept the snow off it.” Or Hester’s description of Mrs. Jellyby’s unkempt attire: “we could not help but notice that her dress was not buttoned at the back and the corset lacing was visible, like the lattice wall of a garden gazebo.” The tone and irony of Pip Jellyby's head stuck between the bars is clearly Dickensian: “I... went up to the poor little fellow, who was one of the most wretched little things I ever saw; stuck between two iron bars, he, all red, screamed in a voice that was not his own, scared and angry, while the milk seller and the parish overseer, motivated by the best intentions, tried to pull him up by his legs, apparently believing that this would help his skull shrink. Having taken a closer look at the boy (but first calming him down), I noticed that his head, like all babies, was large, which means his body would probably fit through where she had gotten through, and I said that the best way to free the child was to push him through head first. The milkman and the parish overseer began to carry out my proposal with such zeal that the poor thing would have immediately fallen down if I had not held him by his apron, and Richard and Mr. Guppy had not come running into the courtyard through the kitchen to catch the boy when he was pushed through.
Dickens’s bewitching eloquence is especially felt in such passages as Hester’s story about meeting Lady Dedlock, her mother: “I explained to her as best I could then and as much as I can remember now, for my excitement and despair were so great that I myself could hardly understood my words, although every word spoken by my mother, whose voice sounded so unfamiliar and sad to me, was indelibly imprinted in my memory - after all, as a child I did not learn to love and recognize this voice, and it never lulled me, never blessed me , never gave me hope - I repeat, I explained to her, or tried to explain, that Mr. Jarndyce, who had always been the best of fathers to me, could give her some advice and support her. But my mother answered: no, it is impossible; no one can help her. A desert lies before her, and through this desert she must walk alone.”
By the middle of the book, Dickens, narrating on behalf of Esther, writes more relaxed, more flexible, in a more traditional manner than in his own name. This, and the lack of structured descriptions at the beginning of the chapters, are their only stylistic differences. Esther and the author gradually develop different points of view, reflected in their style of writing: on the one hand, here is Dickens with his musical, humorous, metaphorical, oratorical, rumbling stylistic effects; and here is Esther, beginning the chapters smoothly and with restraint. But in the description of Westminster Hall at the end of the Jarndyce litigation (I quoted him), when it turns out that the entire fortune was spent on legal costs, Dickens almost completely merges with Hester.
Stylistically, the entire book is a gradual, imperceptible progression towards their complete fusion. And when they paint a verbal portrait or convey a conversation, no difference is felt between them.
Seven years after the incident, as it becomes known from chapter sixty-four, Esther writes her story, which contains thirty-three chapters, that is, half of the entire novel, consisting of sixty-seven chapters. Amazing memory! I must say that, despite the excellent construction of the novel, the main flaw was that Esther was allowed to tell part of the story. I wouldn't let her anywhere near it!
II. ESTER'S APPEARANCE
Hester is so reminiscent of her mother that Mr. Guppy is struck by the inexplicable resemblance when, during a country trip, he visits Chesney Wold and sees a portrait of Lady Dedlock. Mr. George also pays attention to Esther's appearance, not realizing that he sees a resemblance to his deceased friend Captain Hawdon, her father. And Joe, who is told “not to linger” and wearily wanders through the weather to find shelter in the Bleak House, the frightened Joe is hardly convinced that Esther is not the same lady to whom he showed Nemo’s house and his grave. Subsequently, Esther writes in chapter thirty-one that she had a bad feeling the day Joe fell ill, an omen that completely came true, since Charlie contracts smallpox from Joe, and when Esther nurses her (the girl’s appearance is not affected), she falls ill herself and when she finally recovers, her face is riddled with ugly pockmarks, which have completely changed her appearance.
Having recovered, Esther notices that all the mirrors have been removed from her room, and understands why. And when she arrives at Mr. Boythorne's estate in Lincolnshire, next to Chesney Wold, she finally decides to look at herself. “After all, I have never seen myself in a mirror and have not even asked for my mirror to be returned to me. I knew that this was cowardice that needed to be overcome, but I always told myself that I would “start a new life” when I arrived where I was now. That's why I wanted to be alone and that's why, now alone in my room, I said: "Esther, if you want to be happy, if you want to have the right to pray to maintain spiritual purity, you, dear one, need to keep your word." . And I was determined to restrain him; but first I sat down for a while to remember all the benefits bestowed upon me. Then I prayed and thought a little more.
My hair was not cut; and yet they have been threatened with this danger more than once. They were long and thick. I took them down, combed them from the back of my head to my forehead, covering my face with them, and went to the mirror that stood on the dressing table. It was covered with thin muslin. I threw it aside and looked at myself for a minute through the curtain of my own hair, so that I saw only them. Then she threw back her hair and, looking at her reflection, calmed down - it looked at me so serenely. I have changed a lot, oh, very, very! At first my face seemed so alien to me that I would probably have retreated back, shielding myself from it with my hands, if it had not been for the expression that calmed me, which I have already mentioned. But soon I got a little used to my new appearance and better understood how great the change was. She was not what I expected, but I didn’t imagine anything definite, which means that any change had to amaze me.
I have never been and did not consider myself a beauty, and yet before I was completely different. All this has now disappeared. But Providence showed me great mercy - if I cried, it was not for long and not very bitter tears, and when I braided my hair for the night, I was already completely reconciled with my fate.”
She admits to herself that she could love Allen Woodcourt and be devoted to him, but now she must end this. She is worried about the flowers that he once gave her, and she dried them. “In the end, I realized that I have the right to keep the flowers if I treasure them only in memory of what is irrevocably passed and ended, which I should never remember again with other feelings. I hope no one calls this stupid pettiness. It all meant a lot to me." This prepares the reader for her later acceptance of Jarndyce's proposal. She was determined to give up all dreams of Woodcourt.
Dickens deliberately leaves this scene unfinished, because there must remain some ambiguity about Hester's changed face, so that the reader is not discouraged at the end of the book, when Hester becomes Woodcourt's bride and when, in the very last pages, doubt creeps in, charmingly expressed, whether Hester has changed at all. externally. Esther sees her face in the mirror, but the reader does not see it, and no details are given later. When the inevitable meeting between mother and daughter takes place and Lady Dedlock presses her to her chest, kisses, cries, etc., the most important thing about the similarity is said in Esther’s curious reasoning: “I ... thought in a fit of gratitude to Providence: “How good it is that I have changed so much, which means I will never be able to disgrace her with even a shadow of resemblance to her... how good it is that no one now, looking at us, will think that there could be a blood relationship between us.” All this is so unlikely (within the confines of the novel) that you begin to wonder whether there was a need to disfigure the poor girl for a rather abstract purpose; Besides, can smallpox destroy family resemblance? Ada presses her friend’s “pockmarked face” “to her lovely cheek” - and this is the most that the reader is given to see in the changed Esther.
It may seem that the writer is somewhat bored with this topic, because Esther soon says (for him) that she will no longer mention her appearance. And when she meets with her friends, there is no mention of her appearance, except for a few remarks about the impression she makes on people - from the surprise of a village child to Richard's wistful remark: "Still the same sweet girl!" when she raises a veil that was first worn in public. Subsequently, this theme plays a decisive role in the relationship with Mr. Guppy, who abandons his love when he sees Esther - which means she must still be strikingly disfigured. But perhaps her appearance will change for the better? Perhaps the pockmarks will disappear? We keep guessing about this. Even later, she and Ada visit Richard, he notices that “her compassionate sweet face is still the same as in the old days,” she shakes her head, smiling, and he repeats: “Exactly the same as in the old days,” and we begin to wonder whether the beauty of her soul does not overshadow the ugly traces of the disease. This is where I think her appearance somehow begins to straighten out - at least in the reader's imagination. Towards the end of this scene, Hester speaks "of her old, ugly face"; but “ugly” still does not mean “disfigured.” Moreover, I believe that at the very end of the novel, when seven years have passed and Esther is already twenty-eight, the pockmarks have gradually disappeared. Esther is busy preparing for the arrival of Ada with baby Richard and Mr. Jarndyce, then she sits quietly on the porch. When Allen, who has returned, asks what she is doing there, she replies: “I’m almost ashamed to talk about it, but I’ll say it anyway. I thought about my old face... about what it once was.
- And what did you think about him, my diligent bee? - Allen asked.
“I thought that you still couldn’t love me more than you do now, even if it remained the way it was.”
- What was it like once upon a time? - Allen said with a laugh.
- Well, yes, of course, as it once was.
“My dear Bustle,” Allen said and took my arm, “do you ever look in the mirror?”
- You know I look; I saw it myself.
“And don’t you see that you have never been as beautiful as you are now?”
I didn't see this; Yes, I probably don’t see it even now. But I see that my daughters are very pretty, that my beloved friend is very beautiful, that my husband is very handsome, and my guardian has the brightest, kindest face in the world, so they don’t need my beauty at all... even if we allow..."
III. APPEARING IN THE RIGHT PLACE ALLEN WOODCOURT
In the eleventh chapter, the “dark young man,” a surgeon, first appears at the deathbed of Nemo (Captain Hawdon, Esther’s father). Two chapters later, a very tender and important scene occurs in which Richard and Ada fall in love. Immediately, to tie everything together well, the dark-skinned young surgeon Woodcourt appears as a guest for dinner, and Esther, not without sadness, finds him “very smart and pleasant.” Later, when it had just been hinted that Jarndyce, the white-haired Jarndyce, was secretly in love with Hester, Woodcourt reappeared before leaving for China. He's leaving for a very long time. He leaves flowers for Esther. Then Miss Flight will show Esther a newspaper article about Woodcourt's heroism during the shipwreck. When smallpox disfigures Hester's face, she renounces her love for Woodcourt. Then Esther and Charlie go to the port of Deal to offer Richard her small inheritance on behalf of Ada, and Esther meets Woodcourt. The meeting is preceded by a delightful description of the sea, and the artistic power of this description will perhaps reconcile the reader with such an extraordinary coincidence. The indefinably changed Esther notes: “He was so sorry for me that he could hardly speak,” and at the end of the chapter: “In that last look I read his deep compassion for me. And I was glad about it. I now looked at my old self the way the dead look at the living if they ever visit the earth again. I was glad that I was remembered with tenderness, affectionately pitied and not completely forgotten” - a lovely lyrical tone, Fanny Price comes to mind.
Another amazing coincidence: Woodcourt meets the brickmaker's wife in Lonely Tom and - another coincidence - meets Joe there, along with this woman, also concerned about his fate. Woodcourt brings the sick Joe to George's shooting gallery. The superbly written scene of Joe's death once again makes us forget about the pretense that arranged our meeting with Joe with the help of Woodcourt-Perry. In chapter fifty-one, Woodcourt visits lawyer Vholes, then Richard. A curious thing happens here: Esther writes the chapter, but she was not present during the conversations of Woodcourt with Vholes or Woodcourt with Richard, described in great detail. The question is how she knew what happened in both cases. The astute reader must inevitably come to the conclusion that she learned these details from Woodcourt, becoming his wife: she could not have known about what happened in such detail if Woodcourt had not been a person close enough to her. In other words, a good reader should guess that she will end up marrying Woodcourt and will learn all these details from him.
