"Bleak House" by Charles Dickens (1852)

 "'I mean a man whose hopes or aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all of it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other.  All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is the kind I care for.'"

Charles Dickens was the author of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities.  I think it's fair to say he was the greatest author of his generation, even if he had some stiff competition from other American, British and Russian authors of the time.  For all the excellent authors of the early and late 1800s, its probably Dickens who casts the greatest shadow over Western thought and culture.

Bleak House is probably the last of his books I'll read for some time.  Why?  Because I've read all of the other famous ones.  His bibliography is huge, and there are some odds and ends I haven't read, but I'm not likely to come across any of those other, far more obscure works any time soon.

In Bleak House Esther Summerson, a young woman of unknown origins, is released into the care of her guardian, a Mr. Jarndyce.  From that point on her fortunes become increasingly entwined within an ongoing inheritance dispute within the Court of Chancery.  Lurking in the background of her story is the highborn Lady Dedlock, a woman with whom she shares a mysterious relation.

I could never fault Dickens in terms of style, so let me just say that Bleak House is Dickens at his most densely descriptive.  He tells this story with his characteristic lack of moral ambiguity, but given the literature of the time I can't fault him for that.  In the mid-1800s very few people were ready to venture into those waters.

For the most part I found Bleak House very hard to get through, and this is coming from someone who's thoroughly enjoyed all of his other famous books.  My main complaint is that so very little happens actually happens in this story, and it's extraordinary length becomes a real obstacle after a certain point.  I liked the ending, and there was a certain ambiguity to this ending that shows Dickens' skill as a writer, but it seemed like an eternity passed between the opening and closing chapters of this novel.

For those unfamiliar with Dickens, I'd recommend starting with one of his shorter books.  Oliver Twist, for example, or The Christmas Books.  Books like Bleak House are best approached when you've finally come to a conclusion about an author, and when you've finally decided that he or she deserves the title "great."

Related Entries:

"Man's Fate" by Andre Malraux (1934)

"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Presented as a Reader's Theater Script

"The American" by Henry James (1877)

"North and South" by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)

"'In our infancy we require a wise despotism to govern us.  Indeed, long past infancy, children and young people are the happiest under the unfailing laws of a discreet, firm authority.  I agree with Miss Hale so far as to consider our people in the condition of children, while I deny that we, the masters, have anything to do with the making or keeping of them so.'"

North and South was originally serialized in Household Words, a publication edited by Charles Dickens.  Dickens was writing Hard Times at the same time that Elizabeth Gaskell was writing this novel, and the interplay between the two authors' personalities and works of fiction provides some interesting background for this book.

In North and South, Margaret Hale moves to a factory town after her father, a minister, parts ways with the Church of England.  She later forms a strained relationship with Mr. Thornton, one of the factory owners in the town, and comes to understand the wide gulf which separates her social standing from those beneath her.

Dickens himself criticized the novel for lacking "conciseness," and I would heartily agree.  At over 500 pages this book sprawls, and given its actual content it could have easily been half as long.  Instead of what might have been a harrowing look at how the Industrial Revolution impacted the north of England (as in Hard Times), we are instead witness to Margaret's endless fits of crying, fainting, and pointless introspection.  Her relationship to Mr. Thornton also lacks the dramatic import it might have had in other, more skillful hands, and the role of women in Margaret's society could have been explored in much greater depth.  At times this book flirts with being good, but never quite gets there.

I wouldn't say that it's bad, exactly.  It's not unreadable.  But given both its history and subject matter, it's hard not to think about how much better Dickens treated similar themes, and how much more powerful North and South might have been if the author had been more "concise."