BLEAK HOUSE – IN CHANCERY

The present extract is taken from chapter 1 and belongs to Bleak House written by Charles Dickens. The subtitle of the novel refers to the object of discussion and to the events told by a third person OMNISCIENT narrator.

The extract is organized into 5 paragraphs. The narrator sets the story in London, with a implacable November weather. In the first paragraph are presented the main character: Lord Chancellior, the presiding official of the Chancery Court. This first chapter makes Dickens' social criticism explicit and introduces one of the book's principal themes: the ruin that the Chancery Court has made and will continue to make of many people's lives.

The famous opening of the novel describing the fog of London and connecting it to corruption, exemplified by the Court of Chancery, establishes mood, symbol, and theme in one stroke. It is November, and there is “as much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth”. This mud and rain evokes Biblical references to both Creation and to the Flood that God used to destroy the wickedness of people who marred His creation. It strongly suggests theories of the evolution of species by superimposing prehistoric times and contemporary London by showing a “Megalosaurus” would not be out of place “waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Street”. This primitive atmosphere in which species must fight to survive is hardly the popular national image of England as the great seat of Western civilization.

In Chapter 1 Dickens describes the setting. It is November in London, and the weather is typical: wet and foggy. Because the Industrial Revolution was characterized by crowded cities in which people, businesses, and factories burned coal as fuel, those cities, especially London, were known for their "pea soupers"—fogs so dark with soot it was hard to see.

Dickens introduces London and the Court of Chancery by calling up images of fog.  “Fog everywhere,” he writes.  “Fog up the river…Fog down the river…Fog in the eyes and throats.” This fog is more than just a spooky literary device.  It is a symbol of the murk and confusion associated with Chancery itself.  Dickens writes that the “dense fog is densest” on the approach to the court.

Bad weather is a symbol of decay, death, “mourning” for the sun. It is a symptom of “a general infection of ill-temper”, showing the imbalance and sickness of society.