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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

 

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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 ***

 

This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, Toronto, Canada

(charlie@idirect.com), with revision and corrections by

Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.

 

BLEAK HOUSE

 

by Charles Dickens

PREFACE

A 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 judgeā€™s 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 ā€œparsimony 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 appointedā€”I 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 Shakespeareā€™s sonnets:

 

ā€œMy nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyerā€™s 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 ofā€”a 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. Krookā€™s 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.

CHAPTER I

In Chancery

 

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor

sitting in Lincolnā€™s 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 snowflakesā€”gone 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 anotherā€™s 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 ā€˜prentice 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 timeā€”as 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 Lincolnā€™s 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 hereā€”as here he isā€”with 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 beā€”as here they areā€”mistily 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 beā€”as are they not?ā€”ranged in a

line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth

at the bottom of it) between the registrarā€™s 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 manā€™s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means

abundantly of wearying

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