And why do we need refreshment, my friends? Because we are but mortal, because we are but sinful, because we are but of the earth…” Do we need refreshment then, my friends? We do. “My friends,” says, “what is this which we now behold as being spread before us? Refreshment. Dickens has such a subtle ear, not merely for the language people use, but for the rhythm and cadence of the way they use it: The Reverend Mr Chadband, for example, is that deliciously repellent ‘large yellow man with a fat smile and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system’, but what makes him so marvellously memorable is the way he talks. People in novels, of course, can only ever be made of words, but it’s one of the special qualities of Dickens’s imagination that his caricatures are so intensely verbal. From Conversation Kenge’s curiously abbreviated missives (not so very different from modern texting), to the love letters that threaten to expose Lady Dedlock’s dark secret, to the anonymous notes that charge her with murder, to the infamous and long-mislaid Jarndyce will, upon which so much depends and through which so much will be lost. In an age when we are becoming more and more obsessed with the nature of language – with the way words work, and the means by which they are transmitted – Bleak House has never been more compelling. And if this was true back in the 70s when that edition was published, how much more so now.
Hillis Miller: ‘ Bleak House is a document about the interpretation of documents’. I first read Bleak House in my first term at Oxford, and I still have that battered and much-loved Penguin edition, in which I have carefully underlined the opening line of the now celebrated introduction by J. And should one ever doubt it, yet another self-indulgent re-reading of those marvellous fog-wreathed first pages will convince you – without question the greatest opening he ever wrote, and a contender, I would argue, for the greatest opening of any novel, then or now. In this great book, Dickens is truly at the peak of his powers. Bleak House does not merely embody the vast scope of his vision of contemporary London, but offers unparalleled richness in every aspect of his art – from the slums of Tom-All-Alone’s to the ‘houses of high connection’ in the fashionable world from comedy to psychological drama to social commentary and pure storytelling.
So why Bleak House? What is it about this novel, in particular, that I find so compelling? The short answer is that all Dickens’s genius is here.
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