SPOILER ALERT
ALL THREE OF THESE ARTICLES CONTAIN INFORMATION ABOUT PLOT POINTS THAT WILL SPOIL THE FIRST TIME READER’S EXPERIENCE
Here are three critiques of the wonderful Bleak House. To help set the novel in biographical context, Peter Ackroyd gives us some background information about Dickens’s life during the time of writing. G.K. Chesterton charts this novel within the context of the Dickens canon to date to demonstrate that with it Dickens the Writer has reached the “highest point of his intellectual maturity”. Robert Alan Donovan blends the technical and the biographical “in an effort to see how structure and idea engage each other”.
“Indeed the novel can itself be read almost like a symbolic report on the period within which it was written, a newspaper of the imagination where the most startling public issues were given the wraith-like resonance of that ‘Shadow World’ from which Dickens’s fictions emerged.” (123)
ACKROYD
“In this ‘Bleak House’ beginning we have the feeling that it is not only a beginning; we have the feeling that the author sees the conclusion and the whole . . . He means that all the characters and all the events shall be read through the smoky colours of that sinister and unnatural vapour.” CHESTERTON
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22362/pg22362-images.html#BLEAK
“But the real greatness of ‘Bleak House’ lies in the happy accident of Dickens’s hitting upon a structural form (the mystery story) and a system of symbols (Chancery) which could hold, for once, the richness of the Dickensian matter without allowing characters and incidents to distract the reader from the total design.” (28)
DONOVAN
This article contains MANY SPOILERS, and it may not make sense if one is unfamiliar with the novel. I found it extremely helpful to my understanding of several issues especially the following:
- Donovan identifies the “main theme of Bleak House [as] responsibility” stemming from Dickens’s canonical “protest against social injustice”;
- He offers an explanation for Dickens’s use of Chancery as the representative of society’s failure to be responsible;
- He demonstrates how Dickens structured the novel via “the progressive discovery” of relationships between events and characters, that is, via “the typical pattern of the detective story”;
- He discusses the problem of point of view incurred by this structure and how Dickens resolved it by using both an omniscient narrator and a first person narrator;
- He defends the choice of Esther Summerson as the first person narrator by virtue of her being “transparent as glass” and having “sufficient integrity . . . to draw together the manifold observations she sets down”;
- Finally, he weighs in on Boze’s question of which is Dickens’s best novel, offering Bleak House as his choice.
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 