derived from the parable of Dives and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke, 16. After the
elaborate Dombey and Son (1006 pages),the novels are designed and have thematic
ambition. Academic opinion admires the three huge novels,Bleak House,Little
Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, 1000-pagers more serious and complex than those
which had made his name. Post-DombeyDickens certainly repays re-reading, if there
is time. The comic conjurer retires, the tragic artist advances. Stakes are raised, there
is loss and gain.
Bleak House
Of these big three,Bleak House is the best integrated, if hard to summarize. The plot
has two main lines, the Chancery case of the estate of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, so long
drawn out that costs absorb all the benefits; and the discovery that the orphan Esther
Summerson is the illegitimate child, supposed dead, of Lady Dedlock. The saintly
Esther is to marry John Jarndyce, for whom she keeps house; he nobly releases her
to marry a young doctor. Of the minor characters, Skimpole is wonderful. Summary,
however, conveys even less than usual. In late Dickens, although we vividly experi-
ence the outsides of many characters, there is none whose life we share fully from
within – not eve n Esther, who is nearest to its centre, and whose narrative conveys
much of the story. The home Esther is to set up with her doctor is the symbolic anti-
type of the various bleak houses of the novel. Yet it is hard to care for Esther’s doctor,
or,as much as Dickens might wish, for Esther.
For all its crowded canvas, the book is not about people, but about mentalities,
feelings, institutions, the experience of living in a phantasmagoria: a bleak world
which relates to life in Victorian London, yet is too personally imagined to be a
mirror held up to life. Late Dickens is not character-centred but visionary, full of
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 293‘Fagin in the condemned cell’,Oliver Twist
an illustration by George
Cruikshank for Dickens’s Oliver
Twist(1837–9). The book on the
shelf may be a Bible. Black and
white, guilt and punishment, life
and death!