The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charles Dickens · a novel in two narratives · sixty-seven chapters · in twenty monthly numbers bound as nineteen parts, March 1852 to September 1853, and in one volume, 1853 · scored on Dickens’s English as completed, with his preface, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Social novel of an institution and a city, with the secret of a great house, the orphan’s progress and the detective story, in two narratives
Mythos
The curse on a house, inherited and consuming; the fog as the court’s own medium; the city’s pollution returning on the city; the Ghost’s Walk; a rag and bottle Lord Chancellor who burns from within; the lost mother and the scarred face
Phase
From a November of fog in Chancery, through a fever, a combustion, a murder and a flight through the snow, to the end of the suit in costs; Esther’s narrative closes some seven years after
Presentation
Fiction; sixty-seven chapters, written to the monthly number from Dickens’s number plans; an anonymous narrator in the present tense alternating with Esther Summerson’s first person in the past, from “A Progress” (chapter 3) to “The Close of Esther’s Narrative” (chapter 67)
Register
From the cosmic comedy of the fog and the officialese of Coodle and Doodle to Jo’s speech, Vholes’s cold cadence, Skimpole’s charm, Bucket’s affable menace and the apostrophe over Jo’s death
Scale
A suit in Chancery and the society it reaches: the Inns and the law-stationer’s, a great house, an ironmaster’s rising house, the shabby genteel, the brickmakers and the slum, a government and a mission to Borrioboola-Gha
Governing Proposition
A suit in Chancery, inherited from one generation to the next, is eating the estate it was brought to divide; around it the novel sets a great house in Lincolnshire, a slum called Tom-all-Alone’s, a crossing sweeper who is always told to move on, and a girl raised as her mother’s disgrace who is taken in by a guardian with two wards in the suit. Two narrators tell it in turn: one in the present tense, who sees the whole system and no single life, and Esther Summerson in the past, who sees lives and never the whole. The wager of the novel is that an institution can become a system whose only end is its own continuance; that a society is one body whether it admits the connexion or not, so that what it neglects comes back to it as infection; and that only a reader who holds both narratives at once can see what no one inside the book can see.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
London, November, and fog. “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river” (chapter 1). The first chapter sinks the city into a primeval mud in which “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”, and sets the Court of Chancery at the heart of the fog. Before the court is the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, inherited from one generation to the next, its costs eating the estate it was brought to divide. Tom Jarndyce has already died by his own hand over it before the story opens. Its suitors haunt the court: Miss Flite with her birds, Gridley, and, as the book goes on, Richard Carstone.
Dickens wrote the novel to the monthly number, three or four chapters at a time, from number plans that lay out the design. Bradbury and Evans issued it in twenty numbers bound as nineteen parts, the last a double number, from March 1852 to September 1853, with etchings by Hablot K. Browne, “Phiz”, the dark plates among them, and in one volume in 1853 with Dickens’s preface. That text, in sixty-seven chapters, is the work scored here; the plates are its context, not the work. The suit runs from the November of the first chapter to its end, and the last chapter stands some seven years after.
The first chapter is told by a narrator who has no name and no self, in the present tense, from above, as the fog sees: the court, the great house, the slum. The third is told by Esther Summerson, in the past tense, as “A Progress”, and from there the two narrators take turns to the end. Neither knows what the other knows. The narrator in the present sees the system and no single life; Esther sees lives, and never the whole. The reader holds both, and the book’s question, put in chapter 16, is put to the reader alone: “What connexion can there be”.
Movement II
Esther begins with an apology: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (chapter 3). She was raised as a child no one wanted, and told “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers” (chapter 3). She does not know who her mother is. Mr Jarndyce becomes her guardian and takes her into his house, Bleak House, with his two wards in the suit, Ada and Richard Carstone. From there Esther watches the households around it.
Those households are the book’s argument made plural. Mrs Jellyby’s “Telescopic Philanthropy” (the title of chapter 4) looks to Borrioboola-Gha while her own children go untended. Mr Turveydrop lives on his son in the name of Deportment. Skimpole, the child who will not be one, lives on everyone, with a charm the reader is made to enjoy before seeing its cruelty. Mrs Pardiggle visits the brickmakers. The Smallweeds throw cushions at one another. Each is a form of the neglect that Chancery is at scale: the guardian of wards who devours them.
