April 21, 2022 55shame. Later we learn that she has also
gotten her mother’s beauty, the beauty
of a woman who has schooled herself
into a frightening hauteur and is now
known as Lady Dedlock. Esther too is
involved in the suit of Jarndyce v. Jarn-
dyce, though she doesn’t yet know it,
but early in the novel she meets a man
named Gridley who has spent his en-
tire adult life in Chancery’s coils. No
one caught in Gridley’s suit wants it
to proceed, but once begun it cannot
be stopped. It’s driven him mad, and
yet when he makes a personal appeal
to the judge he is told that he “mustn’t
look to individuals. It’s the system.”
Right and wrong don’t matter, and no
individual judge or lawyer is responsi-
ble; it’s the system, and the system, as
Dickens would write in Little Dorrit, is
nobody’s fault.
What is our burden of care, our sep-
arate share of the charge for the world
we live in? What binds individuals to
their society, and how can we make
sense of the forces that link us all?
Unsolvable questions, and inescapable
ones: Dickens would ask them time
and again, but never with quite the
demonic force that he summoned in
Bleak House. The moment comes in a
chapter named for that awful slum, and
in fact Dickens thought about using
“Tom- All- Alone’s” as his title for thenovel. But the chapter begins with “my
Lady Dedlock” in motion from her
country house in Lincolnshire to her
“muffled and dreary” place in town,
and it ends with Jo serving as guide to a
mysteriously veiled woman. She wants
to visit one of the foul urban cemeter-
ies Household Words had crusaded
against, and though she is dressed as a
servant even Jo can tell from her walk
that she’s not; her foot is too “unaccus-
tomed” to the mud. The woman asks
to see the grave of a newly dead opium
addict, a man known only as “Nemo”
(“no one” in Latin), and yet what can
the proud Honoria Dedlock have to
do with such a place and person? Or
as Dickens writes, in one of the novel’s
most famous passages:What connexion can there be, be-
tween the place in Lincolnshire,
the house in town, the [footman]
in powder, and the whereabout
of Jo the outlaw with the broom,
who had that distant ray of light
upon him when he swept the
churchyard- step? What connex-
ion can there have been between
many people in the innumerable
histories of this world, who, from
opposite sides of great gulfs, have,
nevertheless, been very curiously
brought together!Victorian social thought was per-
fectly capable of defining those connec-
tions, of tracing the forces that linked
such different people and places. En-
gels did it, and Ruskin, and so in a
more piecemeal way did the writers of
Household Words. But Dickens was
above all a novelist, a storyteller, and
he had a different way of answering his
own rhetorical questions.
I ask my students, when we get to
this part of the novel, to look at the
chapter titles. We visit that graveyard
in “Tom- All- Alone’s” and then switch
out of the third person and into what’s
called “Esther’s Narrative,” a chap-
ter followed in turn by one set in the
country and named “Lady Dedlock.”
What is the connection between that
slum and “the place in Lincolnshire”?
It’s the girl, it’s Esther— her own story
is the link, and literally so, though nei-
ther mother nor daughter yet knows
it and the reader is at best half aware.
Dickens draws his connections in nar-
rative terms, one bit of his tale lead-
ing on to the next, causes building to
consequences. Jo catches a fever as he
stands by that pestilential spot, and
then wanders out into the country-
side, a vagrant whom Esther discov-
ers and tries to nurse back to health.
Her resemblance to the woman in the
churchyard startles him, and then shesickens in turn; and much will come of
that too, as if those grave- borne lines
of infection were as one with the twists
of the plot.
There are other ways to understand
the world, but that was Dickens’s; such
narrative connections were how he
made sense of society. He stitched one
chapter sequentially to another, and in
doing so he stepped across those “great
gulfs” to show how we are all bound to-
gether. At times he took his readers to
places they would rather not imagine;
there were always some who preferred
the relatively cozy comedy of Pickwick
to the dark majesty of his later work.
The Turning Point isn’t the last word on
Bleak House, and I wish that Douglas-
Fairhurst hadn’t limited himself to a
single year, that he had followed the
book’s story out to the writing of its
last chapter. Dickens finished it only in
August 1853, and appropriately enough
in the offices of Household Words.
But Douglas- Fairhurst’s learning is
buttressed by something of Dickens’s
own exuberance, and in any case there
can never be a last word about such a
novel. In fact Bleak House barely has
a last word itself. It ends with an em
dash, “even supposing— ,” as though
the serial novelist wanted us to wait for
what’s next, as he shuts the door behind
him. QAND
A CURRENT LISTING
LewAllen Galleries
Railyard Arts District
1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 988-3250
[email protected]; http://www.lewallengalleries.comEileen David: City Rhythms
April 8–May 14, 2022San Francisco painter Eileen David conveys the rhythms of her city
WKURXJKLPDJHVRIQHLJKERUKRRGVVWUHHWVFHQHVDQGÀJXUHVVZLP-
ming in the Bay.Late Afternoon, 2021
oil on canvas, 30" x 40"Marlborough Gallery
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900
http://www.marlboroughnewyork.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM–6PMVictor Pasmore: Prints
Through April 30, 2022Victor Pasmore
Senza Titolo, 1982
etching and aquatint,
edition of 85
47 ¼" x 47¼"
120 x 120 cm
© The Estate of the
ArtistVictoria Munroe Fine Art
67 East 80th Street #2, New York, NY 10075; (917) 900-6661
YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRP PDUJR#YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRP
Wednesday–Saturday, 11AM–5PM and by appointmentHan Feng: The Gift
April 1–30, 2022Han Feng, The Gift II (B01), 2020, pigment ink on archival paper
edition of 5, 36" x 48"Alexandre
291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002
(212) 755-2828
alexandregallery.comEdith Schloss: Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s
April 30–June 4, 2022Capinera, 1976, oil on canvas, 15-6/8" x 23-5/8"Helicline Fine Art
KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP
Midtown Manhattan, Private Dealer by appointmentNew Exhibition: American Art:
The WPA Era and BeyondHelicline is proud to offer 26 original
GUDZLQJVE\'DYLG)UHGHQWKDOWKDW
ZHUHÀUVWSXEOLVKHGLQWKH
illustrated edition of the novel
Tobacco RoadE\(UVNLQH&DOGZHOODavid Fredenthal (1914-1958)
́/RY%HQVH\WUXGJHGKRPHZDUGμ
10-1/2" x 6", Framed 20-3/8" x 15-1/2"
ZDWHUFRORUDQGLQNRQSDSHU
6LJQHGORZHUULJKWYossi Milo Galler y
245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
(212) 414-0370; [email protected]Shikeith:
graces comes
violently
May 12–June 18, 2022Shikeith, Prince, 2019
archival inkjet print on
FDQVRQLQÀQLW\SODWLQH
37-7/8" x 30" (96 x 76 cm)
© Shikeith, Courtesy of
Yossi Milo Galler y,
1HZ<RUNGorra 50 55 .indd 55 3 / 24 / 22 5 : 09 PM