IV. THE STRANGE COURTSHIP OF JARNDYCE
When Hester travels in a carriage to London after the death of Miss Barbery, an unknown gentleman tries to console her. He seems to know about Mrs. Rachel, Esther's nanny, who was hired by Miss Barbary and who parted with Esther so indifferently, and this gentleman does not seem to approve of her. When he offers Esther a piece of thick sugar-crusted cake and a superb foie gras and she refuses, saying it's all too rich for her, he mutters, "He's screwed up again!" - and throws both bags out the window with the same ease with which he later gives up his own happiness. Later we learn that it was the sweetest, kindest and fabulously rich John Jarndyce, who, like a magnet, attracted people to himself - unhappy children, and swindlers, and deceivers, and fools, and false philanthropic ladies, and madmen. If Don Quixote had come to Dickens's London, I believe that his nobility and kind heart would have attracted people in the same way.
Already in the seventeenth chapter, for the first time there is a hint that Jarndyce, the gray-haired Jarndyce, is in love with Esther, who is twenty-one, and is keeping quiet about it. The theme of Don Quixote is announced by Lady Dedlock when she meets a group of guests of her neighbor, Mr. Boythorne, and the young men are introduced to her. “You are reputed to be the disinterested Don Quixote, but beware lest you lose your reputation if you patronize only such beauties as this,” said Lady Dedlock, again turning to Mr. Jarndyce over her shoulder.” Her remark refers to the fact that, at Jarndyce's request, the Lord Chancellor appointed him guardian of Richard and Ada, although the essence of the litigation is how exactly to divide the fortune between them. Therefore, Lady Dedlock speaks of Jarndyce's quixoticism, meaning that he gives refuge and support to those who are legally his opponents. Esther's guardianship is his own decision, made after receiving a letter from Miss Barbery, Lady Dedlock's sister and Esther's own aunt.
Some time after Esther's illness, John Jarndyce comes to the decision to write her a letter with a proposal. But - and this is the whole point - one gets the impression that he, a man at least thirty years older than Esther, is offering her marriage, wanting to protect her from a cruel world, that he will not change in his attitude towards her, remaining her friend and not becoming beloved. Jarndyce's quixoticism lies not only in this, if my impression is correct, but also in the whole plan of preparing Hester for the receipt of a letter, the contents of which she may well guess and for which Charlie should be sent after a week of reflection:
“Ever since that winter day when you and I were riding in the mail carriage, you have made me change, my dear. But, most importantly, since then you have done me an infinite amount of good.
- Oh, guardian, and you? What have you not done for me since then!
“Well,” he said, “there’s nothing to remember about that now.”
- But is it possible to forget this? “Yes, Esther,” he said softly but seriously, “now we must forget it... forget it for a while.” All you need to remember is that nothing can change me now - I will forever remain the way you know me. Can you be sure of this, my dear?
- Can; “I’m sure,” I said.
“That’s a lot,” he said. - This is all. But I shouldn't take you at your word. I will not write what I think until you are convinced that nothing can change me, as you know me. If you have even the slightest doubt, I will not write anything. If, after mature reflection, you are confirmed in this confidence, send Charlie to me “for a letter” in exactly a week. But don't send it unless you're completely sure. Remember, in this case, as in all others, I rely on your truthfulness. If you don't have confidence, don't send Charlie!
“Guardian,” I responded, “but I’m already sure.” I can no more change my belief than you can change my mind. I'll send Charlie for a letter.
He shook my hand and didn’t say another word.”
For an older man with deep feelings for a young woman, proposing on such terms is truly an act of self-denial and tragic temptation. Esther, for her part, accepts him quite innocently: “His generosity is higher than the change that disfigured me and the shame I inherited”; Dickens will gradually eliminate the change that disfigured Esther in the last chapters. In fact, and this does not seem to occur to any of the interested parties - neither Esther Summerson, nor John Jarndyce, nor Charles Dickens - the marriage may not be as good for Esther as it seems, since this unequal marriage will deprive Esther of normal motherhood and, on the other hand, will make her love for another man illegal and immoral. Perhaps we hear an echo of the “birds in a cage” theme when Hester, shedding happy and grateful tears, addresses her reflection in the mirror: “When you become the mistress of Bleak House, you will have to be as cheerful as a bird. However, you always need to be cheerful; so let’s start now.”
The relationship between Jarndyce and Woodcourt becomes apparent when Keddie falls ill:
“You know what,” the guardian said quickly, “we need to invite Woodcourt.”
I like the detour he uses - what is this, a vague premonition? At this moment, Woodcourt is preparing to leave for America, where rejected lovers often go in French and English novels. After about ten chapters, we learn that Mrs. Woodcourt, the mother of a young doctor, who earlier, guessing about her son’s attachment to Esther, tried to break up their relationship, has changed for the better, she is no longer so grotesque and talks less about her ancestry. Dickens prepares an acceptable mother-in-law for his female readers. Note the nobility of Jarndyce, who offers Mrs. Woodcourt to live with Esther - Allen will be able to visit them both. We also learn that Woodcourt does not go to America after all, but becomes a country doctor in England and treats the poor.
Hester then learns from Woodcourt that he loves her, that her “pockmarked face” has not changed a bit for him. Too late! She gave her word to Jarndyce and thinks that the marriage is being postponed only because of her mourning for her mother. But Dickens and Jarndyce already have a great surprise in store. The scene as a whole cannot be called successful, but it may please the sentimental reader.
True, it is not entirely clear whether Woodcourt knew about Esther’s engagement at that moment, because if he knew, he would hardly have talked about his love, even in such an elegant form. However, Dickens and Esther (as the narrator of what has already happened) are cheating - they know that Jarndyce will nobly disappear. So Esther and Dickens are going to have a little fun at the reader's expense. She tells Jarndyce that she is ready to become "Mistress of Bleak House." “Well, let’s say next month,” Jarndyce replies. He travels to Yorkshire to help Woodcourt find a home. He then asks Esther to come see what he has chosen. The bomb explodes. The name of the house is the same - Bleak House, and Hester will be its mistress, since the noble Jarndyce cedes her to Woodcourt. This is well prepared, and there is a reward: Mrs. Woodcourt, who knew everything, now approves of the union. Finally, we learn that Woodcourt opened his heart with Jarndyce's consent. After Richard's death, there was a faint hope that John Jarndyce could still find a young wife - Ada, Richard's widow. But, one way or another, Jarndyce is the symbolic guardian of all the unfortunate people in the novel.
V. Figureheads and disguises
To make sure that the lady who asked Joe about Nemo was Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn shows Joe my lady's dismissed maid, Ortanz, under a veil, and he recognizes the clothes. But the hand covered with rings is not the same and the wrong voice. Subsequently, it will be quite difficult for Dickens to make the murder of Tulkinghorn by the maid believable, but in any case the connection between them is established. Now the detectives know that it was Lady Dedlock who tried to find out something about Nemo from Joe. Another masquerade: Miss Flight, visiting Hester, who is recovering from smallpox in Bleak House, reports that a veiled lady (Lady Dedlock) inquired about her health at the brickmaker's house. (Lady Dedlock, we know, it is now known that Hester is her daughter - knowledge breeds responsiveness.) The veiled lady took as a souvenir the scarf with which Hester once covered the dead baby - this is a symbolic act. This is not the first time Dickens uses Miss Flight to kill two birds with one stone: firstly, to amuse the reader and, secondly, to provide him with clear information that is not at all in the spirit of this heroine.
Detective Bucket has several guises, and far from the worst of them is playing the fool under the guise of friendliness with the Bagnets, while keeping an eye on George, so that later, when he goes out with him, he takes him to jail. A great master of masquerade, Bucket is able to unravel someone else's masquerade. When Bucket and Hester find Lady Dedlock dead at the cemetery gates, Bucket, in his best Sherlock Holmes style, tells how he realized that Lady Dedlock had exchanged clothes with Jenny, the brickmaker's wife, and decided to turn to London. Esther does not understand anything until she lifts the “heavy head” of the deceased. “And I saw my mother, cold, dead!” Melodramatic, but extremely well staged.
VI. FALSE AND TRUE WAYS TO THE SOLUTION
It may seem that with the thickening of the theme of fog in the previous chapters, Bleak House, the home of John Jarndyce, will appear as the embodiment of dull gloom. But no - with the help of a masterful plot device we are transported to bright sunlight and the fog temporarily recedes. Bleak House is a beautiful, joyful home. The good reader will remember that the key to this was given earlier, in the Court of Chancery: “The Jarndyce in question,” began the Lord Chancellor, still turning over the pages of the file, “is that Jarndyce who owns Bleak House?”
“Yes, my lord, the same one who owns Bleak House,” confirmed Mr. Kenge.
“It’s an uncomfortable name,” remarked the Lord Chancellor.
“But now it is a comfortable home, my lord,” said Mr. Kenge.”
When the wards are waiting in London for a trip to Bleak House, Richard tells Ada that he vaguely remembers Jarndyce: “I remember this kind of rudely good-natured, red-cheeked man.” However, the warmth and abundance of sunshine in the house turns out to be a wonderful surprise.
The threads leading to Tulkinghorn's killer are masterfully intertwined. It is excellent that Dickens makes Mr. George make the remark that a French woman goes to his shooting gallery. (Ortanz would benefit from shooting lessons, although most readers won't make the connection.) What about Lady Dedlock? “Oh, if only it were so!” - Lady Dedlock mentally responds to the remark of her cousin Volumnia, pouring out her feelings about Tulkinghorn’s inattention to her: “I was even ready to think if he was dead?” It is this thought of Lady Dedlock that will alert the reader upon the news of the murder of Tulkinghorn. The reader may be deceived into thinking that Lady Dedlock killed the lawyer, but the reader of detective stories likes to be deceived.
After a conversation with Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn goes to bed, and she rushes around her chambers in confusion. It is hinted that he may soon die (“And when the stars go out and the pale dawn, looking into the turret, sees his face, so old that it never appears during the day, it truly seems as if the gravedigger with a spade has already been called and will soon begin to dig the grave.” ), and his death for the deceived reader will now be firmly connected with Lady Dedlock; while for the time being, nothing is heard of Ortanz, the real murderer.