Esther’s voice is a made voice. Its modesty divided readers from the first, and reviewers disliked it and the book’s gloom; its modesty is the instrument by which the half she tells sees partially, as she must. She sees Richard begin to hope in the suit. She sees her guardian’s goodness and does not ask where it ends. And she cannot see what the reader sees, that the mother she has never known is in the next chapter, in a great house in Lincolnshire, in the other narrator’s present tense.
Movement III
At Chesney Wold it rains over Lincolnshire. Sir Leicester Dedlock keeps the landed order, and Lady Dedlock, frozen in boredom, keeps a secret. The Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold carries a family prophecy, which the plot will fulfil in a step Sir Leicester hears. Tulkinghorn, the lawyer, watches. From a paper he sees, a trail runs by Hawdon’s handwriting, Krook’s papers, Guppy and at last the detective Bucket through the whole of the book. The secret of the great house is the mystery plot; the institution is the protagonist.
In chapter 16 the narrator asks the question that the book exists to answer: “What connexion can there be” between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the footman in powder, and Jo, the crossing sweeper with his broom. Jo comes out of Tom-all-Alone’s, and is told wherever he stands to move on. Snagsby the law-stationer’s scenes and Chadband’s carry him, and his speech is set down without condescension: “He wos wery good to me, he wos!” The answer to the question, by a paper and by a fever, will be that there is every connexion.
Krook keeps a rag and bottle shop full of papers, and is called its Lord Chancellor. In chapter 32 he is found burned away from within: “Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died”. Dickens defended it in his preface rather than cut it. Whatever its physiology, it is the court’s end shown in a body, the judgment the court never delivers, and the book’s law, that a corruption inborn consumes from within, made a fact.
Movement IV
The fever comes out of Tom-all-Alone’s. Jo carries the smallpox from the slum to Charley, and from Charley it passes to Esther, and leaves her face scarred. Neglect returns as infection, and no house is sealed off: the claim the present-tense narrator makes about the city becomes a fact in Esther’s narrative, crossing the seam between them. Esther learns that Lady Dedlock is her mother; in the scarred face the mother’s face is lost and the self given back. The myth of the city’s pollution returning on the city has been built into the plot.
Jo dies in chapter 47, with a prayer, and the narrator turns from the bed to the reader: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.” The voice is raised; it has been earned by forty chapters of a boy moved on. The sentiment is turned into indictment, and the indictment is addressed to everyone.
Tulkinghorn is murdered. The trooper George, of the shooting gallery, and the Bagnets carry the plot to the murder. Bucket, the police detective, affable and menacing, takes it up, and the plot that the handwriting began is now his to solve. The detective stands at the turn of the novel, and the novel does not settle whether he is its hero or its threat.
Movement V
Sir Leicester is struck down, and forgives his wife. She has fled. Bucket takes Esther with him and pursues her through the snow, and the pursuit ends at the gate of the paupers’ burial ground, where Esther finds her mother dead. The step on the Ghost’s Walk has been heard. The fallen woman at a grave is a figure of melodrama, and the book keeps the archetype particular to the end: the foundling’s search for her mother ends in the mother’s death, at the gate.
Richard has given himself to the suit, and his slow ruin goes on in the cold professional cadence of Vholes. The narrator has named the system: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself” (chapter 39). A will found among Krook’s rubbish, brought in by the Smallweeds, ends Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and it ends because costs have eaten the estate; there is nothing left to divide. Richard dies of it, as Gridley did. The suit’s victims are the book’s, and the institution survives them.
Mr Jarndyce asks Esther to marry him and then renounces her, and she marries Woodcourt, the doctor; they are lodged in a cottage named Bleak House. Esther’s narrative closes seven years after, in the past tense that has ended, in a private happiness the system cannot touch, and breaks off on two words, “even supposing” (chapter 67). The book indicts the world and lodges its good characters outside it. The present-tense narrative does not close in that way: the fog it described has not lifted, and the book’s question, what connexion there can be, is left with the reader.
