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Charles Dickens Bleak House

The 19th-century novel usually applies to the portrayal of the failings of society through the failings of families. The aim of this essay is to analyse the relevance of this statement in regard to Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House. Victorian society was greatly depended on the established norms and principles that shaped people's styles of life and behaviour; however, these rules often resulted in the destruction of a personality and the failure of the family. As the members of such families belonged to the existing society, their individual failure contributed to the failure of society in whole.

In Bleak House Charles Dickens depicts how the destructive British legal system negatively influences people and their families, further ruining other members of society. In this novel society is represented through three principal social groups: the Chancery, the upper-class and the poor. The Chancery is the major legal organ that controls all aspects of people's lives, especially familial, and as Dickens puts it, "The one great principle of the English law, is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings"1. According to Graham Storey, the Chancery "is presented as corrupt and life-destroying, a ghastly parody of a Court founded to administer justice and equity"2. The Chancery is closely connected with the world of the upper-class and the poor, and this connection is especially obvious under the consideration of the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The writer stresses on the fact that everyone who collides with this legal system is destroyed by it. As Daleski claims, this Court "is simply a socially condoned form of parasitism, as is graphically confirmed by the eventual lot of the Jarndyce estate, which is eaten up in costs"3. Destroying families during the courts, the Chancery lawyers pursue their own interests; however, they fail to understand that such actions will finally ruin them and other members of British society. On the example of the Jarndyces, Dickens uncovers the destruction of some generations of this family due to their inability to get money, according to the inheritance. The Chancery doesn't take into account the family's needs and the impact of the lawsuit on people; instead it maintains the established laws. Mr. Tulkinghorn, "a dark, cold object"4, solves the family affairs of aristocrats, destroying not only the lives of other people, but also his own soul. Such individual decay is spread on other members of society, for instance, the Smallweeds who pursue only Compound Interest, thus generating the overall decay. Parliament aggravates this social decay; its members pass those laws that result in the failure of families. They reject any family reforms, considering that they "would encourage some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere"5. Their own families are also exposed to destruction, like the Dedlocks who live without children and usually suffer from boredom. Applying to all these characters and events, Charles Dickens wants to show that the failure of society is a direct consequence of the failing of the family, although the characters of the novel don't want to understand this truth. Every human being belongs to a large family - society, in which he/she lives, thus all members are closely connected with each other. However, in Bleak House each person considers his life isolated from the lives and affairs of other people. Dyson considers that the only thing that unites these individuals is the power of money and social position, depriving them of all human traits; this is clearly revealed by the narrator Esther6. Dickens reveals that in the industrial world preoccupied with corruption and bureaucracy people receive more independence, but simultaneously they are really separated from each other, trying to adhere to the existing social and political system. This isolation contributes much to the family decay; the writer demonstrates that everything in this world is interrelated. If a person's soul is destroyed, this influences those people who are close to him/her, and finally results in the failure of society. Although it is the corrupted system that leads to people's destruction, the writer, "working out closely and thoroughly the skilfully designed tale of a household"7, proves that it is evil inside each character that contributes to his/her decay. As Smith puts it, people in Bleak House "participate willingly in their own human impairment"8.

Perhaps, that's why the majority of cases that the Chancery solves, according to Scott, "have originated in family quarrels - the Jarndyces', Miss Flite's, Gridley's"9. At the end of the novel the case of the Jarndyces is solved by taking the estate to cover the costs of the court, reducing all hopes of the Jarndyces to nothing and destroying many of them. According to Leavis, the Jarndyce case reflects the essence of Victorian society that ignored people for the sake of the system10. This lawsuit reveals the power of some members of society over other people and, as Dunlop puts it, the way, to which these powerful people applies, in order to enrich themselves, despite the fact that their actions ruin people's lives11. As Dickens states, "Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how and why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit"12. But the family destruction occurs not only in the court, the family of Dedlocks is destroyed when their lawyer discovers their secret and makes an attempt to utilize this secret for his own benefit. As a result, the maid of Lady Dedlock kills Tulkinghorn, while Lady Dedlock runs away and soon dies.

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