Bleak House makes a drama out of characters who range from baronet to police inspector to road sweeper. Unlike previous novels, there is less caricature and more depth to the people of Bleak House. Harold Skimpole could have a novel to himself. Mr. Tulkinghorn is a unique archetype of sadism. Even Nemo, who is never actually alive in the novel,—he is talked about by other characters,—tells as real and vivid: working through the night, writing in a strange and recognisable style, making opium in a teapot in his empty, grimy room with its single portmanteau.
Bleak House organises the plot around a court case because in the 1850s a court of law was one of the places where everyone, from all levels of society, could be brought together. When Nemo dies, a smaller court convenes—the coroner’s inquest, above a pub. Studying this scene, from chapter eleven, will show us how Dickens creates his characters, from the anonymous background figures through to central figures in the plot.
This coroner’s court, like Cooks’s Court where Nemo lived, is a microcosm, just like the Court of Chancery: this death is a small case within the large case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a microcosm within a microcosm. Jeremy Bentham had proposed a panopticon, a prison where everyone could see each other. In Bleak House the panopticon is covered in fog and smoke “which is the London ivy.”
Dickens used mystery plots to pull the ivy back and see everyone that lived underneath.
like a vampire’s wings
Death is everywhere in Bleak House. Dead letters, the dead of night, dead infants, Mrs. Jellyby’s daughter wishing she was dead, the Allegory on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s ceiling staring down as if it meant to cut intruders dead. The first death of the story comes in chapter eleven (Tom Jarndyce killed himself, but that was before the novel began).
Nemo, a law clerk, who lived above a rag and bottle shop in Cook’s Court, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the heart of legal London, is found dead by Mr. Tulkinghorn. This is narrated in the usual way, with dialogue and authorial voice adding information. The scene follows the action in “real time”.
“Does the man generally sleep like this?” inquired the lawyer in a low voice. “Hi! I don't know,” says Krook, shaking his head and lifting his eyebrows. “I know next to nothing of his habits except that he keeps himself very close.”
Thus whispering, they both go in together. As the light goes in, the great eyes in the shutters, darkening, seem to close. Not so the eyes upon the bed.
“God save us!” exclaims Mr. Tulkinghorn. “He is dead!” Krook drops the heavy hand he has taken up so suddenly that the arm swings over the bedside.
They look at one another for a moment.
“Send for some doctor! Call for Miss Flite up the stairs, sir. Here’s poison by the bed! Call out for Flite, will you?” says Krook, with his lean hands spread out above the body like a vampire’s wings.
All the usual methods of characterisation are used here: Krook is so physical, especially with that menacing final image. After Nemo’s body is examined by the doctor, the narrative voice moves away and pans round to Cook’s Court.
bare headed scouts come hurrying in
It takes a page or so to move swiftly through the drama of the death to the Coroner’s inquiry. You can see the scene shift. Mr. Tulkinghorn turns one way, the camera the other.
“Good night!” says Mr. Tulkinghorn, and goes home to Allegory and meditation.
By this time the news has got into the court. Groups of its inhabitants assemble to discuss the thing, and the outposts of the army of observation (principally boys) are pushed forward to Mr. Krook's window, which they closely invest.
The narrative moves out of the room, into the court, follows the policeman, the local wives, the boys and the beadle round the vicinity, and then pans into the inquiry room over a pub. It’s like the sweep of a camera making a long shot, catching people and their speech as it goes past.
Mrs. Perkins, who has not been for some weeks on speaking terms with Mrs. Piper in consequence for an unpleasantness originating in young Perkins’ having “fetched” young Piper “a crack,” renews her friendly intercourse on this auspicious occasion.
That’s free indirect style, where the narrator borrows the speech of the character (“in consequence for”) but with some additional reported speech, which may be Dickens mocking Mrs. Piper or Mrs. Piper being snooty about the way Mrs. Perkins.
This novel wants to look at the whole of society—but that’s too many characters. This wide lens allows Dickens to present many characters with various degrees of anonymity, to compress the action, set the context. First, we get the crowds, the atmosphere of a murder discovered. These characters are anonymous. Background.
People talk across the court out of the window, and bare headed scouts come hurrying in from Chancery Lane to know what’s the matter.
As much as anything else, they show time passing more rapidly. Then, “In the midst of this sensation the beadle arrives.” Now we have a type, like a pantomime character. He is known by the way other people react to him. To the crowd, he is a “ridiculous institution”; the policeman thinks him “an imbecile civilian.” Then he affects the other characters: “the tidings spread from mouth to mouth” when he goes inside. The beadle is like a line-drawn cartoon. The descriptions are almost like captions: “the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting about Chancery Lane with his summonses.”
