150 KNOWING DICKENS
good works mark him as the antithesis of self-advertising do-gooders like
Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle. But his guilty dismay when a recipient like
Richard Carstone or Harold Skimpole fails in gratitude or proves undeserv-
ing makes it impossible for him to withdraw support. Esther sees the harm
that ensues: Skimpole is allowed to damage Richard, Richard damages Ada’s
life, and Jarndyce himself is stuck in his conflict between generosity and
unacknowledged suspicion. He is, perhaps, a version of Miss Coutts without
a hardheaded Dickens to vet the begging letters, or to banish the schemers
from Urania Cottage.
Jarndyce’s relations with Esther begin in that strange Dickensian crossover
zone where good housekeeping takes the place of romantic love. Jarndyce
does not ask Esther to marry him; he asks her “would I be the mistress of
Bleak House” in a letter “that was not a love letter though it expressed so
much love” (BH 44). The words “husband,” “wife,” “proposal” and “mar-
riage” are never sounded in connection with this apparent engagement; they
remain ambiguously subsumed under the euphemism “mistress of Bleak
House.” Under cover of the same phrase Jarndyce re-places Esther in a new
Bleak House furnished with the younger man she actually loves, and deco-
rated to reproduce “in the arrangement of all the pretty objects, my little
tastes and fancies, my little methods and inventions which they used to laugh
at while they praised them.” Announcing that he is now her father, Jarndyce
gives her away to Allan Woodcourt in a move that reinstates romantic love
within a generational and familial fiction.
The new Bleak House is not, however, a copy of the old. It is “a cottage—
quite a rustic cottage of doll’s rooms” set far away in the Yorkshire coun-
tryside. The winding passages and impossible staircases are gone; painful
memories are put away, and Esther is granted the old pastoral fantasy of a
new beginning. Guppy is brought into the same chapter to emphasize that
point, as well as to parody Jarndyce’s generosity: he offers Esther a renewed
suit, bolstered by “a ouse” in Lambeth, a “six-roomer, exclusive of kitchens”
that is “in the opinion of my friends, a commodious tenement” which the
happy couple will share with Jobling and Guppy’s mother. Saved from that
all-too-realistic fate, Esther lives happily with Allan and their children in the
doll’s cottage, eventually “throwing out a little Growlery expressly for my
guardian” when he comes to visit (BH 64). His moods and memories are, as
before, confined to an annex.
The writing of this marriage plot during the spring of 1853 coincided
with Dickens’s ambivalence about the future of his “little housekeeper”
Georgina Hogarth, who had joined the family at the age of fifteen, turning
twenty-five in 1852. Sometime that year Dickens’s artist friend Augustus