BLEAK HOUSE, Chapter 1

CHARLES DICKENS

You are to define and account for the impression a piece of fiction produces on you, analyzing the author's selection of details, peculiarities of syntax and his method of creating imagery.

1. Look through the information and reproduce those parts of it which can be attributed to the chapter under discussion.

"Bleak House" is a story of an endless Chancery suit interwined with that of the main character's sin and retribution. The satire on the law's delay was of practical value in exposing the need of reform. Never before or after did Dickens picture more vividly the London streets, the quiet of the precincts of the law-courts, the horror of the city grave-yards, the gruesome and degraded atmosphere of the old houses tainted with old crimes. Death broods over the sombre story.

Some critics say that Dickens had a love for the fantastic in places, houses, objects and names. He renders marvellously the sights, and sounds and smells of London - the fog, the drizzle, the slime, the dust, the crowded or empty streets, picturing with equal authenticity the river, the water-side, the City, the law-courts, the West End, the suburbs. You can't blame his descriptions on the ground that they are exaggerated representations of certain places as you can't blame a gargoyle on the ground that it is an exaggerated representation of the human face. Dickens' descriptions are all of a piece. He brings the realistic and the fantastic together in one piece of writing.

2. Reproduce a few short passages from the text to prove that certain parts of the above information may serve to characterize the chapter. Explain which characteristics you wish to prove by each example.

3. When analysing "The Pickwick Papers", you singled out the meaning of the key words suggestive of the author's conception. Which words have the same key-function in the chapter from "Bleak House", besides "fog", which is too obvious an example? Select them and explain their relevance to the author's conception.

4. When two things are similar even in one respect, it may be possible to refer to one of them by a word or longer expression ordinarily applied to the other, i.e., transfer the word to a new application. A METAPHOR is a figure of speech: the literal meaning is discarded and a new meaning is to be found. The new meaning, especially if it involves a feeling, may be expressed in no other way as effectively, and that is the value of the metaphor. (e.g. " running their heads against the walls of words ".)

What metaphors did Dickens use to create his images? What similitude are they based on? What associations do they bring?

5. Basically, a SYMBOL is a concrete object, animal, or movement, to which an abstract meaning attaches itself. Unlike a separate metaphor, which serves to create a separate image, a symbol represents some of the meanings of the whole text. So, a symbol may be regarded as a sort of GENERALIZED METAPHOR. But the indirect meaning of a metaphor leaps to the eye at once, while the symbolic meaning of an object or action may become apparent much later, in the context of the whole chapter or the whole work. In a metaphor, the word loses its literal meaning (" a wall of words " is not really a wall), in a symbol it preserves both the literal meaning and acquires an additional one representing symbolically many other things.

Is there anything symbolic in the chapter under discussion? What is the general meaning of the symbol(s), if you have found any?

6. Even within the limitations of normal English word order, with all its restriction, there is a range of choice for the disposition of parts. These posibilities are largely responsible for the changes of rhythm, balance, focus of attention, cumulation, and climax.

Dickens was one of the first writers of English prose who made use of loose attribution and presented his material to the imagination as a chain of images. His frequent use of verbless presentations (=nominative sentences) may account for the fact that his writing seems rather impressionistic than realistic. But unlike those of the Impressionists, his image is a single organized whole.

How do one-member sentences (i.e. nominative ones, without any verb: " Fog everywhere. ", or those containing only non-finite forms of the verb, like absolute constructions: " Fog lying out in the yards… ") serve to organize the structure of Dickens's imagery? (Show how some of the images are built by gradually adding more and more details which help us to see, smell, feel, touch, which bring the fantastic image into life).

7. The chapter from "The Pickwick Papers" illustrates the author's panoramic vision of reality. He makes the reader's eye travel from one object to another, now with a broad sweeping movement of the eye, now arresting the reader's attention on minute details. We feel as if we were in the very midst of the crowd inundating the square on the day of the election. Due to a number of technical devices Dickens creates a definite rhythm of the scene, which is very important in rendering his message.

Can one speak of Dickens' panoramic vision of reality in reference to the chapter from "Bleak House'? Explain, prove by examples.

8. What would an artist depict on the cover of the chapter if it were published separately from the others?

9. The word " CHANCERY " has at least two absolutely different meanings. First, it means literally "Lord Chancellor's Court, Division of High Court of Justice”. Second, "in chancery" figuratively means "in a predicament, that is, in a difficult situation with practically no way out." Explain what made Dickens give this title to the opening chapter of the book.

10. Compare the chapter with the verse. What do they have in common?

A FENCE

Now the stone house on the lake in front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence.

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life of any man

who falls on them.

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and

all wandering children looking for a place to play.

Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except

Death and the Rain and Tomorrow.

(Carl Sandburg)

Dickens's openings are almost always good; but the opening of Bleak House is good in a quite new and striking sense. Nothing could be better, for instance, than the first foolish chapter about the genealogy of the Chuzzlewits; but it has nothing to do with the Chuzzlewits. Nothing could be better than the first chapter of David Copperfield; the breezy entrance and banging exit of Miss Betsey Trotwood. But if there is ultimately any crisis or serious subject-matter of David Copperfield, it is the marred marriage with Dora, the final return to Agnes; and all this is in no way involved in the highly-amusing fact that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may repeat that the matter is picaresque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place, and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end except a biographical connection.

A picaresque novel is only a very eventful biography; but the opening of Bleak House is quite another business altogether. It is admirable in quite another way. The description of the fog in the first chapter of Bleak House is good in itself; but it is not merely good in itself, like the description of the wind in the opening of Martin Chuzzlewit; it is also good in the sense that Maeterlinck is good; it is what the modern people call an atmosphere. Dickens begins in the Chancery fog because he means to end in the Chancery fog. He did not begin in the Chuzzlewit wind because he meant to end in it; he began in it because it was a good beginning. This is perhaps the best short way of stating the peculiarity of the position of Bleak House. In this Bleak House beginning we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning; we have the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole. The beginning is alpha and omega: the beginning and the end. He means that all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour. (from Gilbert Keith Chesterton “Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens”)

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