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Title: Bleak House
Author: Charles Dickens
Release Date: August, 1997 [EBook #1023]
[Most recently updated: January 30, 2006]
Edition: 12
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, BLEAK HOUSE ***
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BLEAK HOUSE
by Charles Dickens
PREFACEA Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under
any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judgeās eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to
the āparsimony of the public,ā which guilty public, it appeared,
had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no
means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointedāI believe
by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have
originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeareās sonnets:
āMy nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyerās hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!ā
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know
what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I
mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning
the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth.
The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual
occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was
professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong
from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there
is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years
ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to
appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount
of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is
(I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was
begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet
decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century
and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds
has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for
Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the
shame ofāa parsimonious public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.
The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been
denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes
(quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have
been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters
to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that
spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to
observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers
and that before I wrote that description I took pains to
investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record,
of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi
Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe
Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in
letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he
afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all
rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed
in Mr. Krookās case. The next most famous instance happened at
Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat,
one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject
was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having
murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was
acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died
the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I
do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that
general reference to the authorities which will be found at page
30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of
distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in
more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not
abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable
spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences
are usually received.
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of
familiar things.
1853
* Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at
the town of Columbus, in the United States of America, quite
recently. The subject was a German who kept a liquor-shop and was
an inveterate drunkard.
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincolnās Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
full-grown snowflakesāgone into mourning, one might imagine, for
the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one anotherās umbrellas in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the
tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping
on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides
of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching
the toes and fingers of his shivering little āprentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much
as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by
husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours
before their timeāas the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard
and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the
muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,
appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old
corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincolnās Inn
Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor
in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and
mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition
which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners,
holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be
sitting hereāas here he isāwith a foggy glory round his head,
softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a
large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an
interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to
the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such
an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery
bar ought to beāas here they areāmistily engaged in one of the
ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on
slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running
their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words
and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players
might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause,
some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who
made a fortune by it, ought to beāas are they not?āranged in a
line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth
at the bottom of it) between the registrarās red table and the silk
gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions,
affidavits, issues, references to masters, mastersā reports,
mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the
court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog
hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the
stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day
into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep
in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance
by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the
roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into
the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs
are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which
has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire,
which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in
every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod
heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round
of every manās acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means
abundantly of wearying
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