BLEAK HOUSE 📚: with Stephen Fry

Dominic is joined by the inimitable Stephen Fry who takes the listener on an intricate journey through the fog and mystery of Dickens' thrilling masterpiece: Bleak House

Reading extracts from Esther's narrative also is the brilliant Sally Scott

And here is a link to Miriam Margolyes' unabridged audiobook of Bleak House mentioned in the episode

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Hello everyone. Today's guest is a hugely celebrated actor, writer, comedian, director, and broadcaster. But I can already see him tearing up those labels and starting again. Always wary of being imprisoned by nouns, our guest prefers to live his life as a verb. He is a person who does things, and he never knows what he's going to do next. One moment he might be adapting the Greek myths in his trilogy of Mythos, Heroes, and Troy, which opens an entire cosmos to readers who never would have thought that these stories were for them. Or he might be playing the lead role in a biopic of his hero Oscar Wilde, or writing the book for a West End and Broadway hit, directing an Evelyn War adaptation. Playing Malvolio at Shakespeare's Globe, directed by our mutual friend Tim Carroll from episode two of this series. But of course, there's an entire generation who grew up with his unforgettable and very Dickensian characterization of General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmany Melchit in the comedy series Blackadder, a program I would watch avidly whilst pretending to revise from my history GCSE. I am, of course, speaking of the inimitable Stephen Fry. And today, he is going to help us steer a path through what many consider to be Dickens' masterpiece the mysterious and thrilling Bleak House. Joining us also to read extracts from the novel is the wonderful actress Sally Scott.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Stephen, welcome. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. I'm honored to be one of your Dickensian investigators.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Oh gosh, me too. I I'm so thrilled to have you here. And I suppose my first question for you is really do you remember where you were when you first picked up this uh enormous book?

SPEAKER_02 2:09

I do, because I have to confess I hadn't read it till I got to university. It wasn't, as it were, a set text, but I um spent the holidays, or vax as they were known, sh not short for vaccinations but vacations, uh an Americanism that is for some reason used at university. So I spent my vax catching up on novelists I hadn't completely finished with, as it were. So I read two E. M. Forsters I hadn't read, and then I read about seven Dickenses that I hadn't read, um, one of which was Big House, which um struck me with a broadside. I uh it uh I almost feel it changed me. It was such an extraordinary experience compared to the other books which I completely loved and still love, but there's something about Big House that just gave me a sort of um a clue in in the Ariadne sense of a sort of string leading out of a labyrinth, but in in this sense leading into a labyrinth, leading into a labyrinth of a different way of reading. Um because it's a book about reading in some ways, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Yes. And when you describe a labyrinth, the labyrinth is made of fog, perhaps, in this one, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Yes. Fog it fog begins the story in in the most memorable fashion and in this sort of extra character that is part of the book, which is the voice of the storyteller. Well, there are two voices, of course, which is very rare in Dickens. One is um this very almost bombastic rhetorical figure who occasionally addresses us directly when he sees an injustice or some horror, uh, when he peeps into the houses of London and blows away the fog and lets us see. He, you know, he will call us my lords, ladies and gentlemen, and accuse us of standing by or sitting nonchalantly apart from the horror and um distress that he sees in the city and in human life. And so we're we're involved ourselves. Um and then the other narrator is is Esther Summerson, the uh the heroine, I suppose you call her. In some ways, her mother is the heroine of the story, or the spoiler alert, the woman who turns out to be her mother, I should say.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yes, so uh Lady Deadlock is the sort of tragic heroine, perhaps. She is. Yeah. I've got a lot of time for Esther, because I know Esther comes under a little bit of criticism for being wet or speaking twaddle, and and you think well, if you really walk in her shoes and think about the childhood she had, I think she's wonderful. I I really cherish her for the simple fact that she doubts herself. And I know you mustn't doubt yourself too much, but I think too many people in the book are absolutely certain of their own positions.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

I think you're completely right. We discover quite early on that she was brought up by a rather brutal woman called Miss Barbary, who constantly reminded her that she was a disgrace, which we know means she was born out of wedlock, which is a kind of pun, because it turns out that her mother is actually named Deadlock, which has the natural meaning of deadlock, as stuck in this aristocratic world as her mother is, but also it reminds us of her being born out of wedlock, uh, which was the great disgrace for anyone, and it's the child that gets the blame. Um i and after that it's the woman that gets the blame. The man never does.

