What Makes Dickens’ Characters Immortal?

Bleak House: A Tale of Two Retreats
Menalcus Lankford

        While I can’t claim a comprehensive overview of the thematic interpretations directed at this much admired work of Dickens’s maturity, from what I have read I have felt a certain lack. The focus seems mainly on the failings of the Victorian social order -- as represented by that failed attempt at reform, the Chancery law system -- and the human suffering that resulted, or the marvelous complementary atmosphere of decay, sinister machinations and mystery with which the novel engulfs us. Certainly Dickens deserves much praise for his social criticism, often encouraging change in specific laws and practices, and this element also brings a level of fact to his fiction that much enriches it. And in this novel he does enchant us with the atmosphere he creates.  
          But Dickens also wrote about the essential struggles of the human heart, often connecting that provocatively with the surrounding social evils. And in this probing of the heart, he is always focused as much on human grace as human failures. That balanced vision, like Shakespeare’s, may be an important basis of his enduring popularity. But it is this inner human struggle that seems to me neglected, at least relatively, in the interpretations of Bleak House that I have seen.
          I want to suggest a unifying theme running through the novel which is very much a matter of a particularly human inner choice, one that we all face in greater or lesser degree. It may also serve to bridge what some readers have felt as a disjunction: that Bleak House is actually two stories -- the sinister lawyer Tulkinghorne, relentlessly tracking down the truth about the early life of Lady Dedlock in order to enhance his own power and, running parallel to it, the expose of the Chancery law courts and their devastating effects. These two stories may seem joined only at an obvious plot level: Esther Summerson, who is appointed as a legal companion by the Court of Chancery in that horror of lawsuits, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce (story two), is also gradually revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock (story one). 
          But on my third reading of Bleak House I discovered something that drew together major characters from these 'two stories' and revealed a previously unappreciated inner theme, thereby enriching my sense of reading a unified novel about a universal challenge for the human heart.                           
          To see this, I suggest putting side by side a major character from each of the two stories -- Lady Dedlock and John Jarndyce. They are so restricted to the separate stories mentioned that they have only one casual and not very significant meeting in the thousand pages of the novel. But there is a vital thematic bond: critical to the life of each is an early traumatic event. In addition, each makes a dramatic, life-changing response to that event. To read the novel as an exploration of their contrasting responses is to see it as a rich commentary on two fundamental human alternatives always there for each of us in reacting to psychological /spiritual trauma.
          As a very young woman, Honoria Barbary (before she became Lady Dedlock) had a passionate affair with a young army Captain before he went abroad with his regiment. She became pregnant by him, and in an apparently difficult delivery, she had an illegitimate child. Her sister severely condemned her for this, and so disrespected her as to mislead that the infant daughter had died -- effectively removing her from the mother’s influence. For reasons that are not made explicit, the child’s father also abandoned Honoria around this time. The whole novel shows how keenly she felt her failure and disgrace from these related events, until the day she drove herself to her death at the wretched London graveyard where her former lover lay buried. But her response to this early life trauma was to hide it as far as possible and radically to withdraw into the apparent safety of marriage to a much older man, a member of the insulated aristocracy.
          John Jarndyce likely already knew too well the destructive effects of chancery lawsuits on those counting on receiving monetary judgments and driven to madness by the delays, but he was brought to face this madness at its most extreme when his great uncle, utterly distraught by such frustrations, blew his brains out in a London pub.  This was such a seminal event that the younger Jarndyce withdrew himself completely from further involvement in the suit from which his family had long suffered (though he might eventually have been a beneficiary), refused to attend sessions of the court or even discuss it. And, in a striking act, he took over the dead uncle’s crumbling country house – aptly named ‘Bleak House’, and indicative of the man’s own decay -- and began turning it into something quite determinedly different.
