148 KNOWING DICKENS
the legal system or to endure any “sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor
repairing going on about me” is the central image of social disorder on which
the novel is built (BH 5). Like Mrs. Jellyby’s household, the shop is dangerous
to humans because anything might show up there in the wrong place: old
love letters, for example, that might destroy the present life of their writer.
Esther articulates a central image here, but she also shares with the omniscient
narrator the habit of noticing out-of-the-way details of maintenance: the
way “an old tub was put to catch the droppings of rain-water from a roof ”
at the brickmaker’s cottage (BH 8), or the way one of lawyer Vholes’s “dull
cracked windows” is occasionally “coerced” to open by “having a bundle of
firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather” (BH 39).
Just about every character in the novel’s enormous cast is judged through
his or her style of household management. Mrs. Bagnet, a perfect manager
who runs a house that “contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible
speck of dirt or dust in it,” is doubly virtuous because she endures the ago-
nies of watching her children prepare her birthday dinner without interfer-
ence (BH 27, 49). Mrs. Bayham Badger’s drawing room is narcissistically
decorated with objects meant to display her many types of artistic dabbling.
Guppy’s down-and-out friend Mr. Jobling (alias Weevle) turns surprisingly
sympathetic when we see him redecorate the dismal room in which Captain
Hawdon died: “Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fel-
low, borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite, and a hammer of his landlord,
and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and knocking up
apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two teacups, milkpot, and crockery
sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks, like a shipwrecked sailor making
the best of it” (BH 20). Other bachelor establishments, like Boythorn’s house
and George’s Shooting Gallery, attest further to the motif of ingenious male
housekeeping. The “wonderfully neat” Mrs. Rouncewell is the ideal servant
at Chesney Wold, where “the whole house reposes, on her mind” as she sits
in her ground-floor room (BH 7).
Bleak House itself presents more ambiguity about the meanings that ac-
crue to houses and housekeeping. Like Chesney Wold, it comes with a his-
torical curse, though one of more recent and middle-class origin than the
legend of the Ghost’s Walk. John Jarndyce tells Esther that the house received
its name from his great uncle Tom Jarndyce, who allowed the place to decay
and rot as he ruined and then killed himself in Chancery. The inheriting
John Jarndyce has restored the house to order and charm, but he has not
changed its name; moreover, the house has a double, a property in London
“which is much at this day what Bleak House was then” (BH 8). Esther’s
apparently rapturous description of the intricate maze of rooms, stairs, and