Ortanz comes to Tulkinghorn and announces his displeasure. She is not satisfied with the payment for appearing in my lady's dress in front of Joe; she hates Lady Dedlock; she wants to get a good place in a rich house. None of this is very convincing, and Dickens's attempts to make her speak English in a French way are simply ridiculous. Meanwhile, this is a tigress, despite the fact that her reaction to Tulkinghorn’s threats to put her under lock and key, in prison, if she continues to bother him, is still unknown.
Having warned Lady Dedlock that the dismissal of the maid Rose violates their agreement to maintain the status quo and that now he must tell Sir Leicester her secret, Tulkinghorn goes home - towards death, Dickens hints. Lady Dedlock leaves the house to wander the lunar streets - it turns out that after Tulkinghorn. The reader realizes: this is a stretch. The author is misleading me; the real killer is someone else. Maybe Mr. George? He may be a good person, but he has a violent temper. Moreover, at the Begnets' very boring birthday party, Mr. George appears pale and upset. (Here! - the reader notes.) George explains his paleness by the fact that Joe died, but the reader is full of doubts. Then George is arrested, Hester and Jarndyce, along with the Begnets, visit him in prison. Here the story takes an unexpected turn: George describes the woman he met on the stairs of Tulkinghorn's house on the night of the crime. In posture and height she resembled... Esther. She was wearing a wide black mantilla with fringes. The dull reader immediately decides: George is too good to commit a crime. Of course, this was done by Lady Dedlock, who looked extremely like her daughter. But the astute reader will object: after all, we already know another woman who quite successfully portrayed Lady Dedlock.
Here one of the minor secrets is revealed.
Mrs. Begnet knows who George's mother is and goes to Chesney Wold to get her. (Both mothers are in the same place - the similarity of the position of Esther and George.)
Tulkinghorn's Funeral is a magnificent chapter, it rises like a wave above the previous ones, which were rather flat. At Tulkinghorn's funeral, Detective Bucket watches his wife and his lodger from a closed carriage (who is his lodger? Ortanz!). Bucket's role in the plot increases. He holds attention until the very end of the mystery theme. Sir Leicester is still a pompous fool, although the blow will change him. There is an amusing Sherlock Holmesian conversation between Bucket and a tall footman, during which it turns out that on the night of the crime Lady Dedlock was absent from home for several hours, dressed in the same way as, judging by George's description, the lady he met on the stairs at Tulkinghorne House around that time when the crime was committed. (Since Bucket knows that Tulkinghorn was killed by Ortanz, not Lady Dedlock, this scene is a deliberate deception of the reader.) Whether or not the reader believes at this point that Lady Dedlock is the murderer is up to him. Generally speaking, the author of a detective novel is not supposed to name the real murderer in anonymous letters (as it turns out, they are sent by Ortanz accusing Lady Dedlock). Finally, Ortanz falls into the nets set by Bucket. Bucket's wife, whom he instructed to keep an eye on the tenant, finds in her room a description of the Dedlock house in Chesney Wold, the article is missing a scrap from which the wad for the pistol was made, and the pistol itself is caught in the pond where Ortanz and Mrs. Bucket went on Sunday walk. In another scene, the reader is deliberately deceived. Having gotten rid of the blackmailers, the Smallweed family, Bucket, in a conversation with Sir Leicester, melodramatically declares: “The person who will have to be arrested is now here in the house ... and I am going to take her into custody in your presence.” The only woman in the house, as the reader assumes, is Lady Dedlock, but Bucket means Ortanz, who, unbeknownst to the reader, came with him, expecting to receive a reward. Lady Dedlock does not know that the crime has been solved, and flees, pursued by Hester and Bucket, and then she will be found dead in London, at the gates of the cemetery where Captain Hawdon is buried.
VII. UNEXPECTED CONNECTIONS
A curious feature that recurs throughout the narrative and is common to many mystery novels is the “unexpected connection.” So:
1. Miss Barbary, who raises Esther, turns out to be Lady Dedlock's sister, and later the woman whom Boythorne loved.
2. Esther turns out to be Lady Dedlock's daughter.
3. Nemo (Captain Hawdon) turns out to be Esther's father.
4. Mr. George turns out to be the son of Mrs. Rouncewell, the Dedlocks' housekeeper. It is also revealed that George was a friend of Captain Hawdon.
5. Mrs. Chadband turns out to be Mrs. Rachel, Hester's former maid in her aunt's house.
6. Ortanz turns out to be Bucket's mysterious resident.
7. Crook turns out to be Mrs. Smallweed's brother.
VIII. BAD AND NOT SO GOOD HEROES BECOME BETTER
One of the turning points of the novel is Esther's request to Guppy to stop caring about her interests. She says: “I know my origins, and I can assure you that you will not be able to improve my lot by any investigation.” I think the author intended to exclude Guppy's line (already half rendered meaningless by the disappearance of the letters) so as not to confuse it with the Tulkinghorn theme. “His face became a little ashamed” - this does not correspond to Guppy’s character. Dickens here makes this rogue better than he is. It's funny that while his shock at the sight of Hester's disfigured face and his defection show that he did not truly love her (losing one point), his reluctance to marry an ugly girl, even if she turned out to be a rich aristocrat, is a point in his favor. However, this is a weak piece.
Sir Leicester learns the terrible truth from Bucket. “Covering his face with his hands, Sir Leicester, with a groan, asks Mr. Bucket to be silent for a while. But soon he takes his hands away from his face, maintaining his dignified appearance and outward calm so well - although his face is as white as his hair - that Mr. Bucket even becomes a little scared. This is the turning point for Sir Leicester when he - for better or worse artistically - ceases to be a mannequin and becomes a suffering human being. This transformation cost him a blow. Having recovered, Sir Leicester forgives Lady Dedlock, revealing himself to be a loving man capable of noble deeds, and he is deeply concerned about the scene with George, as well as the anticipation of his wife’s return. Sir Leicester's "declaration" when he says that his attitude towards his wife has not changed, now "produces a deep, touching impression." A little more - and before us is a double of John Jarndyce. Now an aristocrat is as good as a good commoner!
What do we mean when we talk about narrative form? First of all, this is its structure, that is, the development of a certain history, its vicissitudes; the choice of characters and how the author uses them; their interconnection, various themes, thematic lines and their intersections; various plot perturbations in order to produce one or another direct or indirect action; preparation of results and consequences. In short, we mean the calculated layout of a work of art. This is the structure.
The other side of the form is style, in other words, the way this structure operates: this is the author’s manner, even his mannerisms, all sorts of tricks; and if it is a vivid style, what kind of imagery does it use - and how successfully; if the author resorts to comparisons, then how he uses and diversifies metaphors and similarities - separately or together. The effectiveness of style is the key to literature, the magic key to Dickens, Gogol, Flaubert, Tolstoy, to all the great masters.
Form (structure and style) = content; why and how = what. The first thing we notice about Dickens's style is his extremely emotional imagery, his art of arousing an emotional response.
1. VIBRANT PERFORMANCE (WITH AND WITHOUT RHETORIC)
Dazzling flashes of imagery happen from time to time - they cannot be extended - and now beautiful pictorial details accumulate again. When Dickens needs to convey certain information to the reader through conversation or reflection, imagery, as a rule, is not striking. But there are magnificent fragments, for example, the apotheosis of the theme of fog in the description of the Supreme Court of Chancery: “The day turned out to be fitting for the Lord Chancellor - on such, and only on such a day, it befits him to sit here - and the Lord Chancellor sits today with a foggy halo around head, in a soft fence of crimson cloth and draperies, listening to a portly lawyer with lush sideburns and a thin voice who turned to him, reading an endless summary of the court case, and contemplating the window of the upper light, behind which he sees fog and only fog.”
“The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new toy horse as soon as the Jarndyce case was resolved, managed to grow up, get a real horse and ride off to the next world.” The court decides that the two wards will live with their uncle. This is the full fruit, the result of a magnificent accumulation of natural and human fog in the first chapter. Thus, the main characters (the two wards and Jarndyce) are presented to the reader, not yet named, in an abstract way. They seem to emerge from the fog, the author pulls them out of there before they disappear into it again, and the chapter ends.
The first description of Chesney Wold and its owner, Lady Dedlock, is truly brilliant: “There is a real flood in Lincolnshire. The bridge in the park collapsed - one of its arches was washed away and carried away by the flood. The lowland around has turned into a dammed river half a mile wide, and sad trees stick out from the water like islands, and the water is all in bubbles - after all, the rain pours and pours day after day. At Milady Dedlock's "estate" the boredom was unbearable. The weather was so damp, it poured so much for many days and nights that the trees must have been damp through and through, and when the forester cuts and chops them down, there is no sound or cracking - it seems as if an ax is hitting something soft. The deer are probably wet to the bone, and there are puddles in their tracks where they pass. The shot sounds muffled in this humid air, and the smoke from the gun reaches like a lazy cloud towards the green hill with a grove on top, against which a net of rain clearly stands out. The view from the windows in Milady Dedlock's chambers resembles either a picture painted with lead paint or a drawing made in Chinese ink. The vases on the stone terrace in front of the house fill with rainwater all day, and all night you can hear it overflowing and falling in heavy drops - drip-drip-drip - onto the wide flagstone flooring, which has long been nicknamed the "Ghost Walk". On Sunday you go to the church that stands in the middle of the park, you see that it is all moldy inside, cold sweat appears on the oak pulpit, and you feel such a smell, such a taste in your mouth, as if you were entering the crypt of Dedlock's ancestors. One day, Milady Dedlock (a childless woman), looking in the early twilight from her boudoir at the gatekeeper's guardhouse, saw the reflection of a fireplace flame on the glass of the lattice windows, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a woman catching up with a child who had run out in the rain to the gate to meet a man in an oilskin raincoat, shiny with moisture, saw it and lost peace of mind. And Milady Dedlock now says that she is “bored to death” of all this.” Rain in Chesney Wold is the village counterpart of London fog; and the gatekeeper's child is a foreshadowing of the children's theme.
When Mr. Boythorne meets Hester and her friends, there is a delightful description of the sleepy, sun-drenched town: “Evening was approaching when we rode into the town where we were to leave the passenger carriage - a nondescript town with a church steeple, a market square, a stone chapel in this square, the only street brightly lit by the sun, a pond into which, looking for coolness, an old nag wandered, and very few inhabitants who, having nothing to do, lay or stood with their hands folded in the cold, finding somewhere a little shade. After the rustling of the leaves that accompanied us all the way, after the waving grain bordering it, this town seemed to us the most stuffy and sleepy of all the provincial towns in England.”
Having fallen ill with smallpox, Esther experiences painful sensations: “Do I dare to talk about those even more difficult days when in a huge dark space I imagined some kind of flaming circle - either a necklace, or a ring, or a closed chain of stars, one of the links of which I was! Those were the days when I prayed only to break out of the circle - it was so inexplicably scary and painful to feel like a part of this terrible vision!