          So Honoria Barbary and John Jarndyce were both badly burned in early life, and the experience turned each in a radically new direction. Each made a psychological retreat, part of which was a retreat to a great country house. Here their impulses may have been much the same: such a country estate -- whether Chesney Wold or Bleak House -- promises quiet, serenity and the opportunity to get control of a chaotic, personally threatening life. They perhaps each desired to escape the peopled world of their pain, with its endless gossip, criticism, anxiety, hysteria. For John it was to escape the world where a Chancery lawsuit with his family name on it was blighting or actually destroying lives, and for Honoria it was to leave forever behind the place of her indiscreet passion and pregnancy, together with the severe condemnation and abandonment which she suffered as a result. For her, marrying a much older man, and a baronet, doubled the retreat to safety: she was not only moving into a great, removed country house but into the seemingly invulnerable life of the aristocracy, and with an older husband who loved her but not with the disruptive passion of a young man, a husband who offered as well all the time-honored respect and dignity of his family.   
          In this way the novel can be read as 'a tale of two retreats'. It can be seen through that unifying focus. To retreat in the face of trauma is a very natural response, but the way it is done determines what kind of human being emerges from the process, and the effect of that person on others. Bleak House presents an absorbing contrast between the kind of retreat made by Honoria Barbary and the kind made by John Jarndyce, and an awareness of that can enrich the reader’s experience of the novel. 
          Honoria’s retreat may seem extreme -- did she really have to marry a baronet old enough to be her father and go live in a place as grim and ghost-haunted as Chesney Wold and plunge herself so relentlessly into the 'fashionable intelligence' of the aristocracy and their sycophants?  In order to escape the wildness of her youthful past, with its disturbing passions, did she have to become an empty socialite going through the motions of an unreal existence -- like something preserved under glass, a fragile beauty in a kind of walking death? Probably not, but we need to understand how great her early trauma was.
          The treatment she received around her illegitimate pregnancy, as a sensitive and vulnerable young woman, was a cruel thing. Her older sister regarded her as such a hopeless sinner as to hide the fact of her infant’s survival so that she herself could raise the child, though she clearly had no love for this chore. She told the child, 'You are your mother’s disgrace, as she is yours!’1 If she could say this to a little girl, what must she have said to her own grown sister, whom she regarded as the evil one in the case? And likely at this time Honoria was also suffering from rejection by Captain Hawdon, the father of her child. Though she had written him a packet of love letters -- which he did keep for years even after his supposed death  -- it seems he never came to her at the time she gave birth or afterwards. It is likely that she feels deserted by him at this time, even after all her passionate letters. 
          Then there is the apparent death of her child at birth. However unwanted her pregnancy may originally have been, having carried the baby to term and then losing it -- that must have added to her trauma.
          And then there is the reported death of Captain Hawdon. The world learns that he has fallen overboard and drowned while his ship lay moored in harbor. This is a deception which he works to escape his debts and, perhaps, to escape obligation to Honoria. She has been humiliated for her illegitimate pregnancy, she has lost her baby, she has apparently been rejected by the man she still loves, and then she has lost this man to death – burned indeed at a tender age.   
          While Captain Hawdon is held close in memory by Sgt. George, who served him closely as an aid and friend in the army and regarded him as a worthy, honorable gentlemen -- and we know that he was decorated for bravery, and we know that he was very kind to the impoverished street boy Jo, even when he was almost equally destitute -- he was also an addicted opium user. This is the source of the debts he wishes to escape by faking his death. Perhaps as well it helps to explain how he might both have loved Honoria and have felt absolutely incapable of a life with her as a husband and father. His own sense of unworthiness -- a touching echo of hers -- is suggested by the name he took for the self that survived his faked death: Nemo, 'No one', in Latin.
          In Honoria’s mind, this addiction of her lover was likely part of the ‘wildness’ of her youthful life, which, after hearing of his supposed death, she so desperately wished to put behind her. The guilt about that 'wildness' was part of what she had to disassociate herself from.
          When she marries Sir Leicester Dedlock and goes to live at his country estate, Chesney Wold, her retreat from life is considerable. He is a very conservative older man who admires and loves her but is hardly open to a new thought. His name makes it clear. In marrying him and becoming Lady Dedlock, she has locked herself into a kind of death.