Then at the inquest Mrs. Piper appears, one of the women discussing their children from earlier. The camera has settled on the key witness. Her brief, indirectly reported, speech is done in the narrative voice. No speech marks. No directly reported dialogue.
It’s not free indirect style—not the author’s voice with the implied thoughts of the character but closer to an imitation, impression or parody. The narrator is a ventriloquist for Mrs. Piper. This allows Dickens to continue the satirical reportage, brings pace to a large piece of narrative, and to draw attention to details indirectly. And it lets Mrs. Piper take her place in the panoply without breaking the narrative flow.
feariocious, wexed and worrited
Dickens creates several characters within Mrs. Piper’s speech.
First, Mrs. Piper, one of many minor characters in Dickens who come alive for a page through their idioms and idiosyncrasies. She reminds me of Grummer, the magistrate’s servant in Pickwick who refers to the judge as “Your Wash-up” instead of “Your Worship.” She becomes more than a passing semi-anonymous character. Unlike the beadle, she is not a type:—she has idiom.
Second, Mrs. Piper tells us more than anyone else so far about Nemo, who is accounted for as “feariocious” and who was “wexed and worrited” by Mrs. Piper’s children. These two characters are revealed together, thorough the interplay of what Mrs. Piper imagines and what she reveals. Her children used to bother Nemo. Mrs. Piper says you cannot expect the children to be angles “specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself.” Mrs. Piper dreams of Nemo taking an axe to the child’s skull, infuriated by their presence, but reveals that in reality he ran away from them.
Never however see the plaintive take a pick-axe or any other wepping far from it. Has seen him hurry away when run and called after as if not partial to children and never see him speak to neither child nor grown person at any time (excepting the boy that sweeps the crossing down the lane over the way round the corner which if he was here would tell you that he has been seen a-speaking to him frequent).
That is Jo, the crossing-sweeper. Mrs. Piper is not just a comic diversion,—she is a plot twist.
This is sophisticated stuff. Dickens not only makes his cameos tell as strongly as his major parts, but he reveals one character indirectly through the waffling, elongated evidence of another. It would be easy to simply have Mr. Tulkinghorn find this out in conversation with Krook. To have this woman give a long speech means we get the effect of the inquest, where you have to work out what is Mrs. Piper’s diversion and what is the real evidence.
It also means we understand Nemo as only someone like that could be understood: such a private person could only really be discovered through neighbourly gossip. Mrs. Piper is the sort of person who would notice Nemo and Nemo is the sort of person who can only be discovered through people like Mrs. Piper’s nosiness.
chiefly in parentheses
There are two other characters in Mrs. Piper’s speech, who Dickens creates with only a sub-clause each.
Mrs. Piper lives in the court (which her husband is a cabinet-maker), and it has long been well beknown among the neighbours (counting from the day next but one before the half-baptizing of Alexander James Piper aged eighteen months and four days old on accounts of not being expected to live such was the sufferings gentlemen of that child in his gums) as the plaintive—so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased—was reported to have sold himself.
The husband is hardly known, but the boy gets a fuller description. It seems, from what she says, that Alexander James is not dead, but he might have been. Mrs. Piper’s complaint is given as a sort of comic obituary. The full name, the “half-baptising”, the detail of the gums, all add up to a parody of the sort of memorial you might find engraved on a plaque in a church, or a simple obituary. And the word gentleman, which lightly mocks her way of deferring to the court but also formalises her language, as people do when someone dies.
Dickens wrote a brief biography of that child, and he did it in the idiom of Mrs. Piper because her way of talking is itself a telling part of the boy’s life. We know him more clearly by being able to hear his mother talking about the sufferings of that child in his gums. You can hear Mrs. Piper saying about him—within his hearing—all the time.
As Dickens says, “Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.” But of course she did have one thing to tell about Jo, and without all that parenthesis, she wouldn’t be able to tell them anything at all. If Mrs. Piper wasn’t the sort of woman who gave long parentheses about the day her son was half-baptised, she also wouldn’t be the sort of woman who could say, in parenthesis, that Nemo knew the road sweeper,—and he turns out to be a crucial hinge for the whole plot of Bleak House…
Fantastic close reading, and a very good discipline for me, I always read too fast. I've never even noticed Mrs Piper, and if it had come up in a quiz I would have sworn blind that I knew the novel inside out and there was no such person! It's so lovely just to be reminded of what an extraordinary comic genius Dickens was. Thank you!
I LOVE Bleak House, it’s one of my favourite Dickens novels.