When Hester sends Charlie for a letter to Mr. Jarndyce, the description of the house gives practical results; the house operates: “When the evening appointed by him arrived, as soon as I was left alone, I said to Charlie:
“Charlie, go knock on Mr. Jarndyce’s door and tell him you came from me “for a letter.”
Charlie went down the stairs, up the stairs, walked along the corridors, and I listened to her steps, and that evening the winding passages and passages in this old house seemed prohibitively long to me; then she walked back, along the corridors, down the stairs, up the stairs, and finally brought the letter.
“Put it on the table, Charlie,” I said. Charlie put the letter on the table and went to bed, and I sat looking at the envelope, but not touching it, and thought about many things.”
When Esther goes to the seaport of Deal to see Richard, a description of the harbor follows: “But the fog began to rise like a curtain, and we saw many ships, the proximity of which we had not previously suspected. I don’t remember how many there were, although the servant told us the number of ships in the roadstead. There were also large ships there - especially one that had just arrived home from India; and when the sun began to shine, peeking out from behind the clouds, and cast light reflections on the dark sea that seemed like silvery lakes, the changing play of light and shadow on the ships, the bustle of small boats scurrying between them and the shore, life and movement on the ships and in everything, what surrounded them - it all became extraordinarily beautiful" 9.
It may seem to others that such descriptions are a trifle that does not deserve attention, but literature is all made up of such trifles. In fact, literature does not consist of great ideas, but each time of revelations; it is not philosophical schools that form it, but talented individuals. Literature is not about something - it itself is something, its essence is in itself. Literature does not exist outside of a masterpiece. The description of the harbor in Deal is given at the moment when Hester travels to this city to see Richard, whose capriciousness, so inappropriate in his nature, and the evil fate hanging over him bother Hester and prompts her to help him. Over her shoulder, Dickens shows us the harbor. There are ships there, lots of boats that appear as if by magic when the fog rises. Among them, as already mentioned, is a huge merchant ship that arrived from India: “... and when the sun shone, peeking out from behind the clouds, and cast light reflections on the dark sea, which seemed like silvery lakes...”. Let's stop here: can we imagine this? Of course, we can, and we imagine it with the thrill of recognition, because in comparison with the usual literary sea, Dickens first grasped these silvery lakes on the dark blue with the naive, sensual gaze of a real artist, saw them, and immediately put them into words. Even more precisely: without words there would be no this picture; If you listen to the soft, rustling, flowing sound of the consonants in this description, it will become clear that the image needed a voice to sound. Dickens goes on to show the "variable play of light and shadow on the ships" - and I think it is impossible to select and put words side by side better than he does to convey the subtle shadows and silvery light in this delightful seascape. And to those who think that all this magic is just a game, a charming game that can be erased without harming the story, I would like to point out to them that this is a story: a ship from India in these unique scenery returns - has already returned! - Doctor Woodcourt's Esther, they are about to meet. And this landscape with silvery shadows, with trembling lakes of light and a confusion of sparkling boats will in retrospect be filled with wonderful excitement, the delight of meeting, the roar of applause. This is exactly the reception Dickens expected for his book.
2. STRAPPY LIST OF FINE DETAILS
This is exactly how the novel begins with the already quoted passage: “London. The autumn court session - the "Michael's Day Session" - has recently begun... Unbearable November weather.<...>The dogs are so covered in mud that you can’t even see them. The horses are hardly better - they are splashed up to their eyecups.<...>Fog is everywhere."
When Nemo is found dead: “The parish overseer goes around all the local shops and apartments to question the residents... Someone saw the policeman smile at the tavern servant.<...>In shrill childish voices, she [the audience] accuses the parish overseer... In the end, the policeman finds it necessary to defend the honor of the guardian of the dean...” (Carlyle also uses this type of dry list.)
“Mr. Snagsby arrives, greasy, steamed, smelling of “Chinese weed” and chewing something. He tries to quickly swallow a piece of bread and butter. Speaks:
- What a surprise, sir! Yes, it’s Mr. Tulkinghorn!” (Here the chopped, energetic style is combined with bright epithets - also like Carlyle.)
3. RHETORICAL FIGURES: COMPARISONS AND METAPHORS
Comparisons are direct likenings when the words “like” or “like” or “like” are used. “Eighteen learned brothers of Mr. Tangle (lawyer - V.I.), each of whom is armed with a brief statement of the case on eighteen hundred sheets, jumped up like eighteen hammers in a piano, and, having made eighteen bows, sank to their eighteen seats, drowning in darkness."
The carriage with the young heroes of the novel, who are supposed to spend the night with Mrs. Jellyby, reaches “a narrow street with tall houses, like a long tank filled to the brim with fog.”
Before Caddy's wedding, Mrs. Jellyby's unkempt hair was "matted like the mane of a scavenger's nag." At dawn, the lamplighter “begins his rounds and, like the executioner of a despot king, cuts off the small fiery heads that were trying to dispel the darkness at least a little.”
"Mr. Vholes, calm and imperturbable, as befits such a respectable man, pulls off his narrow black gloves from his hands, as if tearing off his own skin, pulls off his tight top hat from his head, as if scalping his own skull, and sits down at his desk."
Metaphor animates a thing, evoking another in the imagination, without the connecting “as if”; sometimes Dickens combines metaphor and simile.
Attorney Tulkinghorn's suit is very representative and eminently suitable for a clerk. “It vests, so to speak, the guardian of legal secrets, the butler in charge of the Dedlocks’ legal cellar.”
In Jellyby's house, "the children staggered everywhere, falling every now and then and leaving traces of the misadventures they had experienced on their feet, which turned into some kind of short chronicles of childish misfortunes."
“... A dark-winged loneliness hung over Chesney-Wold.”
Having visited with Mr. Jarndyce the house where plaintiff Tom Jarndyce shot himself in the forehead, Hester writes:
“This is a street of dying blind houses, whose eyes are knocked out with stones, - a street where the windows are without a single glass, without a single window frame...” 10
4. REPEATS
Dickens adores peculiar spells, verbal formulas repeated with increasing expressiveness; This is an oratorical technique. “The day was fitting for the Lord Chancellor - on such and such a day it was fitting for him to sit here... The day was fitting for the members of the Bar at the Supreme Court of Chancery - on such and such a day it was fitting for them to wander here, as in the fog, and they, among about twenty people, are wandering here today, sorting out one of the ten thousand points of some extremely protracted litigation, tripping each other up on slippery precedents, knee-deep in technical difficulties, banging their heads in protective goat hair wigs and horsehair against the walls of idle talk and, like an actor, seriously pretending that they are administering justice. The day turned out to suit all the attorneys involved in the litigation... on such and such a day it was fitting for them to sit here, in a long, carpeted “well” (although it is pointless to look for the Truth at its bottom); and everyone is sitting here in a row between the registrar’s table covered with red cloth and the lawyers in silk robes, piled in front of them... a whole mountain of nonsense, which was very expensive.
How can this court not drown in darkness, which candles burning here and there are powerless to dispel; How can the fog not hang in it like such a thick veil, as if it were stuck here forever; how can colored glass not fade so much that daylight no longer penetrates the windows; How can uninitiated passers-by, looking inside through the glass doors, dare to enter here, unafraid of this ominous spectacle and viscous verbal debate, which echoes dully from the ceiling, sounding from the platform where the Lord High Chancellor sits, contemplating the upper window, which does not let in light, and where everything his close wig-wearers got lost in the fog!” Note the effect of the thrice repeated opening “the day was going well” and the four times groaning “how is it”, note the frequent sound repetitions that give assonance.
Anticipating the arrival of Sir Leicester and his relatives in Chesney Wold on the occasion of the parliamentary elections, “and they” is repeated like a refrain: “The old house seems sad and solemn, where it is very comfortable to live, but there are no inhabitants, except for the portraits on the walls. “And they came and went,” some living Dedlock might say thoughtfully, passing by these portraits; and they saw this gallery as deserted and silent as I see it now; and they imagined, as I imagine, that this estate would be empty when they left; and it was hard for them to believe how difficult it was for me that it could do without them; and they now disappeared for me, just as I disappeared for them, closing the door behind me, which slammed noisily. , echoingly through the house; and they were consigned to indifferent oblivion and they died."
5. RHETORICAL QUESTION AND ANSWER
This technique is often combined with repetition. “Who, then, is present in the Lord Chancellor's court on this gloomy day, except the Lord Chancellor himself, the lawyer who appears in the case that is being tried, two or three lawyers who never appear in any case, and the above-mentioned attorneys in the "well" ? Here, in wig and gown, there is a secretary sitting below the judge; here, dressed in judicial uniform, there are two or three guardians of either order, or legality, or the interests of the king.”
While Bucket waits for Jarndyce to persuade Hester to go with him in search of the runaway Lady Dedlock, Dickens gets into Bucket's mind: “Where is she? Dead or alive, where is she? If that handkerchief, which he folds and carefully hides, had magically shown him the room where she found it, shown him the wasteland shrouded in the darkness of the night around the brick house, where the little dead man was covered with this handkerchief, would Bucket have been able to track her there? In a vacant lot, where pale blue lights are burning in kilns... someone’s lonely shadow looms, lost in this sorrowful world, covered with snow, driven by the wind and as if cut off from all humanity. This is a woman; but she is dressed like a beggar, and in such rags no one crossed the Dedlocks' lobby or, throwing open the huge door, left their house.
In answering these questions, Dickens hints that Lady Dedlock has swapped clothes with Jenny, and this will confuse Bucket for some time until he guesses the truth.
6 APOSTROPHIC MANNER OF CARLEIL
The apostrophe can be addressed to shocked listeners, to a sculpturally frozen group of great sinners, to some natural elements, to a victim of injustice. When Joe sneaks to the cemetery to visit Nemo's grave, Dickens bursts out with an apostrophe: “Hark, night, hear, darkness: the better it will be the sooner you come, the longer you stay in such a place as this! Listen, rare lights in the windows of ugly houses, and you, who create lawlessness in them, do it, at least by fencing yourself off from this terrible sight! Listen, the flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gates, in the poisoned air, that it covered them with a witch’s ointment, slimy to the touch!” It is also worth noting the already quoted apostrophe on the occasion of Joe's death, and even earlier the apostrophe in the passage where Guppy and Weave cry for help upon discovering the surprising death of Crook.
7. EPITHETS
Dickens cultivates the luxurious adjective, or verb, or noun as an epithet, as the basic premise of vivid poetry; it is a full-fledged seed from which a flowering and spreading metaphor will rise. At the beginning of the novel, we see how people lean over the railing of the bridge, looking down - “into the foggy underworld.” Apprentice clerks were accustomed to “hone... their legal wits” through amusing litigation. As Ada put it, Mrs. Pardiggle's bulging eyes were "bulging out of her head." Guppy urges Weevle not to leave his quarters in Crook's house by "restlessly biting his thumbnail." Sir Leicester is waiting for Lady Dedlock to return. Late at night, this neighborhood is quiet, “unless some reveler gets so drunk that, obsessed with wanderlust,” he wanders in, bawling songs.