SPEAKER_04 5:38

Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table before the fire. Her darkened face had such power over me. She said slowly in a cold, low voice, I see her knitted brow and pointed finger. Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this better and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

She reminds me, Esther, and I agree with you, I I I have a great deal of time for her. She reminds me very much of Jane Austen's most insipid, some people would say, heroine Fanny in Mansfield Park, also regarded as a bit a bit of a drip and uh a bit sort of goody two shoes compared to the bubbly Eliza Bennett and uh uh and Anne Elliot and and and and others who, you know, the the the sisters in in uh sense and sensibility all seem to have more life. But I think the point is with characters like that that you understand that some people aren't extrovert and full of charm that win over the reader with their vivacity. Some of them are quiet and stayed but have a deep quality of honour and a placid nature, which is a very common human nature. In fact, most of us know people who always apologize because they aren't the life and soul of the party, and I'm a bit shy and I don't like going out. But there are very often people we we value enormously. And I think we should in literature too, we should take a note uh uh uh of of Esther and realize that she, as we would say, now negotiates her lived experience with uh with with splendid honour.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Absolutely. And and of course, there are extroverts in life that are not always the life and soul of the party. Uh you've described I'm sure I've read this sentence from you somewhere, where you described the yawning chasm between public and private.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

Yeah, absolutely. And novels, as Dickens was experimenting with, I mean, it was still a relatively young form. I mean, he's only fifty years after Jane Austen was at her peak, for example, and uh he's discovering that novels can move in and out of the public and private uh characters that uh or natures of those characters that he that he is portraying, and that that is part of what a a novel uniquely can do, that it can bring you inside a character's mind and then it can lift you above like a drone shot looking down, um uh or or like a marionette marionetteer or something.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yes. And there's that fantastic description in the opening chapter of uh imagining people being up in a balloon. Yes. A sort of a uh an illusion of the city being in the clouds because of the fog. So yes, he straightaway has that aerial view you just mentioned between the two n narratives. Um there's the third person narrative which is more Dickens, isn't it, and Esther's first person. And then there's the different uses of tense that Dickens uses as well. But you do read it, I think, and you're so absorbed in it that all of that passes you by without you noticing sometimes, I think.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

That's right. The the third person narrator does use the present, the historic present tense, whereas Esther is always writing from the past. And without us necessarily knowing it, that immediately tells us that Esther will get through this because she's not writing it from the grave, we assume. Yes. It's not papers discovered uh post-mortem. Um and so even when it gets to a uh uh a part of the story where she becomes dangerously ill, we we sort of know she must pull through, but we don't know that about any of the other characters, and she doesn't know it about any of the other characters. So we our knowledge is compromised and played with wonderfully. And and I think the whole thrill of the book is that I mean, I can remember this first reading, which I can't of a lot of books. I mean, I, you know, I sort of dimly recall when I first read this book or that book, but with Bleak House, I can remember even that first chapter thinking this is all going to connect up as we start to meet different characters. I think, how are all these people? I know they must be connected. And you sort of know that it's a book. I use the word clues, meaning like Ariadne, you know, a string that she she gave, a thread that she gave to Theseus to play out through the maze, through the labyrinth on his way to the minotaur, so that he could follow his way back out. Those were called clues, and we've used the word since, in crossword puzzles, and most notably, especially with reference to this book, in detective stories, which this famously is. Some people would call it one of the very first detective stories. It's up there with Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins Moonstone, for example, or the Edgar Allan Poe stories. And and uh it's certainly Inspector Bucket is a memorable figure from Scotland Yard, whom one could regard as a true fictional detective. So there are clues, and very quickly you know there are clues, and you know they're all over the place. That they're in a uh a lawsuit, they're in papers held by some weird figure, crook, um, and and you know that there's a mystery. There's even a character called Nemo. I mean, it's so in your face kind of symbolic, and yet it's also deeply detailed, and a whole picture is is is brought to life of this world, this world mostly London, um the the legal area of London and the little courts and strange places where people who are satellites of the legal industry, either by being law copiers or um something similar, selling legal ink and it's a profession that has its own sub-professions and trades. And you we meet lots of lawyers. We meet um the most famous one, Mr. Tulkinghorn, who's a malevolent figure in the background, pulling strings, a sort of spider, um, uh monitoring the twitches on the web, um, and a rather fruity orotund figure called Kenj. Conversation Kenj is his nickname because he speaks so absurdly. Um and there's a legal a charming sort of legal clerk uh called Mr. Guppy, uh, who's a divine figure.

