Something like this can be said3of the structure of the novel that begins “In Chancery” (chapter 1), “hanging” (p. 17) in a state of suspended animation; goes on to the world of “Fashion” (chapter 2), which is “wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool” (p. 23); and then, departing for yet another scene, concludes an account of “A Progress” (chapter 3), on “streets … so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen” (p. 42), back “in Chancery” once more. “ ‘Beginning over’ ” and over “ ’again,‘” Bleak Housealso closes without closure. Leaving off with an ambiguous unfinished sentence, Dickens leaves behind the formulaic fulfillment of wishes that characterizes so many nineteenth-century novels’ endings.
And yet, Bleak Housenot only has a plot—that mechanism of cause and effect that propels a narrative from beginning to end. It has a compelling one, too, centering on mysteries of identity, driven by the desire to uncover guilty secrets, urged on by the first professional detective in English fiction. Set against the “ ‘bedevilment’ ” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the plot moves forward, gathers momentum, and then, accelerating in “Flight” (chapter 55) and “Pursuit” (chapter 56), yields “A Discovery” (chapter 61) and “Another Discovery” (chapter 62) in the climactic final chapters of the book. Contributing to the vogue for sensation fiction, which flourished in the 1860s, Bleak House,like the later work of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, is a thoroughly good read.
It is also a strange one. A novel in which Dickens answers the wish of the opening chapter of the book for “the whole” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce to be “burnt away in a great funeral pyre” (p. 23) with something as bizarre as the “Spontaneous Combustion” (p. 436) of Krook, the gin-sodden rag-and-bottle dealer who styles himself the Lord Chancellor, follows this with the “ ‘smouldering combustion’ ” (p. 526) of Richard Carstone as this youthful hero becomes absorbed in the case, and then goes on to represent the suit as being consumed by its own costs is evidently up to something unusual. “Unnatural” is the word critics of Bleak Houseused.
While the apocalyptic theme is one of the many linkages between the story line (or snarl) that concerns Jarndyce and Jarndyce and the one that pursues detection—apocalypse being a mode of discovery, unveiling—these strands of the novel are also structurally consistent, as well as being consistently subversive of the onward and upward motion of progress and of narrative that follows this path. As one of the earliest instances of detective fiction, Bleak Housedemonstrates the distinctive circularity of this genre, which begins after the fact—after the action, criminal or otherwise, that instigates the investigation—and moves forward, gathering the clues and making the discoveries through which the original actions and motives and means are reconstructed. In the backward-looking logic of the forward-moving detective plot, the end recapitulates the beginning. This recursive narrative pattern is even more prominent in the proceedings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. “ ‘It won’t do to think of it!’ ” says John Jarndyce. “ ‘When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the beginning of the end!’ (p. 105). So it is with Richard, who does not heed such warnings, and, ” ‘hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification’ “ (p. 105), becomes another victim of the ”ill-fated cause“ (p. 21).
In these and other ways, Bleak Housecoheres in a deadly whole that is emblematic of the deadly condition of England.