For all great writers with a keen, discerning eye, a hackneyed epithet sometimes takes on new life and freshness thanks to the background against which it appears. “Soon the desired light illuminates the walls,” this is Kruk (who went downstairs for a lighted candle. - V.N.) slowly climbs the stairs with his green-eyed cat, which follows him.” All cats have green eyes - but notice how green these eyes are filled with from the candle slowly moving up the stairs. Often the place of the epithet and the reflection of neighboring words give it extraordinary charm.
8. TALKING NAMES
In addition to Crook (crook), in the novel there are jewelers Blaze and Sparkle (blaze - shine, sparkle - sparkle), Mr. Blowers and Mr. Tangle (blower - talker, tangle - confusion) - these are lawyers; Budd, Koodle, Doodle, etc. (boodle - bribe, doodle - scammer) - politicians. This is a technique of old comedy.
9. ALLITERATION AND ASSONANCE
This technique has already been noted in connection with repetitions. But let us not deny ourselves the pleasure of hearing Mr. Smallweed address his wife: “You dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling, poll-parrott” (“You dissolute magpie, jackdaw, parrot, what are you talking about?”) - exemplary assonance; and here is the alliteration: the arch of the bridge turned out to be “sapped and sopped” (“washed away and carried away”) - in the Lincolnshire estate, where Lady Dedlock lives in a “deadened” (dead) world. “Jarndys and Jarndys” is, in a sense, complete alliteration taken to the point of absurdity.
10. RECEPTION “I-I-I”
This technique conveys the excitement of Esther’s manner when she describes her friendly interactions in Bleak House with Ada and Richard: “I sat, walked, and talked with him and Ada and noticed how they fell more and more in love with each other day by day, without saying a word about it and each shyly thinking to himself that his love is the greatest secret..." And another example when Hester accepts Jarndyce's proposal: "I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him, and he asked if I thought I thought of myself as the mistress of Bleak House, and I said, “Yes”; but for now everything remained the same, and we all went for a ride together, and I didn’t even say anything to my sweet girl (Ada. - V.N.).”
11. HUMORICAL, CLASSIC, ALLEGORATIVE, WANTED INTERPRETATION
“His family is as ancient as the mountains, but infinitely more honorable”; or: “a turkey in a poultry house, always upset by some hereditary grievance (must be the fact that turkeys are slaughtered for Christmas)”; or: “the crowing of a cheerful rooster, which for some reason - it’s interesting to know why? - invariably anticipates the dawn, although he lives in the cellar of a small dairy on Carsitor Street"; or: “a short, cunning niece, tied perhaps too tightly, and with a sharp nose, reminiscent of the sharp cold of an autumn evening, which is colder the closer it is to the end.”
12. WORD PLAY
“Il faut manger (a corruption of the French il faut manger - you need to eat), you know,” explains Mr. Jobling, and pronounces the last word as if he were talking about one of the accessories of a man’s suit. From here it’s still a long way from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, that jumble of wordplay, but the direction has been chosen in the right direction.
13. INDIRECT SPEECH TRANSMISSION
This is a further development of the style of Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, with even more speech interspersed. At the inquest into Nemo's death, Mrs. Piper's testimony is given indirectly: “Well, Mrs. Piper has a lot to say—mostly in parentheses and without punctuation—but she can tell little. Mrs. Piper lives in this lane (where her husband works as a carpenter), and all the neighbors have been sure for a long time (one can count from that day, which was two days before the baptism of Alexander James Piper, and he was baptized when he was one and a half years old and four day, because they did not hope that he would survive, the child suffered so much from teething, gentlemen), the neighbors had long been convinced that the victim, as Mrs. Piper calls the deceased, was rumored to have sold his soul. She thinks that the rumors spread because the victim looked strange. She constantly met the victim and found that he looked fierce and should not be allowed near children, because some children are very timid (and if there is any doubt about this, she hopes that Mrs. Perkins, who is present here and can vouch for Mrs. Piper, for her husband and for her entire family). I saw how the victim was tormented and teased by children (children are children - what can you take from them?) - and you cannot expect, especially if they are playful, that they behave like some kind of Methuselahs, which you yourself were not in childhood.”
Less eccentric heroes are often given an indirect presentation of speech - in order to speed up the story or thicken the mood; sometimes it is accompanied, as in this case, by lyrical repetitions. Esther persuades the secretly married Ada to go with her to visit Richard: “My dear,” I began, “didn’t you quarrel with Richard during the time that I was so rarely at home?
- No, Esther.
- Maybe he hasn’t written to you for a long time? - I asked.
“No, I wrote,” Ada answered.
And the eyes are full of such bitter tears and the face breathes such love! I couldn't understand my dear friend. Should I go alone to Richard? I said. No, Ada thinks it’s better for me not to walk alone. Maybe she will come with me? Yes, Ada thinks it's better for us to go together. Shouldn't we go now? Yes, let's go now. No, I just couldn’t understand what was happening to my girl, why her face glowed with love and there were tears in her eyes.”
A writer can be a good storyteller or a good moralist, but if he is not a sorcerer or an artist, he is not a writer, much less a great writer. Dickens is a good moralist, a good storyteller, and an excellent magician, but as a storyteller he is a little inferior to everything else. In other words, he excels at depicting the characters and their environment in any given situation, but in attempting to establish connections between the characters in the overall scheme of action, it is often unconvincing.
What overall impression does a great work of art make on us? (By "us" I mean the good reader.) The Precision of Poetry and the Delight of Science. This is the impact of Bleak House at its best. Here Dickens the magician, Dickens the artist comes out on top. The moralist teacher does not stand out in the best way in Bleak House. And the narrator, who stumbles here and there, does not shine at all in Bleak House, although the overall structure of the novel remains magnificent.
Despite some flaws in the story, Dickens remains a great writer. To command a vast constellation of characters and themes, to keep people and events connected, and to be able to bring out missing heroes in dialogue - in other words, to master the art of not only creating people, but also keeping them alive in the reader's imagination over the course of a long novel - is, of course, a sign of greatness . When Grandfather Smallweed appears in a chair at George's shooting gallery, from whom he seeks to obtain a sample of Captain Hawdon's handwriting, he is carried by the coach driver and another man. “And this fellow,” he points to another porter, “we hired on the street for a pint of beer. It costs two pence. Judy (he addresses his daughter - V.K), pay this fellow two pence.<...>He charges a lot for such a trifle.
The said “well done”, one of those outlandish specimens of human mold who suddenly appear - in shabby red jackets - on the western streets of London and willingly undertake to hold horses or run for a carriage - the said good fellow, without much enthusiasm, receives his two pence, throws coins into air, catches them and leaves.” This gesture, this single gesture, with the epithet “over-handed” (movement from top to bottom, “following” the falling coins, this is not translated in translation. - Note per.) is a trifle, but in the reader’s imagination this person will forever remain alive.
The world of the great writer is a magical democracy where even the most minor, most random heroes, like that fellow who throws two pence in the air, have the right to live and multiply.
Notes.
1. The poem “The Laws of God and People..” by A. E. Houseman (1859-1936) is quoted, translated by Yu. Taubin from the publication: English Poetry in Russian Translations. XX century - M., 1984.
2. Quotes from the novel are translated by M. Klyagina-Kondratieva according to the publication: Dickens Ch. Collected. cit.: In 30 T. - M.: Khudozh. lit., 1960.
3. In English, the words “years”, “flight” and the heroine’s surname are homonyms. — Note. lane
4. Carlyle Thomas. French Revolution: History / Trans. from English Y. Dubrovin and E. Melnikova. - M, 1991. - P. 347, 294. - Note. lane
5. Shortly before this, under pressure from Bucket, old man Smallweed returns Jarndyce’s will, which he found in a pile of Crook’s waste paper. This will is more recent than those being disputed in court, and it left the bulk of the estate to Ada and Richard. This already promised a speedy end to the litigation. - Fr. B.
6. American versus Homeric (lat.).
7. Among V.N.’s papers there is a note: “Charlie, who becomes Esther’s maid, is her “light shadow,” in contrast to the dark shadow, Ortanz, who offered Esther her services after Lady Dedlock fired her, and did not succeed in that". - Fr. B
8. V.N. gives an example: “the clock ticked, the fire clicked.” In the Russian translation (“the clock was ticking, the firewood was crackling”) the alliteration is not conveyed - Note. ed. rus. text.
9. On the attached sheet, V.N. compares - not in favor of Jane Austen - her description of the sea in Portsmouth harbor when Fanny Price visited her family: “And the day turned out to be wonderfully good. It’s only March, but in the soft gentle breeze, in the bright sun, which only occasionally hid for a moment behind a cloud, it feels like April, and under the spring sky there is such beauty all around (somewhat boring - V.N.), the way shadows play on ships in Spithead and on the island behind them, and the sea changes every minute at this hour of the tide, and, rejoicing, it rushes onto the ramparts with such a glorious noise,” etc. The variability of the sea is not conveyed, “rejoicing” is borrowed from second-rate verses, description Overall standard and sluggish." - Fr. B.
