BLEAK HOUSE – CHARLES DICKENS

CHAPTER 1 

What follows is a personal analysis of an extract belonging to the chapter one of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, called “In Chancery”. 

First of all, the intelligent reader should take into consideration the titles. For what concerns the one of the novel, it makes the reader understand the main setting of the whole composition: the adjective “bleak” connotes the house as a bad, desolate, gloomy, hopeless one. On the other side, the title of the chapter makes the reader think about a diplomatic building, maybe a court of equity.

Taking now into consideration the structure, it is clearly visible that the extract is organized into different sequences and that there is not any dialogue. Therefore, the narrator may have used mainly the narrative technique of telling.

Analyzing now the text, the first introductory sequence sets the atmosphere. The setting is the city of London, during a typical day in November. In particular, here the narrator focuses on the weather, on the smoke “lowering down from chimney-pots” and on the people and the animals (dogs and horses) across the streets. In addition, thanks to a legal reference to the Lord Chancellor “sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall”, the reader could start to understand the meaning of the title.

In the second sequence, the narrator goes on describing the city, focusing now on the fog. In particular, together with an exaggerated use of language, there is also the use of the anaphora, since the word “fog” is repeated at the beginning of every sentence, to underline its strong presence among the city and the surroundings, “in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners” and also all around the people, “as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds”. Here, with a simile, the narrator highlights how much foggy and polluted was the atmosphere, due to the fog and the smoke. The effect of the fog surrounding everything makes the reader feel as it is infecting the inhabitants of the city.

Moreover, in the two sections, the verbs tenses are mainly expressed with the participle and some sentences do not have any verb to the point that sometimes seem disconnected, maybe to convey the idea that the city is also disconnected. In the first two sequences there is also a slight amount of hyperbole to emphasize Charles Dickens’ point of view, since he, through the use of a third person omniscient narrator, seems to portray the muddy and polluted street of London he sees.

Going on, some lines later, the reader seems to have the impression that everything above is all due to the Government since right from the beginning the Lord Chancellor is characterized as lazy, sitting in Lincoln’s Hall and later on, in the fourth sequence, the narrator refers to Lincoln’s Inn Hall as “at the very heart of the fog”, insinuating that the Lord Chancellor is the cause of the fog.

Summing up, “Bleak House” starts with the narration of a mysterious London, covered with mud, fog and smoke, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery, as the fifth sequence reports. Therefore, the overall effect the reader has, is a negative image of the city, where everything is grey and mysterious. But in particular, since the fog is very dense in the Court of Chancery, the reader could think that there it is happening something obscure, because the fog covers something and does not let you see clearly what is beyond it.

Finally, since Charles Dickens does not adopt a difficult language, the extract could be read and understood by the people who can catch the moments when the narrator uses an exaggerated language and the ones who have a basic knowledge of the legal vocabulary.