SPEAKER_04 12:13

It was at the theatre that I began to be made uncomfortable again by Mr. Guppy. I was sitting in front of the box one night with Ada and Richard, when, happening to look down into the pit, I saw Mr. Guppy, with his hair flattened down upon his head and woe depicted in his face, looking up at me. I felt all through the performance that he never looked at the actors, but constantly looked at me, and always with a carefully prepared expression of the deepest misery and the profoundest dejection. It was so very embarrassing and so very ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

So there are all these characters circling around law, and then in the middle of this maelstrom, there is the famous legal case of Jondyce versus Jondyce, which has a huge, sort of symbolic, uh uh uh fantastic quality to it. As so much in the story does. It's not just Jandyce and Jondyce that everybody thinks, well, it's ridiculous. He he's do he's he's doing a verbal cartoon of a legal case that is so mired in complexity and has so many different people expecting money from it. It's a it's a will or a series of wills, it's a fortune that only the Chancery Court can can sort out, apparently. And it's been going on for decades and sucking the life out of all the suitors to the case. And you think, well, that's a kind of cartoon, just as then Mr. Crook dies by exploding, uh spontaneous combustion. Um leaving just a sort of layer of fat all around the room.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Horrific the description in that entire sequence, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 13:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

It really is amazing. And if you read it with hindsight, it's even worse because you know the signs of the soot falling in the room below and this this goo. Yeah, this sort of lard-like tallow.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

Yes. It's quite disgraceful. Because he's become literally a human candle, and his fat has burned down. Um and that's supposedly the explanation. I remember writing essays and things on Beak House at university. I did a dissertation on it. And I remember researching or trying to research all the uh cases of spontaneous combustion that may or may not have occurred. And I know Dickens was actually quite cross that people thought he was making it up or exaggerating or kind of falling for an urban myth. Um and in the introduction to the first edition of the book, when it was produced as a book, rather than in its twenty serial parts, which is how it first appeared. In the early 1850s, I think it was. He quite roundly accused his um his his detractors of n of of not understanding that the the truth of the spontaneous combustion. And and people thought the same of Jondyce and John Dyce. So there is this feeling in the book that he's moving into an almost modernist symbolic kind of literature where he's, you know, which is a fantastic and brilliant caricaturing of the world, but at the same time there is this fantastic detail, this extraordinary uh uh ability to to make it all real, and you can smell it and touch it and taste it, and all the things that good writing is supposed to do for your senses.

SPEAKER_04 15:22

London. Mickelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Hoburn Hill. Smoke luring down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes, gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