10. In Esther's story, these words belong to Mr. Jarndyce. — Note. lane
Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens (1853), which opens the period of artistic maturity of the writer. This book provides a cross-section of all layers of British society of the Victorian era, from the highest aristocracy to the world of city gateways, and reveals the secret connections between them. The beginnings and endings of many chapters are marked by bursts of high Carlylean rhetoric. The picture of judicial proceedings in the Chancery Court, performed by Dickens in the tone of a nightmarish grotesque, aroused the admiration of such authors as F. Kafka, A. Bely, V. V. Nabokov. The latter devoted a lecture from a series on the greatest novels of the 19th century to the analysis of the novel. Esther Summerson spent her childhood in Windsor, in the house of her godmother, Miss Barbary. The girl feels lonely and wants to find out the secret of her origin. One day Miss Barbery can’t stand it and says sternly: “Your mother has covered herself with shame, and you have brought shame on her. Forget about her...” A few years later, the godmother suddenly dies and Hester learns from the attorney lawyer Kenge, representing a certain Mr. John Jarndyce (John Jarndyce), that she is an illegitimate child; he declares, in accordance with the law: “Miss Barbery was your only relative (illegal, of course; by law, I must note, you have no relatives).” After the funeral, Kenge, aware of her lonely situation, offers her study at a boarding house in Reading, where she will not need anything and will prepare to “fulfill her duty in the public field.” The girl gratefully accepts the offer. “The six happiest years of her life” pass there. After completing her studies, John Jarndyce (who became her guardian) assigns the girl as a companion to his cousin Ada Claire. Together with Ada's young relative Richard Carston, they go to an estate called Bleak House. The house once belonged to Mr. Jarndyce's great-uncle, Sir Tom, who shot himself under the strain of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce inheritance battle. Red tape and abuses by officials led to the process lasting for several decades; the original plaintiffs, witnesses, and lawyers had already died, and dozens of bags of documents related to the case had accumulated. “It seemed as if the house had taken a bullet in the forehead, just like its desperate owner.” But thanks to the efforts of John Jarndyce, the house looks better, and with the arrival of young people it comes to life. The smart and sensible Esther is given the keys to the rooms and storage rooms. She copes well with household chores - it’s not for nothing that John affectionately calls her Troublemaker. Their neighbors turn out to be Baronet Sir Leicester Dedlock (pompous and stupid) and his wife Honoria Dedlock (beautiful and arrogantly cold), who is 20 years younger than him. The secular chronicle notes her every step, every event in her life. Sir Leicester is extremely proud of his aristocratic family and cares only about the purity of his good name. A young employee of Kenja's office, William Guppy, falls in love with Esther at first sight. While on company business at the Dedlock estate, he is struck by her resemblance to Lady Dedlock. Soon Guppy arrives at Bleak House and confesses his love to Esther, but receives a decisive refusal. Then he hints at the amazing similarity between Hester and the lady. “Honour me with your hand, and I can’t think of anything to protect your interests and ensure your happiness!” I can’t find out anything about you!” He kept his word. Letters from an unknown gentleman who died from an excessive dose of opium in a dirty, squalid closet and was buried in a common grave in a cemetery for the poor fall into his hands. From these letters, Guppy learns about the connection between Captain Hawdon (this man) and Lady Dedlock, about the birth of their daughter. William immediately shares his discovery with Lady Dedlock, which causes her extreme confusion.
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Landport, a suburb of Portsmouth (Southern England). His father, an official of the naval commissary, soon after the boy's birth was transferred to Chatham Docks, and from there to London.
Little Dickens early became acquainted with the works of Shakespeare, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith. These books captured Charles's imagination and sank into his soul forever. The greatest English realists of the past prepared him to perceive what reality revealed to him.
Dickens's family, which had modest means, experienced increasing need. The writer's father became mired in debt and soon found himself in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. Having no money for an apartment, Charles’s mother settled with his sister Fanny in prison, where the prisoner’s family was usually allowed to stay, and the boy was sent to a blacking factory. Dickens, who was then only eleven years old, began to earn his own bread.
Never in his life, even in its most cloudless periods, could Dickens remember without a shudder the blacking factory, the humiliation, the hunger, the loneliness of the days spent here. For a pitiful wage, which was barely enough for a lunch of bread and cheese, the little worker, along with other children, had to spend long hours in a damp and gloomy basement, from the windows of which only the gray waters of the Thames could be seen. In this factory, the walls of which were eaten away by worms, and huge rats ran along the stairs, the future great writer of England worked from early morning until dusk.
On Sundays, the boy went to the Marshalsea, where he stayed with his family until the evening. Soon he moved there, renting a room in one of the prison buildings. During the time spent in the Marshalsea, this prison for the poor and bankrupt, Dickens became intimately familiar with the life and morals of its inhabitants. Everything he saw here came to life over time on the pages of his novel Little Dorrit.
The London of dispossessed workers, outcasts, beggars and vagabonds was the school of life that Dickens went through. He forever remembered the haggard faces of people on the streets of the city, pale, thin children, women exhausted from work. The writer experienced firsthand how bad it is for a poor man in winter in torn clothes and thin shoes, and what thoughts flash through his head when, on the way home, he stops in front of brightly lit shop windows and at the entrances of fashionable restaurants. He knew that from the fashionable quarters where the London aristocracy comfortably settled down, it was just a stone's throw away from the dirty and dark alleys where the poor lived. The life of Dickens's contemporary England revealed itself to him in all its ugliness, and the creative memory of the future realist preserved such images that over time excited the whole country.
The happy changes that occurred in the life of the Dickenses made it possible for Charles to resume his interrupted studies. The writer's father unexpectedly received a small inheritance, paid off his debts and got out of prison with his family. Dickens entered the so-called Washington House Commercial Academy on Hamsteadrod.
A passionate thirst for knowledge lived in the heart of the young man, and thanks to this he was able to overcome the unfavorable conditions of the then English school. He studied with enthusiasm, although the “academy” was not interested in the individual inclinations of children and forced them to learn books by heart. Mentors and their wards mutually hated each other, and discipline was maintained only through corporal punishment. Dickens's experiences at school were later reflected in his novels The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield.
However, Dickens did not have to stay long at the Commercial Academy. His father insisted that he leave school and become a clerk in one of the City offices. A new and hitherto little known world of small employees, entrepreneurs, sales agents and officials opened up before the young man. Dickens's always characteristic attentive attitude to a person, to every detail of his life and character, helped the writer here, among the dusty office books, to find a lot of things that were worth remembering and that he should later tell people about.
Dickens spent his free time in the library of the British Museum. He decided to become a journalist and eagerly took up shorthand. Soon, young Dickens actually got a job as a reporter in one of the small London newspapers. He quickly gained fame among journalists and was invited as a reporter to the World Parliament and then to the Morning Chronicle.
However, the work of a reporter soon ceased to satisfy Dickens. He was attracted to creativity; he began to write stories, small humorous sketches, essays, the best of which he published in 1833 under the pseudonym Bosa. In 1835, two series of his essays were published as a separate publication.
Already in the “Essays of Bose” it is not difficult to discern the handwriting of the great English realist. The plots of Bose's stories are simple; The reader is captivated by the truthfulness of stories about poor clerks, small businessmen trying to get out into the world, old maids dreaming of getting married, street comedians and tramps. Already in this work of the writer his worldview was clearly revealed. Sympathy for man, pity for the poor and disadvantaged, which never left Dickens, constitute the main intonation of his first book; in “Sketches of Boz” an individual Dickensian style was outlined, in them one can see the variety of his stylistic techniques. Humorous scenes and stories about funny and absurd eccentrics are interspersed with sad stories about the fate of the English poor. Later, on the pages of Dickens's best novels, we meet characters who are directly related to the characters in "Sketches of Boz."
“Sketches of Boz” was a success, but it was his novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” the first issues of which appeared in 1837, that brought Dickens real fame.
“The Pickwick Papers” were commissioned from the writer as a series of essays accompanying the drawings of the then fashionable cartoonist D. Seymour. However, already in the first chapters of the book, the writer relegated the artist to the background. Dickens's brilliant text became the basis of the book, the drawings of Seymour, and who later replaced him Fiz (Brown) - nothing more than illustrations for him.
The author's good-natured humor and infectious laughter captivated readers, and they laughed merrily with him at the amusing adventures of the Pickwickians, at the caricature of English elections, at the machinations of lawyers and the claims of secular gentlemen. It seems that everything that happens is unfolding in the atmosphere of the patriarchal and cozy Dingley Dell, and bourgeois self-interest and hypocrisy are embodied only by the scammers Jingle and Job Trotter, who inevitably suffer defeat. The whole book breathes with the optimism of the young Dickens. True, at times the dark shadows of people offended by life flicker on the pages of the novel, but they quickly disappear, leaving the reader in the company of gentle eccentrics.
Dickens's second novel was Oliver Twist (1838). The conversation here was no longer about the adventures of cheerful travelers, but about “workhouses”, a kind of correctional institutions for the poor, about charitable institutions, the members of which think most of all about how to punish the poor for poverty, about shelters where orphans starving, about dens of thieves. And this book contains pages worthy of the pen of a great humorist. But in general, the carefree intonations of “The Pickwick Club” are forever a thing of the past. Dickens would never again write a cheerful novel. "Oliver Twist" opens a new stage in the writer's work - the stage of critical realism.
Life suggested Dickens more and more new ideas. Before he had time to finish work on Oliver Twist, he began a new novel, Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and in 1839-1841 he published The Antiquities Shop and Barnaby Ridge.
Dickens's fame is growing. Almost all of his books were a resounding success. The remarkable English novelist was recognized not only in England, but also far beyond its borders.
Dickens the realist, a harsh critic of bourgeois orders, emerged in the 30s of the 19th century, when important socio-political changes were taking place in his homeland; the insightful artist could not help but see how the crisis of his contemporary social system was manifested in various spheres of life.
In England at this time there was a clear discrepancy between the economic and political organization of society. By the 30s of the 19th century, the so-called “industrial revolution” ended in the country, and the British kingdom became a major industrial power. Two new historical forces emerged in the public arena - the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But the political structure of the country remained the same as it was more than a hundred years ago. New industrial centers, numbering tens of thousands of people, had no representation in parliament. Deputies were still elected from some provincial town, which was completely dependent on the neighboring landowner. Parliament, to which reactionary conservative circles dictated their will, finally ceased to be a representative institution.
The struggle for parliamentary reform that unfolded in the country turned into a broad social movement. Under popular pressure, the reform was carried out in 1832. But only the industrial bourgeoisie, which rejected broad democratic reforms, took advantage of the fruits of victory. It was during this period that the complete contrast between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the people was determined. The political struggle in England has entered a new stage. Chartism arose in the country - the first organized mass revolutionary movement of the working class.
Respect for old fetishes was dying among the people. The growth of economic and social contradictions and the resulting Chartist movement caused an upsurge in public life in the country, which in turn affected the strengthening of the critical tendency in English literature. The looming problems of social reconstruction worried the minds of realist writers who thoughtfully studied reality. And the English critical realists lived up to the expectations of their contemporaries. They, each to the best of their insight, answered the questions posed by life, expressed the innermost thoughts of many millions of Englishmen.
The most talented and courageous of the representatives of the “brilliant school of English novelists,” as Marx called them (this included Charles Dickens, W. Thackeray, E. Gaskell, S. Bronte), was Charles Dickens. An outstanding artist who tirelessly drew his material from life, he was able to depict human character with great truthfulness. His heroes are endowed with genuine social typicality. From the vague opposition of “poor” and “rich”, characteristic of most of his contemporary writers, Dickens turned to the question of the real social contradictions of the era, speaking in his best novels about the contradiction between labor and capital, between the worker and the capitalist entrepreneur.
Despite their deeply correct assessment of many life phenomena, the English critical realists essentially did not put forward any positive social program. Rejecting the path of popular uprising, they did not see a real opportunity to resolve the conflict between poverty and wealth. The illusions inherent in English critical realism in general were also characteristic of Dickens. He was also sometimes inclined to think that evil people, of whom there are many in all levels of society, were to blame for the existing injustice, and hoped, by softening the hearts of those in power, to help the poor. This conciliatory moralizing tendency is present to varying degrees in all of Dickens's works, but it was especially pronounced in his A Christmas Stories (1843-1848).
