Study Guide to Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Studienhilfen
• Subtopic: Studienführer

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, said to be one of Dickens’s most powerful novels due to the way it challenged Britain's court system and caused legal reform in the 1870s. As an 1830 novel set in London, Bleak House unveils a different way of life where the court system is corrupt and ruled by the affluent. Moreover, the struggles throughout the story highlight the love between the characters and the push for a change in the legal system. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Dickens’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO CHARLES DICKENS

EARLY LIFE

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea. His father, John Dickens, was a minor clerk in the Navy Pay Office; his father’s parents had been servants and his mother’s parents only slightly higher on the social scale. John Dickens was a happy-go-lucky, improvident man whose family often knew want as the debts piled up. At the age of twelve, Charles Dickens experienced what was to become the key event of his life. His father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea Prison; young Charles was taken out of school and put to work in a blacking warehouse in London, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish. Although he later returned to school for a time, this experience left a permanent mark on the soul of Charles Dickens. Even many years later, after he had become a successful author, he could not bear to talk about it, or be reminded of his family’s ignominy.

At the age of fifteen Dickens began working as an office boy for a law firm. He taught himself shorthand and by 1828 he became a reporter for the lay courts of Doctors’ Common. The dull routine of the legal profession never interested him, so he became a newspaper reporter for the Mirror of Parliament, The True Sun, and finally for the Morning Chronicle. (John Forster, later his closest friend and biographer, was also employed at The True Sun.) By the age of twenty, Dickens was one of the best Parliamentary reporters in all England.

During this same period Dickens’ interest began to switch from journalism to literature. His first work of fiction, “Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later reprinted as “Mr. Minns and His Cousin”), appeared in the Monthly Magazine when he was twenty-one. His newspaper work had given him an intimate knowledge of the streets and byways of London, and late in 1832 he began writing sketches and stories of London life. They began to appear in periodicals and newspapers in 1833, and in 1836 were gathered together as Sketches by Boz, Illustrations of Every-day Life, and Every-day People. This pseudonym, Boz, was suggested by his brother’s pronunciation of “Moses” when he had a cold.

PICKWICK PAPERS

The success of the Sketches brought an invitation from the publishers Chapman and Hall in 1836 to furnish the “letter-press” for a series of cartoon sketches about a humorous cockney sporting club. (The letter-press was little more than a running accompaniment, like an ornamental border around the drawings.) The project had hardly begun when Robert Seymour, the artist, committed suicide. Dickens searched long for a new artist and found an ideal collaborator in H. K. Browne (“Phiz”), but Dickens had persuaded the publisher to let him improvise a fictional narrative. When the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club finally came out, the story predominated over the illustrations.

When Pickwick Papers appeared in April, 1836, as a monthly serial, the sales were at first discouraging. Of the first issue, a modest 400 copies were printed; later the work became increasingly popular. Some 40,000 copies of each issue were sold. After the last installment appeared in November, 1837, the novel was published in book form. This set the pattern for all of Dickens’ subsequent novels.

The success of Pickwick convinced Dickens that his real career lay in writing fiction; he gave up his Parliamentary reporting in order to devote himself full time to it. In 1836 he had married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of one of the owners of the Morning Chronicle; his growing family made it necessary to work exhaustingly at his writing. His next work, Oliver Twist, began appearing even before Pickwick was completed. Nicholas Nickleby followed in a like manner in 1838-39, and the very first number sold some 50,000 copies. During this same period he was editor of Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-39). By the 1840s Dickens had become the most popular novelist in Britain, taking over the place long held by Sir Walter Scott.

THE MIDDLE YEARS

The years between 1840 and 1855 were most fruitful ones: The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorritt, and Hard Times all appeared. In addition, he made his first trip to America; copyright laws at that time allowed American publishers to pirate his works, and their lack of concern over this injustice undoubtedly contributed to Dickens’ unfavorable criticism of America in Martin Chuzzlewit. In 1850 Dickens founded his own periodical, Household Words, and continued to edit it until he and his partner exchanged it for All the Year Round in 1859. Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations appeared in serial form in these publications. But these years of literary success were marred by domestic strife. He and his wife had never been particularly suited to each other, and their marriage ended in separation in 1856.

In addition to writing, Dickens had another love - amateur theatricals - which led him into yet another pursuit in the latter part of his career. He gave public readings from his novels from 1859 to 1868 in England, Scotland, and America. He had always loved the theater - he studied drama as a young man and had organized an amateur theatrical company of his own in 1847 (he was both manager and principal actor).

His energies never seemed to fail: he burned the candle at both ends. He published Our Mutual Friend in 1864-65 and at his death left an unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a suspense tale in the nature of a detective story. He died suddenly in 1870 from a stroke at the age of fifty-eight. G. K. Chesterton once said that Dickens died of “popularity.” It would seem so; his exhaustive burden (marked by insomnia and fatigue) is well cataloged in his letters. He was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Dickens wrote with an eye on the tastes of a wide readership, never far ahead of the printer, and was always ready to modify the story to suit his readers. For example, when the sales of serial installments of Martin Chuzzlewit fell from 60,000 to 20,000, Dickens sent his hero off to America in order to stimulate renewed interest. No novelist ever had so close a relationship with his public, a public ranging from barely literate factory girls to wealthy dowagers, but consisting mostly of the newly formed middle classes.