          Given the pain that has driven her to this, it might be expected that she would attempt to soften her husband toward the class of everyday folk from which she sprung. Perhaps she could get him to see that not every social aspiration of middle and lower class people threatened a new instance of the Wat Tyler Rebellion, as he seems to think. Sir Leicester Dedlock values people of lower social station who serve him faithfully and keep their place, such as his housekeeper Mrs. Rouncewell, but he cannot abide her upstart son who has become a successful and wealthy manufacturer, and is scandalized that one of his friends of the same class has been elected to parliament. 
          But Lady Dedlock makes no attempt to broaden his outlook, nor do we see her compassionating people of the class she was born into, or in any way seeming sympathetic to them. (Rosa is a touching exception, because she becomes an emotional stand-in for her own daughter of the same age when she learns that this daughter is alive, though she will have no relationship with her due to the ever-present fear that her past will be exposed.) So, far from expressing tenderness toward her own class, it’s quite the opposite: Honoria goes to the other extreme, maintaining a cold aristocratic bearing and confining her associations to what Dickens ironically describes as 'the fashionable intelligence'. In fact, he says she has reached 'the top of the fashionable tree.'
         
          How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody knows….  My Lady Dedlock having conquered her world, fell not into the melting but rather into the freezing mood. An exhausted composure, a worn-out placidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction, are the trophies of her victory. She is perfectly well bred. If she could be translated to heaven tomorrow, she might be expected to ascend without any rapture (p. 22).
 
          This is how Dickens presents her, from an outside point of view. The reader must interpret her, and at first she seems quite unsympathetic, as in this passage. It is a tribute to the novelist’s skill that we do begin to care for her, to realize that a human heart beats beneath the false self she has created in her retreat. But we come to that not from what she says, nor from Dickens revealing her inner thoughts and certainly not from her indolent and superior attitude. Instead, the author engages us by this seemingly dispassionate woman’s secret and passionate acts.
          These occasional acts, so intriguing, begin early. In the midst of a boring legal document in the interminable Chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, Lady Dedlock happens to idly glance at the legal copy itself and -- in a quite uncharacteristic burst of animated interest -- asks 'who copied that' (p. 26)? At the moment no one knows, but it is clear that it was copied recently, and moments later she faints and needs to be taken to her room. She has seen the copying hand of her lover and the father of her child, whom she had believed drowned some twenty years before. Tulkinghorne, the sinister lawyer who lives by using the secrets of the aristocracy, has noticed, as has the reader, and story number one of the novel takes off. 
          As we get to know Lady Dedlock better, as we find her secretly pursuing whatever she can learn about her former lover, even after she knows that he has now truly died (of a drug overdose), as we see her passionate to learn where he lived and what his life was like and where he was buried, we begin better to understand the retreat she has made. We sense how greatly it is based on her self-suppression. Then we begin to understand how frightened and destroyed she must have been as a young woman, condemned for her illegitimate pregnancy, abandoned by her lover and condemning herself for the wildness of that early life. Now we begin to see why she has made herself into this cold, indolent aristocrat of the 'fashionable intelligence': this new self is the antithesis of what, in her own mind, she was -- the opposite of what, deep down, she fears that she still is. This cold, bored detachment is protective cover from the wildness, the passion within her -- that so burned her in early life. 
          And she knows too well that there is always the possibility that her old life will be revealed, and the safe cocoon she has spun about herself will be torn apart. She sees that Sir Leicester Dedlock cares much for the reputation of his great family, and it is a mark of her fear -- its blinding effect -- that she assumes that is almost the only thing he cares about. When the uncovering of her secret seems imminent, she runs away -- ultimately to her death -- rather than be present to her husband at the time he discovers her 'disgrace'. In this she is a truly tragic figure, victim of her own exaggerated fears of exposure: in fact, her husband is bereft at her departure, forgives her for past indiscretions immediately, uses all his resources in the attempt to find and bring her back. He still loves her dearly, still regards her as the light of his existence, but she never learns of his reaction and dies of exposure at her former lover’s burial ground. Far from rejecting her, Sir Leicester Dedlock will visit her burial place on the estate nearly every day of his remaining life.    