However, "Christmas Stories" does not define his entire work. The forties were the period of greatest flowering of English critical realism, and for Dickens they marked the period that prepared the appearance of his most significant novels.
The writer’s trip to America, which he took in 1842, played a significant role in shaping Dickens’s views. If in his homeland Dickens, like most representatives of the English bourgeois intelligentsia, could have the illusion that the vices of contemporary social life were primarily due to the dominance of the aristocracy, then in America the writer saw the bourgeois legal order in its “pure form.”
American impressions, which served as material for “American Notes” (1842) and the novel “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” (1843-1844), helped the writer look into the very depths of the bourgeois world, and notice in his homeland such phenomena that are still escaped his attention.
The period of greatest ideological and creative maturity of Dickens begins. In 1848 - during the years of the new rise of Chartism and the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Europe - Dickens’s wonderful novel “Dombey and Son” was published, highly appreciated by V. G. Belinsky, in this book the realist artist moves on from criticizing certain aspects of contemporary reality to a direct denunciation of the entire bourgeois social system.
The Dombey and Son trading house is a small cell of a large whole. Contempt for man and the soulless, selfish calculation of Mr. Dombey personify, according to the artist’s plan, the main vices of the bourgeois world. The novel was conceived by Dickens as the story of Dombey's fall: life mercilessly takes revenge for trampled humanity, and victory goes to the inhabitants of the Wooden Midshipman's shop, who follow in their actions only the dictates of a good heart.
“Dombey and Son” opens the period of greatest ideological and creative maturity of the great realist. One of the last works of this period was the novel Bleak House, published in 1853.
In the novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens depicted both the public and private life of the English bourgeoisie with the mercilessness of a satirist. The writer sees his homeland as a gloomy, “cold house,” where the prevailing social laws oppress and cripple the souls of people, and he looks into the darkest corners of this big house.
In London there is all sorts of weather. But in Bleak House, Dickens most often paints us a picture of a foggy, autumn-gloomy London. The fog that shrouds Lincoln Fields, where the judges hearing the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case has been sitting in the Lord Chancellor's Courthouse for many decades now, is especially rare. All their efforts are aimed at confusing an already complicated case in which some relatives dispute the rights of others to a long-defunct inheritance.
No matter how different the judges and lawyers are in their position and their individual characteristics, each located on the corresponding step of the hierarchical ladder of the British court, they are all united by the greedy desire to enslave the client, to take possession of his money and secrets. This is Mr. Tulkinghorn, a respectable gentleman whose soul resembles a safe keeping the terrible secrets of the best families in London. Such is the smooth-talking Mr. Kenge, who charms his charges like a boa constrictor of rabbits. Even young Guppy, who occupies one of the last places in the corporation of pulls and tricks, no matter what he has to face in life, operates primarily with the knowledge acquired in the office of Kenge and Carboy.
But perhaps the most typical of all the lawyers depicted in Bleak House is Mr. Vholes. A lean gentleman with a pimply, sallow face, always dressed in black and always correct, he will be remembered by the reader for a long time. Vholes talks all the time about his old father and three orphan daughters, to whom he allegedly strives to leave only a good NAME as an inheritance. In reality, he makes good money for them by robbing gullible clients. Ruthless in his greed, the hypocrite Vholes is a typical product of the puritanical morality of the bourgeois, and WE can easily find many of his ancestors among the satirical images of Fielding and Smollett.
Back in The Pickwick Club, Dickens told his readers the amusing story of how Mr. Pickwick was misled by the lawyers when he was put on trial on a false charge of breaking his promise to marry his landlady, the Widow Bardle. We cannot help but laugh at the case of Hurdle v. Pickwick, although we feel sorry for the innocent hero who suffered. But the case of “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce” is depicted by the author in such gloomy tones that the fleeting smile caused by individual comical details of the story immediately disappears from the reader’s face. In Bleak House, Dickens tells the story of several generations of people embroiled in pointless litigation and handed over to greedy and soulless lawyers. The artist achieves enormous persuasiveness in his narrative - he shows the machine of English legal proceedings in action.
Many people, old and very young, completely broke and still rich, spend their lives in courtrooms. Here's little old Miss Flight. Who comes to the Supreme Court every day with her tattered reticule filled with half-decayed documents that have long lost all value. Even in her youth, she found herself entangled in some kind of litigation and all her life she did nothing but go to court. For Miss Flight, the whole world is limited to Lincoln Fields, where the Supreme Court is located. And the highest human wisdom is embodied by its head, the Lord Chancellor. But in moments, the old woman’s reason returns, and she sadly tells how, one after another, the birds, whom she christened Joy, Hope, Youth, Happiness, die in her pitiful closet.
Mr. Gridley, nicknamed here “the man from Shropshire,” also comes to court, a poor man whose strength and health were also consumed by judicial red tape. But if Miss Flight has come to terms with her fate, then Gridley’s soul is seething with indignation. He sees his mission in denouncing judges and lawyers. But Gridley cannot change the course of events. Tormented by life, tired and broken, he dies like a beggar in George's gallery.
Almost all of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce litigants suffer the same fate as Flyte or Gridley. On the pages of the novel we see the life of a young man named Richard Carston. A distant relative of the Jarndyces. A handsome, cheerful young man, tenderly in love with his cousin Ada and dreaming of happiness with her. He gradually begins to become imbued with a general interest in the process. Already in the first chapters of the novel. When the crazy old lady Flight first appears before the happy Ada and Richard, Dickens seems to be revealing a symbol of their future. At the end of the book, the embittered Richard, tormented by consumption, having squandered all his and Ada’s funds in this lawsuit, reminds us of Gridley.
A lot of people became victims of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case, and in the end it turned out that there was no case at all. Because the money bequeathed by one of the Jarndyces went entirely to pay legal costs. People accepted the fiction, covered by the ostentatious splendor of English legislation, as reality. An invincible belief in the power of laws is one of the conventions of the English bourgeois society depicted by Dickens.
Dickens is especially outraged by the English aristocracy with its slavish adherence to empty fetishes and arrogant disregard for the environment. In Bleak House, this line of social criticism was embodied in the story of the Dedlock house.
In Chesney Wold, the Dedlock family estate. As majestic as they themselves are, the “color” of London society gathers, and Dickens paints them with all the power of his satirical talent. These are arrogant degenerates, parasites bored with idleness, greedy for other people's misfortunes. From the entire crowd of slanderous ladies and gentlemen who make up the background of Chesney-Wold, stands Volumnia Dedlock, in whom all the vices of high society are concentrated. This faded beauty from the younger branch of the Dedlocks divides her life between London and the fashionable resort of Bath, between the pursuit of suitors and the pursuit of an inheritance. She is envious and heartless, knows neither sincere sympathy nor compassion.
The Dedlocks are the personification of British nobility. They preserve their family traditions and hereditary prejudices with equal pride. They firmly believe that all the best in the world should belong to them and be created for the sole purpose of serving their greatness. Having inherited their rights and privileges from their ancestors, they feel like owners not only in relation to things, but also in relation to people. The name Dedlock itself can be translated into Russian as “vicious circle”, “dead end”. Indeed. Deadlocks have long been frozen in one state. Life passes them by; they feel THAT events are developing, that new people have appeared in England - “iron masters” who are ready to declare their rights. Deadlocks are mortally afraid of everything new and therefore withdraw even more into their narrow little world, not allowing anyone in from the outside and thereby hoping to protect their parks from the smoke of factories and factories.
But all the desires of the Dedlocks are powerless before the logic of history. And although Dickens, it would seem, exposes the Dedlocks only in the sphere of their private life, the book clearly sounds the theme of social retribution of the British aristocracy.
To show the entire illegality of the claims of the English nobility, Dickens chose the most ordinary detective story. The beautiful and majestic wife of Sir Leicester, destined to adorn the Dedlock family, turns out to be the former mistress of an unknown army captain and the mother of an illegitimate child.
Lady Dedlock's past stains her husband's family, and the law itself comes to the defense of the Dedlocks in the person of lawyer Tulkinghorn and detective Bucket. They are preparing punishment for Lady Dedlock not at the request of Sir Leicester, but because the Dedlock family is related to all these Doodles. Koodles, Noodles - masters of life, whose political reputation has been maintained in recent years with more and more difficulty.
However, the end of Lord and Lady Dedlock received a deeply humanistic solution from the pen of the great artist. In their grief, each of them overcame the conventions of social life that shackled him, and the blow that crushed the dignity of the titled spouses returned them to the people. Only the debunked Dedlocks, who had lost everything in the eyes of society, spoke the language of genuine human feelings that touch the reader to the depths of his soul.
The entire system of social relations, shown by the realist writer in Bleak House, is designed to protect the inviolability of the bourgeois legal order. This purpose is served by British legislation and the conventions of the world, with the help of which a select few are fenced off from the huge mass of their compatriots, brought up from childhood in respect for such principles, people are so imbued with them that they often free themselves from them only at the cost of their own lives.
The inhabitants of the “cold house” are obsessed with the thirst for money. Because of money, members of the Jarndyce family have hated each other for several generations and dragged them through the courts. Brother confronts brother over a dubious inheritance, the owner of which, perhaps, did not bequeath to him even a silver spoon.
For the sake of wealth and position in society, the future Lady Dedlock abandons her loved one and the joys of motherhood and becomes the wife of an old baronet. She, like Edith Dombey, the heroine of the novel Dombey and Son, exchanged her freedom for the apparent prosperity of a rich home, but found only misfortune and shame there.
Greedy for profit, lawyers deceive their clients day and night, moneylenders and detectives come up with cunning plans. Money penetrated every corner of public and private life in Dickens's contemporary England. And the whole country seems to him like one big family, quarreling over a huge inheritance.
In this society, poisoned by self-interest, two types of people easily develop. Such are Smallweed and Skimpole. Smallweed embodies the typical characteristics of those who actively use the right to rob and deceive. Dickens deliberately exaggerates the colors, trying to show how disgusting is the appearance of a person for whom acquisitiveness becomes the goal and meaning of life. This small, weak old man is endowed with enormous spiritual energy, aimed exclusively at building cruel intrigues against his neighbors. He carefully monitors everything that happens around him, lying in wait for his prey. The image of Smallweed embodies a bourgeois individual contemporary to Dickens, inspired only by the thirst for enrichment, which he vainly masks with hypocritical moral maxims.
The opposite of Smallweed. It would seem, Mr. Skimpole imagines, a kind of resident in the house of John Jarndyce, a cheerful, good-looking gentleman who wants to live for his own pleasure. Skimpole is not a money-grubber; he only takes advantage of the dishonest machinations of the smallwids.
