Picking up Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853)

This last year has been a drought for me in terms of reading or watching films. The situation is so bad that to end the year I picked a book that could potentially make up for slacking off. It is a Victorian book with some serious page count and has been authored by one of the most charismatic writers I’ve been fortunate enough to read and know of—that is to say the most profound way one can know a writer, is through their work, and the other means being unavailable to me on account of the said writer being dead for many years. Charles Dickens, whom I consider to be a poet, a comedian and a cruel god. I took upon a plan to read the book in small portions and finish it in a month, along with a buddy of mine, hence commencing on a buddy read—as throughout the year I’ve ghosted a few great books by literary figures arguably on an equal footing with Mr. Dickens, and I didn’t want to ghost this one too. I picked Bleak House, by the way.

I’m through half the book and it’s been such a pleasant read. I will not go into the story, for it is hard to summarize an epic of this sort in a short form and if I were to say this story revolves around a chancery suit, a case forever hanging in the court and people related to it one way or another, that wouldn’t do justice to the story, nor to the unaware audience of this piece of writing. For now, I just want to recollect a few things from the book with fondness.

Dickens has enjoyable, satirical prose and little comedic outburst throughout the book. It would give me much joy to mention a couple of lines that stayed with me and I believe I can point out their subtlety.

A big manservant is asked to escort an elderly and mean loan shark (unable to move on his own), and the manservant, upon hearing the master’s command and sharing his congenial distaste anent the loan shark picks him up, and carries him outside with fervency, “as if he was commissioned to carry him to the nearest volcano” as Dickens put it. I laughed out loud, considering the characters, and imagining the scene.

A police officer is intimidating a character while holding onto the suspect’s hat, “as if he himself made it” as dickens put it. Normally someone would write ‘owned it’, to imagine the situation, and the gait the police officer might have had, but when someone creates something, they have some special connection with the said creation, they may see the object in a different light than they would if they had simply owned it. I’m forced to think how would a creator think with affection, I can’t just glaze over the text.
The book of extremely quotable and I’d like to quote some in my regular review after I finish the book.

Dickens’ take on the lawyers and their façade, which quickly drops as soon as they are out of the premises of the court rings true for me, he describes them while the court is closed for a few weeks—

“The learned gentleman who is always so tremendously indignant at the unprecedented outrage committed on the feelings of his client by the opposite party that he never seems likely to recover it is doing infinitely better than might be expected in Switzerland. The learned gentleman who does the withering business and who blights all opponents with his gloomy sarcasm is as merry as a grig at a French watering-place. The learned gentleman who weeps by the pint on the smallest provocation has not shed a tear these six weeks.”

I have had my fair share of experience with the lawyers and I know they haven’t changed at all in the last 170 years.
At any rate, the book has already made me weep, both in joy and in sorrow, cheer for the characters I’ve bonded with and I can see already picking it up was a great decision to end the year with.

The photo is mine