          Lest Honoria’s flight to suicide seem melodramatic and not sufficiently motivated, consider that she is driven by more than new external fears. It is not only the daily threat of exposure by Tulkinghorne, and what that will do to her husband and all those around her, or a little later the fear that she is about to be charged with Tulkinghorne’s murder. Remember that within recent months she has learned that the deaths of her infant child and lover were both faked. In each case the death was falsified at least partly to escape from contact with her, as though she were someone to be quarantined. So that old sense of inner evil, like a contagious disease emanating from her and driving others away, must have come back strong on her. Here Dickens is a master psychologist. Though she maintains the same cool demeanor in her dealings with Tulkinghorne right up to the time of her flight, inwardly she has become a blind and driven figure, unable to see her value to her husband, her daughter or anyone -- a woman driven by fear and self-hatred to her own tragic end.
          There is an irony in the name Dickens has given her -- 'Honoria'. She is an honorable woman, but she can never really credit that in herself. To a tragic extent she is concerned with what the world considers honorable.    
          Here, Dickens has writ large the kind of retreat from past guilt and rejection that humans so often make. Deny the past with its sense of inner moral failure, deny the passionate self implicated in that failure, retreat to a careful new persona of order and routine, feign indifference until it becomes almost real and go on walking through its motions day by day. Perhaps that’s why, despite her aristocratic coldness, readers find her so touching a character. It’s the personal recognition.
          The name Dickens has given to John Jarndyce is also telling. It sounds like 'jaundice'. In fact, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, as the epitome of all maddening and ravaging Chancery lawsuits, has become a disease, highly contagious among the supplicants at the court and passed on from generation to generation. It lays waste to 'youth', 'beauty', 'hope', etc -- names which one of its maddened victims has given to her captive birds, those she intends to set free when the suit is finally settled. It has spawned slums from its legally entangled properties in London, slums which do in fact spread two diseases that figure prominently in the novel -- tuberculosis and smallpox.
          Despite the path of death and destruction it has wrought in English society, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce has become to the legal profession a joke. Lawyers and judges are blind to its evils because, after all, it moves so slowly that it employs large numbers of them for generations.
          But this is the infamous name, with its history of despair and suicides, that
John Jarndyce must carry through life as his own. This is his disgrace. Not brought about by his own actions, like Honoria’s, but a felt disgrace all the same.
          When his great uncle, unable to bear longer the false promises of the lawsuit, shoots himself in the London pub, the nephew begins his own retreat from all that world. It turns out to be a very different kind of retreat from Honoria’s, not destructive of the self but saving and enlarging of the best within him.
          Of course, compared to her, he was fortunate. Since his 'disgrace' was not caused by his own actions -- and he had no older sister telling him what a moral leper he was --his sense of personal worth did not suffer as hers did. He did not have to labor under the dread of what he personally had done, or the fear of his past being discovered. Being less defensive and fearful, he had greater freedom to make a more discerning retreat. If hers were to a life as far removed as possible from her old one -- and from her hidden inner passion -- his retreat to Bleak House acknowledged rather than denied his history. And he retreated from the 'family curse' out of a dread not of what he had done, but of what he otherwise might do. A crucial difference in the psychology of their two retreats. 
          So in his retreat John Jarndyce chooses not to flee his family’s tragic recent history but to remake it. To turn from it, but not to hide from it. He will take over that Bleak House of his great uncle, in its ruin reflecting so dreadfully his uncle’s ruin. He will not even change the name of it, because that memory shouldn’t be erased, grim as it is. Instead, the associations of the house should be remade. 'Bleak House' should come to have an altered meaning. It should come to stand not for human ruin in response to social evil but for a benign and creative response to such evil. The darkness of the house will be converted to light. 
          On the first night of their arrival at the house John Jarndyce has remade from the ruin he inherited, the three young people -- Richard and Ada, 'the wards in Jarndyce', and their companion, Esther -- are delighted by what he has done with it. This is important enough that Dickens has Esther describe it at a length of two pages. Here is a much-shortened version, to give the flavor.
                               
            It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you…lost yourself in passages, with mangles in them, and three-cornered tables, and a native Hindu chair, which…looked… something between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage…In my room…I had four angels…taking a complacent gentleman to heaven, in festoons, with some difficulty…All the movables…displayed the same quaint variety…with the face of its generous master brightening everything we saw…(these) were our first impressions of Bleak House (pp. 85-87).
