Bleak House by Charles Dickens - SLoB Book Club returns! (feat. Bret Walker SC)
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What experiences shaped the hosts' views on the law?
Jonty, it's hard for me to imagine that you've got through a half century on this earth without having a brush with the law. Am I right?
You're right, Sophie. I haven't had many recently, but you won't be surprised to know that in the 1990s, in my late teens and early 20s, I was frequently embroiled in Bertie Worcester escapades involving London constables and ending up sitting out the night in police cells.
Of course you did.
some of which I can't recount on this podcast. But I will say that one of which involves climbing a statue of Eisenhower outside the American embassy holding a stolen phone at 3 a.m. How fabulous. How about you, Sophie? Have you ever felt the dead hand of the law upon your shoulder?
Only on one occasion, which was when I tapped the bumper bar of someone at a red light in New York City and she sued me for an exorbitant sum. It would have stripped me of almost all of my worldly possessions. But in a very Dickensian, jaundice and jaundice-like twist, the plaintiff died shortly before the case was going to go through the courts. So... So I got off easy, Jonty. I got off scot-free. But actually, I had an encounter with the Lord only yesterday because a good friend of mine, a great advocate barrister, was appointed to a very high-ranking court in Australia. And I and several of our friends went to the swearing-in ceremony. It was a truly Dickensian affair. There was ermine. There were plush red outfits.
There were vast quantities of wigs. Lots of banging of the ground and swearing allegiance to the king.
And Sophie, you have beautifully taken us into the courtroom because this is the secret life of books. I am Jonty Claypole. I am a rag and bottle merchant. I keep women's hair in a sack in the basement. I exist on a diet of gin. And Sophie, I'm going to burst into fire through a case of spontaneous combustion.
So I'm Sophie Gee. I'm a haughty and rather magnificent aristocratic woman, but I have a dark past, Jonty, and the depths of that darkness will be revealed as we penetrate deeper and deeper into the fogs of London. So this week we present Bleak House by Charles Dickens, a starter pack for our multi-episode book club on Dickens' great mid-career novel.
We began a Dickens series a year ago, skating through Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, like Orlando on the frozen River Thames, and then slowing as we reached David Copperfield, which we had to spread into two parts. When we realised Bleak House was next, dear listeners, we panicked. Published in serialized form between 1852 and 1853, Bleak House is Dickens' longest novel and a towering masterpiece in English literature. It is a sprawling satire on the evils of English society, carried by a cast of hundreds. It has some of Dickens' most famous characters, including the virtue-signalling Mrs. Jellaby, the astonishingly irresponsible Mr. Skimpole, and the sinister and indeed highly flammable Mr. Crook.
With its two unreliable narrators, moments of deliberate opacity and confusion, both at plot but also sentence level, and its characters lost in a vast impersonal system, Bleak House is one of the first depictions of the alienation and complexity we associate with modernist literature. It's a straight road from Bleak House to Kafka's The Trial and indeed to George Orwell's 1984. It is also one of the earliest police procedurals, introducing Inspector Bucket as the first fully rounded detective in English fiction. And that's English fiction, not American for all of you Edgar Allan Poe fans out there who are limbering up to write in after I said that. It is also, in case the message is getting lost, very funny and sentimental and full of all the loveliness that makes Dickens a great writer.
Yeah, it really is. It's lots of people's favourite Dickens, I think. So, of course, it's impossible to cover the majesty and the grandeur and the intricacy of Bleak House in one or two episodes. So, having finished Ascending Mount Middlemarch as our inaugural book club and done a few victory laps about that because we enjoyed it immensely and there was something about reading it over a long period of time with all of our Secret Life of Books listeners that made it all the more enjoyable.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What experiences shaped the hosts' views on the law?
0:00–9:50
2
What is the significance of the fog in Bleak House?
9:50–20:11
3
How does Dickens critique the Court of Chancery?
20:11–30:31
4
What role does the character of Inspector Bucket play in the story?
30:31–40:03
5
What are the historical contexts surrounding Bleak House's publication?
40:03–50:21
6
How does Dickens' personal life influence his writing in Bleak House?
50:21–1:01:19
7
What are the implications of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case?
1:01:19–1:12:06
8
How does this episode set the stage for future discussions on Bleak House?
1:12:06–1:16:29