Dickens and Christmas are so intertwined that those of a literary disposition often think of them together. It is usually Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family who spring to mind, as we make our yearly return to A Christmas Carol and the other Christmas Books. In contrast to these tales of hope and good cheer, Bleak House is, to use a phrase from the first chapter, “perennially hopeless”. Instead of the small and close-knit Cratchit family, we have the infamous Jarndyces: not so much a family as a disparate group of ill-matched individuals whose only real connection is their involvement in the never-ending legal dispute of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
As in many families, there are ongoing feuds: the boundary dispute between Lord Dedlock and Lawrence Boythorn; the unhappy marriage of the Snagsbys, trapped between his timidity and her suspicious mind. There are also eccentrics, such as the aptly named Miss Flite with her many birds, who is given to blurting out uncomfortable truths. Nearly everyone connected to the case is in some way polluted by it, as they are by the ever-present London fog.
At the head of this vast table is John Jarndyce, “a bluff, rosy fellow” and the only official Jarndyce among the entire cast. It is Jarndyce who tries to maintain some sense of good feeling and warm-heartedness by inviting into his home Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, two wards of Chancery and the latest victims of what he refers to as “the family curse”, as well as the self-effacing Esther Summerson, who narrates some of the story. Nabokov once called Jarndyce “one of the best and kindest human beings ever described in a novel”, and indeed he is responsible for the only happy ending in the book, through an act of noble self-sacrifice worthy of anyone in Downton Abbey.
Besides Jarndyce and his Fezziwig-like qualities, Bleak House has other similarities with A Christmas Carol – the Scrooge-like figure of Grandfather Smallweed and his equally aged-looking grandchildren, as well as Jo the aspiring street-sweeper, who could give Tiny Tim a run for his money (if he had any). Just as today’s soap operas provide the traditional Christmas special, a rich mix of melodrama wherein lurks the greasy sixpence of murder or infidelity, Bleak House is packed with more scandals, suspicion, long-lost lovers and grisly deaths than there are plums in a Christmas pud. The murky complexity of these are embodied in the gothic figure of the Dedlock family lawyer: “There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr Tulkinghorn.”
It was in December 1851 that Dickens sat down to write the first few chapters of Bleak House, throwing us face first into the muck and filth of the London he made his own: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes...” As Claire Tomalin says in her recent biography of Dickens, Bleak House is “a nineteenth-century fairy-tale or pantomime, with good and evil spirits, reversals, discoveries of lost parents and children, comedy and pathos, violent and tragic deaths and triumphs of love.” When you’ve had enough of festive EastEnders, why not sit down with this doorstopper and see how it used to be done. And however difficult you may find your own family, just remember that it could be a whole lot worse.
• Daniel Gooding comments as JudgeDAmNation