 
            In the vision of John Jarndyce this great ruined house of a suicide has been re-created as a place for human beings to live with delight.  In separate paragraphs above Dickens uses the phrases  'pleasantly irregular' and 'delightfully irregular'. This is John Jarndyce’s vision -- and certainly Dickens’s -- of what human beings themselves can be.
          And he offers the hospitality of Bleak House to all, even to some whose brand of 'irregularity' strains even the determinedly compassionate and accepting vision that he is attempting to realize there. When he hears of Mrs. Jellyby’s almost criminal neglect of her children (a woman whom he would prefer to admire for her charitable activities), he feels that suddenly 'the wind’s in the east'. Similarly when he hears of some of the selfish cruelties of Mrs. Pardiggle or Harold Skimpole. It’s as though human failings are felt too personally by this man who has seen enough of all that before his retreat to Bleak House. He would much prefer to simply welcome and enhance the goodness of all. How else explain his almost blind acceptance of Harold Skimpole, a middle aged man who excuses his constant mooching and selfishness on the basis of being merely an innocent 'child'? Only when he catches Skimpole in some especially grasping behavior does he object.  
          Though he is not outwardly religious, Jarndyce has clearly become in his retreat a kind of saint. But Dickens doesn’t make the mistake of confusing sainthood with perfection. Nor does the master of Bleak House himself: not only does he struggle with 'the east wind' when scenting evil, but he retreats to a room in the house he has named 'the Growlery' to wrestle in private with his demons, instead of imposing them on others. Yet he continues to create a place where even Skimpole, Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle are accepted with generosity and hope, though they display a self-promoting and condescending charity in strongest contrast to his own.
          On her first morning at Bleak House, Esther ventures outside and sees clearly in the distance the old Abbey church of St. Alban’s, a monastery built to serve as a memorial to the first Christian martyr in England, and very much still a place of pilgrimage to the shrine of the saint.
 
The day shone brightly upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character. But so from rough outsides…serene and gentle influences often proceed (p. 115).
 
        Such influences certainly proceed from John Jarndyce, and he has made of Bleak House his own kind of monastic retreat, not explicitly religious but clearly partaking of the Christian monastic values of hospitality, compassion and service to all classes of people. Did Dickens choose to situate the house within sight of the famous monastery to suggest this? We probably can’t know, but as master of Bleak House Jarndyce certainly acts the good abbot. When he learns of the death of her father, he goes to the slum where eight year old Charlie is struggling to take care of her even younger siblings, and makes provision for all of them and eventually brings Charlie too to his retreat at Bleak House. When the poor street boy Jo, very ill with smallpox, is discovered in the neighborhood of the house, Skimpole, formerly a physician, advises very strongly against admitting him even to the grounds of Bleak House for fear of contagion, but John Jarndyce takes him in for the night. He 'welcomes the stranger' in good monastic tradition, and writes a letter intended to gain him admission to a hospital on the following day. It is from this contact that first Charlie and then Esther come down with life-threatening smallpox themselves. John Jarndyce knew the risk of this, but he was not one, like Skimpole, who could put self-protection over the obvious need for succor of even the poorest and most deprived of London street boys.
          Perhaps the man’s most saintly moment is in stepping back from the agreement Esther and he had made to marry. She is perfectly willing to honor her commitment to him, though she loves him more like a father and spiritual guide than like a future husband. But he senses her love and attraction for Dr Woodcourt, a man of her own age, and sees that she is more romantically inclined toward him. So his greater love for her well-being trumps the love he wanted for himself. He then secretly converts a house in the county where Dr Woodcourt has just gained a medical practice into a place that he knows Esther will love. He takes her there without revealing why and surprises her with the delightful home that she will share with Woodcourt as his wife. Tellingly, he names her new abode 'Bleak House' as well. This both acknowledges Esther’s role in creating the beauties of its namesake and suggests that the spirit of the original house will be carried on there. It will be another place where all are welcomed with compassion, joy and hope. 