Act III · The Twelve
The design states its question in chapter 16: “What connexion can there be” between Chesney Wold, the town house, the footman in powder and Jo with his broom; almost every household answers it. Mr Turveydrop is the parasitic parent beside Mrs Jellyby the absent one and Skimpole the child who will not be one, three forms of the neglect that Chancery is at scale. George and the Bagnets carry the plot to Tulkinghorn’s murder; Snagsby and Chadband carry Jo; the Smallweeds bring the will that ends the suit. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the slack that twenty numbers left: Boythorn, the repeated Bagnet routine, some of Chadband, the Turveydrop wedding comedy and the drawn out Woodcourt and Jarndyce resolution, near a tenth of the whole.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure is not that Chancery was slow. It is general, and it holds: an institution can become a system whose end is its own continuance, “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself” (chapter 39), and such a system disperses responsibility until no one is guilty and everyone is consumed. Beside it stands a second: a society is one body whether it admits it or not, and neglect returns as infection; the smallpox Jo carries out of Tom-all-Alone’s to Charley and to Esther makes that a fact of the plot. The book adds philanthropy that looks past the near to the far, and a child formed by being told she is her mother’s disgrace. Held off the top by its private answer: a guardian’s purse, a doctor, a cottage.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Height is reached often and in several keys, and the best of it is earned by the matter. The comic and the cosmic together: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river” (chapter 1), and a city sunk in a primeval mud where “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill”. The dreadful: Krook’s end, “Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died” (chapter 32). The raised voice over Jo’s death (chapter 47), earned by forty chapters of a boy moved on. The flight through the snow to the gate of the paupers’ burial ground; Sir Leicester struck down and forgiving his wife. Held at the foot of the summit by the sentiment: Esther’s raptures, and tears the rhetoric asks for.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The suit is a curse on a house, inherited and transmitted, consuming those who hope in it, and the plot carries the curse out: Tom Jarndyce’s suicide before the action, Gridley, Miss Flite, Richard Carstone, and the suit’s end when costs have eaten the estate. The fog of the first chapter is the court’s own medium and the plot’s: no one sees whole. The fever is the old myth of a city’s pollution returning on the city, carried by a boy who is told to move on and cannot. The Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold is a family prophecy the plot fulfils. Krook, called the Lord Chancellor of his rag and bottle shop, burns from within. Held a step down because Esther’s half keeps its myth thinner than the other.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is Dickens’s own: the multiple plot, the comic gallery, the orphan’s progress, the attack on an institution, as on the workhouse in Oliver Twist and the schools in Nicholas Nickleby. The turn is formal, and it was costly. The book divides itself between an impersonal narrator in the present tense, itself a departure in the English novel, and a woman’s retrospect that never knows what the other narrator knows, and stakes a long serial on the seam between them. Its protagonist is an institution and a city; its plot is solved by a police detective. Reviewers disliked Esther’s voice and the gloom, and Dickens defended the combustion in his preface rather than cut it. Held below the top because it bends his own proven form more than it breaks the novel’s.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The impersonal half sees the system, from Chancery to Chesney Wold to Tom-all-Alone’s, in a present tense in which nothing is concluded. Esther’s half sees persons, in a past tense that has ended, and its knowledge is partial by design: she cannot see what the reader sees, that her mother is in the next chapter. The book’s claim, that a society is connected and that no one inside it can see the connexion, is carried by the gap between the two, and the reader alone holds both. Esther’s first sentence states the form’s knowledge, that the good person sees little: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (chapter 3). Held off the top because some numbers alternate for supply more than for meaning.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over a century and three quarters. Edmund Wilson’s “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (1941) placed the book at the turn of Dickens’s career into social criticism; Nabokov lectured on it at Cornell as a study of craft (Lectures on Literature, 1980); J. Hillis Miller’s introduction to the Penguin edition read it as a novel about interpretation, a world of documents read and misread; D. A. Miller’s “Discipline in Different Voices” (The Novel and the Police, 1988) read the double narration as the reader’s induction into surveillance. The readings do not cancel, and the questions stay open: whether Esther’s modesty is innocence or strategy, whether the cottage answers the system or evades it, what the combustion is, fact or figure or both, and whether Bucket is the book’s hero or its threat.