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Trade paperback, 1037 pages Published 2003 (originally 1852-53) Acquired December 2019 Read January 2020 |
I really enjoyed this, the most recent of my attempts to read a Charles Dickens novel every year. You might say that Dickens had two different approaches to the novel: there's the bildungsroman that focuses on a single character, told in the first person, like David Copperfield (1849-50) or Great Expectations (1860-61). Or there's the "vast sweep of London" novel, taking in numerous strands and characters, like A Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). Bleak House is both, alternating between sections told in the first-person past tense by Esther Summerson (Dickens's only female narrator) and those told in the third-person present by an omnipotent narrator. (Anyone who thinks Victorian novels were stodgy in their formats has clearly never actually paid attention to them. Take that, modernists!)
Each of these would be a good novel on its own. Esther is a great Dickens protagonist, Dickens bringing his usual attention to detail when it comes to the development of the self. There are some great jokes (I love the one about the kid who fell down the stairs). The other half is one of Dickens's best crafted sweep-of-London novels, I think, with so many disparate parts that all revolve around a central point even when it doesn't seem like it. There are lots of great characters: the Jellabys, Vholes (if you made the law comprehensible, men like him would be out of work!), Sir Leicester, many more.
I'd be curious to see sometime if I'm right, but I actually think you could read each of these strands as its own novel and it would work fine, a book called Esther Summerson and another called something like In Chancery or Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Dickens has done great work (well, and bad) in both of these forms, but here he's wedded them together. I think it works really well, thanks to the divergent styles. Dickens is always interested in how people are shaped by societal forces, and Bleak House gives us both a novel of a person and a novel of societal forces at once, letting Dickens explore that balance to its fullest effect. Esther wouldn't be Esther without all the machinations around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but if her sections were told like all the others, I think she might get lost in the novel. This isn't my favorite Dickens (that's probably still Great Expectations), but it's definitely up there.
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