          The two houses that dominate the novel, Bleak House and Chesney Wold, themselves suggest the differing kinds of retreat that John Jarndyce and Honoria Barbary have made. The difference is even in the decoration: whimsical, playful and full of surprises at Bleak House versus staid and deathly at Chesney Wold -- Dickens is always showing us those portraits of dead ancestors and figures of ancestors in armor lining the halls. It’s also in the architecture: an odd mix of styles, a little room here and odd staircase there, a bit stitched together and fantastic but clearly delightful at Bleak House versus the heavy grandiosity of great rooms and spaces at the Dedlock’s country retreat. Here there’s even a revenge-seeking ghost, a mistreated commoner who had married into the family, whose unhappy footsteps echo at night. This complements the usual mood of the living Chesney Wold company, going though tired routines of riding to the hounds, eating, drinking and complaining about the advance of egalitarianism in English society -- in an atmosphere of bored whining. There is little of the sprightliness, the joy, the openness to new possibilities of Bleak House.
          Esther Summerson, who narrates roughly half the novel, and certainly filters it through her sensibility, is tellingly the child of both retreatants. She is the natural daughter of Honoria Barbary, but her mother’s form of retreat is responsible for the damaged parts of her personality. Though Honoria has been misled by her sister that her child died at birth and so cannot be blamed directly for Esther’s damaging childhood, she was responsible for the illegitimate birth itself, which did lead to the horrors of her stepmother’s bringing her up.  The stepmother’s 'you are her disgrace and she is yours' has given Esther a deep sense of unworthiness, which she only gradually overcomes during the course of the novel. And even after she learns that Esther is alive, Honoria’s retreat is such that she permits only that one garden meeting with her child, because protecting her own secret has become the key to her being. As a result, Esther will continue to be deprived of the mother for whom she has so long hungered.  
          Esther’s real father is of course not her birth father but John Jarndyce. When her stepmother dies, he arranges for her to go to the boarding school, and from there to become the companion to Ada. From her first appearance at Bleak House, he loves and accepts her for who she is, expecting the best of her. That springs from the kind of retreat he has made:  his re-created Bleak House is benign shelter for all. From the first morning when he has the little servant give Esther the keys to the house, making her the housekeeper, she is overwhelmed by his trust of her. He becomes her true father, and his love will largely overcome her sense of unworthiness. So through Esther the novel emphasizes again the difference between the life retreat which opens out to others and fosters healing and that more familiar kind of human retreat which remains frozen in fearful self-protection.  
          As much as we come to understand that Honoria has married into her Dedlocked world from a desperate need to flee her past and retreat to a place of safety -- as far removed as possible -- the novel makes it painful to feel the human loss in the choice she has made.  We see her passion rekindled regarding the lover she thought long dead, we see her hunger for the daughter she now knows to be alive but will allow herself to meet but once, we see her love and protection of her young maid Rosa, the same age as that daughter. But she will always play it safe. She is caring and ethical -- acting to protect Rosa from the coming scandal, and ever acting to protect her husband’s name -- but she will always play it safe with respect to her own secret past and will maintain the false persona she has created. Only rarely – when, disguised as her own maid, she tracks down the life of her ex-lover, in that one garden moment with her daughter, and on the awful night she drives herself to suicide -- can she allow that created persona of cool indifference to crack and reveal the hurting woman beneath. Even her flight from their London house toward her own death comes in the service of that old mask -- to escape her fear of imminent exposure, now that Smallweed is bringing to her husband the proof of her dreaded past.
          As suggested earlier, perhaps the deadening retreat she has made remains resonant with readers because it is such a common human response. To retreat behind a mask for self-protection is something we all do, at least in small ways. I once read that a priest, having heard a lifetime of confessions, summed them up with 'Most men are far more desperate than they appear.' But Honoria Barbary did that cover job in a very big way, tragically turning herself into a Lady Dedlock indeed.
          John Jarndyce was also traumatized but not so personally and at a more mature time of life. He was able to use his pain to reconstruct instead of to hide. He made Bleak House into something no longer bleak at all but a pleasure palace of human possibility, a place of retreat where all -- himself included -- would be welcomed and valued for the best within them.   

1 Bleak House (London: Penguin Books 1996), p. 30. All further page references are to this edition and are given in the text.