TEACHER AND ENTERTAINER

Walter Allen in The English Novel points out that Dickens became the spokesman for this rising middle class, and also its teacher. “Dickens more than any of his contemporaries was the expression of the conscience-untutored, baffled, muddled as it doubtless often was-of his age,” he writes. Not only in his novels, but in his magazine, Household Words, Dickens lashed out at what he considered the worst social abuses of his time: imprisonment for debt, the ferocious penal code, the unsanitary slums which bred criminals, child labor, the widespread mistreatment of children, the unsafe machinery in factories, and the hideous schools.

Yet, as Allen suggests, Dickens was primarily a great entertainer, “the greatest entertainer, probably, in the history of fiction.” It is significant that Dickens was not satisfied to have his books the best sellers of their time. He wanted to see his audience, to manipulate it with the power of his own words. His public readings gave him an excellent opportunity to do so. Sitting alone on a bare stage, he would read excerpts from various novels, act them out really, imitating the voices of the various characters. These theatrical readings would always contain a dying-child scene or two which left his audience limp and tear-stained. Dickens suffered all the emotions with his audience, even after repeated readings, and this undoubtedly helped to shorten his life. He entertained his readers with humor, pathos, suspense, and melodrama, all on a grand scale. Charles Dickens had a fertile imagination that peopled his novels with characters and events which continue to entertain twentieth-century readers as they delighted his contemporaries.

NOVEL TECHNIQUE

An understanding of Dickens as an artist requires an understanding of the method of publication he used-monthly or weekly installments. Serialization left its mark on his fiction and often accounts for the flaws which many critics have found in his work. John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson in Dickens at Work (1957) describe the problems serial publication imposed:

“Chapters must be balanced within a number in respect both of length and of effect. Each number must lead, if not to a climax, at least to a point of rest; and the rest between numbers is necessarily more extended than what the mere chapter divisions provide. The writer had also to bear in mind that his readers were constantly interrupted for prolonged periods, and that he must take this into account in his characterizations and, to some extent, in his plotting.”

This technique brought on a loose, episodic treatment with a vast, intricate plot, numerous characters and much repetition to jog the reader’s memory. Instead of the whole novel slowly building to a real climax, each part had to have a little climax of its own. In Hard Times the bad effects of serialization are at a minimum because it is a comparatively short novel (about 260 pages in most editions) and it appeared in weekly rather than monthly parts. But the careful reader can still tell where each part ended; considerations of space rather than of artistic technique formed the story.

The works of Dickens have many of their roots in the eighteenth century, especially in the novels of Tobias Smollett, whom he greatly admired. From Smollett he borrowed many devices of characterization - “tagging” characters with physical peculiarities, speech mannerisms, compulsive gestures, and eccentric names. Examples in Hard Times include the distinctive speech pattern of Stephen Blackpool, who talks in a phonetically transcribed Lancashire dialect; the self-deprecating speech of Bounderby or the self-pitying talk of Mrs. Sparsit; the physical peculiarities of Bitzer, the epitome of pallidness; the names of characters - Bounderby, M’Choakumchild, Gradgrind-so evocative of their personalities.

The eighteenth century also brought the picaresque tradition in fiction to full flower. (The term refers to novels which depict the life of a picaro [Spanish: “rogue”] and which consist of unconnected episodes held together by the presence of the central character.) Early novels, especially those of Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, were rambling, episodic, and anecdotal. Many of the novels of Dickens-Pickwick, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield to name a few - are picaresque in technique. Hard Times borrows from the tradition only the irreverent, satirical view of stuffed-shirt pretentiousness and of established society in general. The eighteenth-century theater, with its sharply defined villains, its involved melodramatic plots, and its farcical humor, also suggested ideas for plots and characterizations to Dickens.

Dickens took his descriptive techniques from Sir Walter Scott and other early nineteenth-century novelists. No character, no matter how minor, appears on the scene without being fully described, not only as to physical appearance, but as to the clothing he wears. Dickens also excels in the short but evocative description of places; in Hard Times note the portrayal of the murky streets and factories of Coketown and of its blighted wasteland-like countryside.

THE WORLD OF HIS NOVELS

The world of Dickens’ novels is a fantasy world, a fairy-tale world, a nightmare world. It is a world seen as through the eyes of a child: the shadows are blacker, the fog denser, the houses higher, the midnight streets emptier and more terrifying than in reality. To a child, inanimate objects have lives of their own: thus the smoke malevolently winds over Coketown like serpents and the pistons of the steam engines in the factory are “melancholy mad elephants.”

The characters, too, are seen as children see people. Their peculiarities are heightened to eccentricities; their vices, to monstrous proportions. Most of the people in his novels are caricatures, characterized by their externals, almost totally predictable in behavior. We know little about them beyond their surface behavior; Dickens focuses on the outward man, not the inner motives. It is interesting to note, however, that Dickens was able to create intensely individual portraits even though he lacked the ability to analyze motivation and character developments. His characters are more than types or mere abstract representations of virtue or vice. They are intensely alive and thus memorable. The characters from a Dickens novel are remembered long after the plots and even the titles of the books have been forgotten.

DICKENS THE REFORMER

Dickens in his lifetime saw Great Britain change from a rural, agricultural “Merrie Old England” of inns, stagecoaches, and fox-hunting squires to an urbanized, commercial-industrial land of railroads, factories, slums, and a city proletariat. These changes are chronicled in his novels, and it is possible to read them as a social history of England. Pickwick, although set in 1827-28, reflects much of what still survived of the old eighteenth-century way of life. Oliver Twist (1837-39) shows the first impact of the Industrial Revolution - the poverty existing at that time and the feeble attempt to remedy it by workhouses. Dombey and Son (1846-48) describes the coming of the railroad, a symbol of change. Dombey, the merchant, sacrifices love, wife, and children for a position of power through money; yet he is already...