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the English novel of the mid nineteenth century. The force: a novel of a whole society organised around an institution, the city shown as one connected system and told from two incompatible vantages, a real reorganisation of what the social novel could hold. Its reach is wide in kind but often diffuse in particular, and the reach of the author is easily taken for the reach of the book; that holds the axis below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bucket stands at the head of the police detective in the English novel, before Sergeant Cuff in Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); critics have set Kafka’s court in The Trial beside this one; and the city novel as network, and the systems novels of the twentieth century, are traced to it by critical tradition rather than proven descent.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One hundred and seventy-three years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text survives whole, as Dickens issued it, in print without a break since 1853, with no problem of recension. The presence is wide and continuous: taught as a central Victorian novel, translated widely, adapted for television again and again, most widely in the BBC serial of 2005 written by Andrew Davies, and two of its names, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” and “telescopic philanthropy”, still in use for an endless lawsuit and a distant charity. It has outlived its conditions: the Judicature Acts of the 1870s ended the court it drew, and the book is read for what it disclosed through that court. Held a step down because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of Great Expectations in the schools and in common reading.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. The command of register is as wide as any English novel of its century: the cosmic comedy of the fog; the officialese of Coodle and Doodle; Jo’s speech, “He wos wery good to me, he wos!”, set down without condescension; Vholes’s cold professional cadence; Skimpole’s charm, enjoyed before its cruelty is seen; Bucket’s affable menace. The construction carries a plot of great intricacy across nineteen parts, so that a paper Tulkinghorn sees leads by Hawdon’s handwriting, Krook’s papers, Guppy and Bucket to the gate of the burial ground, and a will found among Krook’s rubbish ends the suit. Esther’s modesty is an instrument, not a lapse. Charged: the tags overrun, the Woodcourt resolution is contrived, and some numbers are padded.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill in the first chapter and Esther’s last broken words, “even supposing” (chapter 67). One law governs them: everything is connected, no one sees the connexion, and what is neglected returns. The combustion obeys the book’s law, not chemistry’s: the corruption is inborn and consumes from within, as the suit does. Comedy and death share the law; Turveydrop and Jo are both what neglect makes. The range is very wide and it is held. Charged: the private resolution softens the law in Esther’s half, so that the system’s victims, Richard, Jo, Lady Dedlock and Gridley, die while the good are lodged in a second Bleak House. The law bends there.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Held, not listed, by one figure: the suit and the fever reach every order. The law and the state: Chancery, the Inns, the law-writer, the solicitors, the government of Coodle and Doodle, an election in Rouncewell’s town. Class: Chesney Wold, the ironmaster’s rising house, the shabby genteel, the brickmakers, Tom-all-Alone’s. Labour: the law-stationer’s trade, the trooper’s shooting gallery, the ironworks. The family, in a dozen versions, most of them failing. Consciousness: Esther’s half entire, Lady Dedlock’s frozen boredom, Richard’s slow ruin. The sacred: Chadband, Mrs Pardiggle, Jo’s dying prayer. Empire: Borrioboola-Gha. The body: the smallpox, the doctor, the combustion. Crime and the police. The natural order and history: the fog, the rain over Lincolnshire, the primeval mud, and the landed order passing at the close.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.5, then The Bottomless Well at 9.2. Every order of a society, from Chesney Wold to Tom-all-Alone’s and from Chancery to a mission to Borrioboola-Gha, held together by one suit and one fever rather than set side by side; and a century and three quarters of argument over Esther’s modesty, the combustion, the cottage and the detective that has not closed any of them.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by what twenty monthly numbers left that the design does not need: Boythorn, the repeated Bagnet routine, some of Chadband, the Turveydrop wedding comedy and the drawn out Woodcourt and Jarndyce resolution, near a tenth of the whole. Next above it, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 8.9: a turn made inside Dickens’s own proven form; a reach wide in kind but diffuse in particular; and a law that bends where the good are lodged in a second Bleak House.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, scored as the novel he completed: issued by Bradbury and Evans in twenty monthly numbers bound as nineteen parts, the last a double number, from March 1852 to September 1853, and in one volume in 1853, sixty-seven chapters with Dickens’s preface. Hablot K. Browne’s etchings (“Phiz”), the dark plates among them, are named as context and are not scored. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. The share of dialogue, the length of the sentences and the rate of repetition are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the novel in words, the division of the chapters between the two narrators, the chapters in which the fever passes, the suit ends and the pursuit through the snow runs, and whether any English novel before it had divided itself between two such narrators. Citations are by chapter: chapter 16 is chapter 16.