The Bleak House Companion (Includes Study Guide, Historical Context, Biography and Character Index)

By BookCaps

Charles Dickens’ "Bleak House" is a true classic that people have appreciated for over a hundred years. The fact that it is a classic doesn’t mean every reader will breeze through it with no problem at all. If you need just a little more help with Dickens’ classic, then let BookCaps help with this simplified study guide!

This book contains a comprehension study of Dickens’ classic work (including chapter summaries for every chapter, overview of themes and characters, and a short biography of Dickens’ life). This edition does not include the novel.

We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCaps can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookCaps
• Release date: Jul 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311409560

BookCaps

We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCaps can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.Visit www.bookcaps.com to see more of our books, or contact us with any questions.

Book preview

Chapter Summaries

Preface

Based in fact—Dickens’s main point in the preface to Bleak House is that as unbelievable as certain aspects of his story might be, they are based in fact.

Inefficiency of the Court of Chancery—Specifically, he is referring here to the Court of Chancery’s reputation for complicating and extending its cases way beyond what is rational or necessary. This milking of the lawsuits under its jurisdiction benefited no one but the multitude of judges, lawyers, and court employees involved, all of whom charged a fee for their services. Dickens’s attempt to shame the parsimonious public, who refused to allow the Court to add more judges to its roster, should therefore be understood as tongue in cheek.

Spontaneous combustion—The second unbelievable subject Dickens mentions is spontaneous combustion. In the early 1850s, the general public was still in denial of its existence, which led Dickens to both investigate and defend its actuality by citing various statistics and specific historical cases.

Concluding remarks—Dickens ended the preface with the statement that he deliberately focused on the romantic aspect of familiar, or ordinary, things, which was also a major aim of his publication Household Words. He further rejoiced that his readership numbers were greater than ever. This is especially meaningful since, as mentioned in the introduction to this edition of Bleak House,¹ Dickens took a number of literary risks that made the novel critically controversial. He experimented with plot and sentence structure, narrative voice, mystery in storytelling, and the creative, witty use of words and puns. Not least, he dared to say what others were neglecting—to show the darker side of life in Victorian London. But as implied above, while this may have put a dent in his critical acceptance, it had no negative effects on his general popularity.

Chapter 1—In Chancery

Fog, fog everywhere—In a sense, Chapter 1 is all about fog and mud, starting with Dickens’s description of the ubiquitous fog, mud, puddles, and pollution so characteristic of London, at the time the world’s largest city. But the fog and mud, and the aggravation they caused, are not just literal in this case. Aside from the external London setting, Dickens’s focus here is the Court of Chancery and its grindingly slow, bureaucratic process that killed every case it took on, so that people were actually warned by the lawyers themselves that they would be better off avoiding a lawsuit rather than submitting themselves to the Chancery Court’s convoluted ways. Some cases, like the Jarndyce case that is central to Bleak House, even dragged on for decades until all resources—financial, emotional, and in some cases, physical—were exhausted, and there was a question as to whether anyone even knew anymore what the case was actually about.

The Chancery’s cast of characters—Sitting at the center of all this fog, both literal and figurative, was the Lord High Chancellor, the reigning figure of the Court of Chancery and the holder of one of the highest offices in the land. Around him were the lawyers and judges—the advocates, barristers, solicitors, and masters, each with his own role in the tedious Chancery drama. They were accompanied by the clerks, apprentices, and copyists as well as the newspaper and court reporters, not to mention the odd human fixture such as the elderly madwoman, the jaundiced prisoner, and the man from Shropshire, whose main goal was to corner the Lord Chancellor at the end of the day’s proceedings. These last three all frequented the Court in the naïve belief that they eventually stood to gain something from doing so.

The Lord Chancellor sees through the mud to the matter of two young people—Of all those present, Mr. Tangle knew the most about the Jarndyce case. In fact, he had been steeped in it for so long that he seemed to know nothing else. Whether that knowledge was useful was another question, as it seemed to only add to the inefficiency. Somehow, though, the Lord Chancellor managed to make his way through Mr. Tangle’s tangled information and useless presentations to deduce that the young boy and girl in his private quarters, both of whom were related to the Jarndyce case, would be living not with their uncle (who was dead) or their grandfather (who suffered from some brain defect) but with a cousin. He even managed to determine that he should broach the matter in court the following