Beauty in Ashes

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I just finished reading Bleak House for the third time in my life, and before writing this blog post, I looked back to see what I blogged about in 2012, the last time I enjoyed the Great Man’s ninth novel. It appears I wrote six times about the book. How did I find so much time to write these posts while I was working?

I have just one thing to write about after this visit with the deep, mysterious, disturbingly comforting Bleak House. I see that I touched on it in one of my posts from nine years ago when I commented on this passage:

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

The dark storm makes creation new. After the deluge comes a new brilliantly colored sign in the heavens.

Throughout Bleak House, characters are immersed in atmospheres of influence. Influence, a common word in the book, originally referred to streams of celestial power in our atmosphere flowing (fluens in Latin) in from the planets. These influences, it was believed, both shaped character and caused temporary changes of temperament or health. Influenza came from the influences. At the beginning of Bleak House, the air is filled with “fog,” which sounds romantic to us now but actually consisted mostly of smoke from factories. As we progress through the pages, we get the pervading rain around Chesney Wold, the dust that blankets everything in Tulkinghorn’s chambers, the soot of the poor neighborhoods, the disease in the noisome air of a cramped urban cemetery, and, most importantly, the poisonous influence of the Court of Chancery, touching and harming everyone who has the misfortune to find his business taken up therein:

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.

And yet beauty arises from the wreckage of this whirlwind. This isn’t Great Expectations, so Dickens awards his good characters happy endings in this novel with the sad name. And yet every happy ending summarized in the last chapter of Bleak House has a depth of beauty that comes from some tragic mark. One character ends happily married and has a baby girl – who is deaf and dumb. But doesn’t the mother only love her child the more for that deficiency? The narration tells us explicitly that one pretty widow is more beautiful with the shadow of loss on her face. Two neighbors who have argued over the ownership of a disputed strip of land try reconciling but find that they actually have more fun arguing. John Jarndyce still calls his study the Growlery. And the house, in commemoration of the storm that has made creation new, is still affectionately known as Bleak House. Because of its realism and familiarity, isn’t this the happiest of all Dickens’s happy endings?