The same social system, which is based on deception and oppression, gave birth to both smallluids and skimpoles. Each of them complements the other. The only difference between them is that the first expresses the position of people who actively use existing norms of social life, while the second uses them passively. Smallweed hates the poor: each of them, in his opinion, is ready to encroach on his money. Skimpole is deeply indifferent to them and just doesn’t want the ragamuffins to come into his sight. This selfish epicurean, who puts his own comfort above all else, like the representatives of the British aristocracy, does not know the value of money and despises all activity. It is no coincidence that he evokes such sympathy from Sir Lester Dedlock, who feels a kindred spirit in him.
Smallweed and Skimpole are a symbolic generalization of those. Among whom are material benefits distributed in bourgeois England?
Dickens tried to contrast Dedlock and Skimpole, who mercilessly plunder the fruits of the people's labor, with the hoarding of Smallweed, the young enterprising entrepreneur Rouncewell, whose figure is noticeably idealized. The writer saw only the ways in which Rouncewell differed from Dedlock and Skimpole, but did not notice how he was similar to Smallweed. Naturally, such an image could not have been successful for the realist Dickens. Less than a year later, Rouncewell was replaced by the manufacturer Bounderbrby from the novel Hard Times (1854), which embodied all the callousness and cruelty of his class.
Having correctly identified the contradiction between the aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie, Dickens also understood the main social conflict of the era - the conflict between the ruling classes as a whole and the people. The pages of his novels, telling about the plight of ordinary workers, best speak of why the honest and insightful artist wrote his books.
The poor are deprived of their rights and deprived of illusions about the prosperity of their homeland. The inhabitants of dilapidated houses, and more often of London pavements and parks, know well how difficult it is to live in a “cold house”.
Each of the poor people portrayed by Dickens in the novel has his own personality. Such is Goose, a little servant in Mr. Snagsby's house, a lonely orphan, sickly and downtrodden. She is all embodied fear of life, of people. The expression of fear is forever frozen on her face, and everything that happens in the Cooks Court alley fills the girl’s heart with trembling despair.
Joe from the Lonely Tom neighborhood often comes here to Cooks Court Lane. No one can really say where Joe lives or how he hasn't starved to death yet. The boy has no relatives or relatives; he sweeps the pavements, carries out small errands, wanders the streets until somewhere he stumbles upon a policeman who chases him from everywhere: “Come on in, don’t linger!..” “Come on in,” always “go on through” somewhere - that’s the only word , which Joe hears from people is the only thing he knows. Homeless tramp Joe is the embodiment of painful ignorance. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything...” Joe answers all questions, and how much great human resentment is heard in these words! Joe gropes through life, vaguely aware that there is some kind of injustice going on in the world around him. He would like to know why he exists in the world, why other people live, that Joe is the way he is, my lords and eminences, “the reverend and unlike ministers of all cults,” are to blame. It is them who the realist Dickens blames for the life and death of Joe.
This is the story of one of the many inhabitants of the Lonely Tom quarter. Like a London tramp, the forgotten Lonely Tom is lost somewhere between the fashionable houses of the rich, and none of these well-fed people wants to know where he is, what he is like. Lonely Tom becomes a symbol of the difficult fate of working London in the novel.
Most of the inhabitants of Lonely Tom accept their suffering without complaint. Only among the brickworkers who huddle in miserable hovels near London does their half-starved existence give rise to protest. And although Dickens is saddened by the bitterness of the brickmakers, he still thinks about their history.
Servants and maidservants, poor people and beggars, eccentric renegades, somehow earning their bread, crowd the pages of Bleak House. They are the good geniuses of those events that are unraveled by the clever hand of an artist who knew well that little people are involved in big things. Each of these humble workers has a role to play in the events described, and it is difficult to imagine what the outcome of the novel would have been without the old campaigner George Rouncewell or the homeless Joe.
Dickens talks about all these nice and honest people in one of his best works. He takes his readers to the stinking slums of Lonely Tom, to the rickety huts of brick workers, where wind and cold easily penetrate, to attics where hungry children sit locked up until the evening. The story of how people who are naturally kinder and more sympathetic than many rich people suffer from hunger and die in poverty sounds from the lips of an English realist as a cruel denunciation of the ruling system.
Dickens was never able to free himself from his liberal illusions. He believed that the situation of English workers would radically improve if the ruling classes were imbued with sympathy for them and care for them. However, the writer's observations conflicted with his utopian dreams. Thus, on the pages of his novels, starting with The Pickwick Club, grotesque images of various gentlemen from charitable societies appeared, whose activities serve anything - personal enrichment, ambitious plans, but not helping the disadvantaged.
But, perhaps, the writer was most successful with the philanthropists from Bleak House - Jellyby, Chadband and others. Mrs. Jellyby is one of those who has devoted her life to charity, from morning to night she is absorbed in the worries associated with missionary work in Africa, while her own family declines. Mrs. Jellyby's daughter, Caddy, runs away from home, and the other children, ragged and hungry, suffer all sorts of misadventures. The husband goes broke; the servants steal the remaining goods. All the Jellybys, young and old, are in a pitiful state, and the mistress sits in her office above a mountain of correspondence, and her eyes are fixed on Africa, where the “natives” under her care live in the village of Boriobulagha. Caring for one's fellow man begins to seem like selfishness, and Mrs. Jellyby ends up not much different from old Mr. Turveydrop, who is concerned only with his own person.
Mrs. Jellyby's "Telescopic Philanthropy" is a symbol of English charity. When homeless children die nearby, on the next street, the English bourgeoisie send soul-saving brochures to the Boryobul Negroes, who are cared about only because they may not even exist in the world.
All the benefactors from Bleak House, including Pardiggle, Quayle and Gusher, are extremely unattractive in appearance and unpleasant manners, talk a lot about loving the poor, but have not yet performed a single good deed. These are selfish people, often people with a very dubious reputation, who, although they talk about mercy, care only about their own good. Mr. Gusher makes a solemn speech to the students of the orphan school, convincing them to contribute their pennies and half-pens for a gift to Mr. Quayle, and he himself has already received a donation at the request of Mr. Quayle. Mrs. Pardiggle uses exactly the same methods. A look of rage appears on the faces of her five sons when this terrifying-looking woman loudly proclaims how much each of her little ones has donated to one or another charitable cause.
Preacher Chadband is supposed to instruct in good deeds, but his very name has passed from Dickens's novel into the general English dictionary to mean "unctuous hypocrite."
The figure of Chadband embodies the hypocrisy of English charity. Chadband understood his mission well - to protect the well-fed from the hungry. Like any preacher, he is busy making sure that the poor are less bothered by the rich with complaints and requests, and for this purpose he intimidates them with his sermons. Chadband's image is revealed already in his first meeting with Joe. Sitting in front of the hungry boy and devouring one tartine after another, he makes his endless speeches about human dignity and love for one's neighbor, and then drives the ragged boy away, ordering him to come again for an edifying conversation.
Dickens understood that the English poor would not receive help from people like Quayle, Gusher and Chadband, although they needed it more and more. But Dickens was able to contrast the sanctimonious official charity only with the private philanthropy of the good rich.
The favorite heroes of the author of “Bleak House” - John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson - are driven only by the desire to help the unfortunate. They save little Charlie, her brother and sister from poverty, help Joe, the brickmakers, Flight, Gridley, George Rouncewell and his devoted Phil. But how little does this mean in front of the enormous disasters that are fraught with “Bleak House” - the birthplace of Dickens! How many needy people can the good Mr. Snagsby give his half-crowns to? Will the young doctor of Woodcourt Alley visit all the sick and dying in the London slums? Esther takes little Charlie in with her, but she is powerless to help Joe. Jarndyce's money is also of little use. Instead of helping the poor, he finances Jellyby's senseless activities and supports the parasite Skimpole. True, sometimes doubts creep into his soul. At such moments, Jarndyce is in the habit of complaining about the “east wind,” which, no matter how you warm the “cold house,” penetrates its many cracks and carries away all the heat.
The originality of Dickens's writing style appears with great clarity in his novel Bleak House. The writer walked through life, looking closely at everything, not missing a single expressive detail of human behavior, not a single unique feature of the world around him. Things and phenomena take on an independent life for him. They know the secret of each of the heroes and predict his fate. The trees in Chesney Wold Park whisper ominously about Honoria Dedlock's past and future. The Roman warrior depicted on the ceiling of Mr. Tulkinghorn's room has long been pointing to the floor - to the very place where the body of the murdered lawyer was eventually found. The cracks in the shutters of Nemo's scribe's pitiful closet resemble someone's eyes, which look at everything that happens in the Cook's Court alley with either a curiously intent or an ominously mysterious gaze.
Dickens's creative idea is revealed not only through the thoughts and actions of the characters, but also through the entire figurative structure of the novel. Dickens's realistic symbolism recreates the entire complex interweaving of human destinies and the internal development of the plot. The writer succeeds in this because the symbol is not introduced by him into the novel, but grows out of life, as the most prominent expression of its tendencies and patterns. Not concerned about petty plausibility
And where Dickens deviates from the truth of life, he is weaker as an artist. Two characters fall out of the novel’s figurative system and, as characters, are inferior to its other characters. This is John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson. Jarndyce is perceived by the reader in only one capacity - a kind, slightly grumpy guardian, who seems to be called upon to look after all of humanity. Esther Summerson, on whose behalf the narrative is told in individual chapters, is endowed with nobility and prudence, but sometimes falls into “humiliation rather than pride,” which does not fit with her general appearance. Jarndyce and Hester are deprived of much life-like verisimilitude, since the writer made them carriers of his self-defeating tendency - to make everyone equally happy in a society built on the principle: the happiness of some is bought at the price of the misfortune of others.
Bleak House, like almost all of Dickens's novels, has a happy ending. The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce trial is over. Esther married her beloved Allen Woodcourt. George Rouncewell returned to his mother and brother. Peace reigned in Snagsby's house; The Begnet family found well-deserved peace. And yet, the gloomy tones in which the entire novel is written do not soften even at the end of the book. After the successful completion of the events told by the author of Bleak House, only a few of his heroes remained alive, and if happiness befell them, it was cruelly overshadowed by memories of past losses.
Already in “Bleak House” the pessimism that permeated Dickens’s last six novels was evident. The feeling of powerlessness in the face of complex social conflicts, the feeling of the worthlessness of the reforms he proposed were a source of deep sadness for the writer. He knew his contemporary society too well not to see how natural poverty, oppression, and loss of human values were in it.
Dickens's novels are strong with great life truth. They truly reflected his era, the hopes and sorrows, aspirations and sufferings of many thousands of the writer’s contemporaries, who, although they were the creators of all the good in the country, found themselves deprived of basic human rights. In defense of the simple worker, one of the first in his homeland to raise his voice was the great English realist Charles Dickens, whose works became part of the classical heritage of the English people.