That's the great fun of Dickens, I think, as you were saying, his use of caricature and symbolism. There's actually a phrase I I picked up from the book, reading it again in in preparation for our chat, which is augmentation of reality. Brilliant. Which is essentially augmented reality as we'd call it today. Here we are.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Exactly. And as you know, and as as many um tuning in will know, um Dickens was a prodigious walker. Uh I mean, what what one of the most extraordinary things about Dickens, and it's true of many people from the Victorian era, is just the energy they had. It is almost unbelievable. And that's true of, I don't know, Ruskin and Carlyle and Darwin and Tennyson, the amount of letters they wrote, the sheer volume of correspondence they kept up, on top of the actual writing they were doing. And in Dickens's case, it's it's it's not just those enormous novels, and Bikhaus is one of his longest, if not his longest, I can't quite I think our mutual friend is also very long, I think, from roughly the same period of his writing. But anyway, it's a very big book, by certainly by modern standards. On top of that, he was writing whole editions of his magazines that he ran, and and and keeping up a furious correspondence, and walking twenty, thirty, forty miles a day around London, absorbing it. You know, uh a later character that that we think of as sort of an epitome of Victorian London is Sherlock Holmes. And there's a great deal that you can think of as part of the Victorian experiences, that they were aware of this enormous organic entity that had been built up in their own lifetimes, the city, that had become something quite different from what was a town that then became a larger town. London became something else. It became a living organism, and the people within it, the bacteria, you and me and everyone, are connected in an organic, holistic way. That it's without being too kind of pretentious and um sophomoric, as they say in America. Um Dickens, we know, hated utilitarianism. He he he wrote against it most fiercely in hard times. Um, this idea that people are units and that their their their satisfaction can be quantified by a um what the original uh utilitarians call a calculus of felicity, literally a a mathematics that could say the greatest good for the greatest number is the way it's usually shortened. And the the the industrial north that is the subject of the hard times and the Ironmaster Gradgrind and his insistence on facts, that facts were collectible, and there's a a famous scene where Jassy, I think she's called the girl who who's grown up um in the sort of circus and amongst horses, and she's a free and wonderful spirit, and she's pushed into this classroom where Gradgrind is showing off the teaching, and uh the the teacher says, Pupil number five or whatever, define a horse. And Jassy just kind of freezes. How do you define that living creature? She doesn't think that, we think that for her. And then um, what's he called? He's got a wonderful name, Bitsa, this this annoying boy, um says, uh, graminivorous quadruped. Graminivorous meaning, you know, eats grain and grasses, and quadruped four-legged. And says, Good boy, you know what a horse is. And that is the perfect moment in which Dickens encapsulates this. And also you see Greggrind's cabinet of, you know, like all Victorians, he's he's a taxonomist. He collects, labels, orders, categorizes, everything has its place and can be numbered. And that is part of what the Victorian scientific movement and the Industrial Revolution and the economics and the political science of the time were all about. But Dickens, I think, understood the opposite point of view, uh, that rather than atomistic, in which we're all individuals bouncing off each other in a kind of swirl of Brownian motion in the fog and smoke of reality, we're all bouncing off each other as individuals. Yes, that's one way of looking at it, but the other way is to understand that we're actually all connected, we're not separate particles. And the two things in a city in his day, he didn't have electricity in the telecommunications we have now, but the two things that that unite people, or at least that can connect people, are money and disease. Yes. And Dickens almost treats them as the same. You know, Joe gets given money from Nemo, Joe the crossing sweeper, who literally sweeps the crossing, the way people connect. He sweeps it away. It's it's a wonderful image. And he's one of the most memorable and beautiful characters Dickens ever created. And his death and his complaints, which are utterly really without self-pity, they're just a kind of realistic recognition of the deep tragedy of his existence, of being moved along all the time, being moved along, not having a place. But he connects, he gives the disease to Esther that nearly kills her. He uh is given money that that gives Tulkinghorn the knowledge that he knows something about Nemo that may threaten the deadlocks, and so he has Bucket move Joe along. That Joe is the unwitting receipt of things that connect him to people he doesn't really feel connected to. But Dickens shows he is, and that money and disease are vectors of communication that are sort of the same. They despoil and they ruin. One, of course, we run away from and the other we run towards. But it's really interesting, I think, when you when you look at it in that way. Absolutely. I think Bernard Shaw said that at one point there are thousands rotting their lives away in the jails of Europe for writing pamphlets a tenth as seditious as Bleak House. Something like that. That's the thought he expressed. He recognized this. I think if anyone does when you Read it, that it is an absolute critique of hierarchy. If you like, it's this is a bit uh Nile Ferguson, but the world of Leicester Deadlock is a world of hierarchy. Everyone has their place in strata, and he's at the top, and he's constantly going, Celeste. He's always going on about how things threaten that order, and his thing is the floodgates. The floodgates will open, and when that happens, he and his type that the aristocrats will be over, and he has to stand up for that in a ramrod, deadlocked fashion, because hierarchy is deadlocked. It's like a Neapolitan ice cream, frozen layers and levels. But Dickens is arguing that it's a network of nodes of connection, which is not a hierarchy. It's far more like what we understand society to be: a network. And we actually have it now when we say network, we think of it as a technological thing. And then the way it was in Dickens's time, only it was messengers and runners and policemen and maids and people who connected, people who in Victorian terms shouldn't be connected. And Dickens is showing the disease of Victorian England is that everybody thinks there's a place for everything, a number for everything, and the world will work if people stick to their place, and they can be well treated in their place, and they can be they can be charmed, you know, as as uh famously Scrooge says, are there no workhouses, are there no prisons? They have places to go. They uh but what mustn't happen is they mustn't fuse together or the floodgates will open and the whole cake or the whole sorry, the whole Neapolitan will melt. And he's saying, but you don't understand. Human beings aren't really like that. There's a network, there's a connection between the old soldier who runs a shooting gallery, there's a connection between uh him and the neighbor of John Jondyce, who has a law case going on with the deadlocks. They're all connected. And, you know, we know this phrase, only connect, it's the famous Fausterian motto of Howard's End. And we know through comic novels like uh Duck Gently and uh so on that that you can use this fact, the the fact in physics that everything is connected to paint visions of how humanity is. But I don't think anybody did it in quite the way that Dickens did, and he had to help him that he was at a time when suddenly in the city, although there were areas where Joe was, you know, the Tom all alone's his rookery in St. Giles's and all these places, he shows that they're all actually one, and that mankind is one. And in that case, it's a fantastic novel of brotherhood, of of of connection, um, a tragic one. Yes. Sorry, I've talked far so much, I've given my thesis. No, this is wonderful.

SPEAKER_04 24:45

What connection can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, and the whereabout of Joe the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard step? What connection can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who from opposite sides of great gulfs have nevertheless been very curiously brought together. Joe sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any link there be.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

I really wanted to pick up on what you were saying about connections, because, as you said, when you picked up the book initially, you knew that there were connections there. Yes. But you do wonder, because it's such an enormous novel, and if Dickens is writing it in serial form, how on earth did he maintain the connections in his own mind to be able to hold it all together?

SPEAKER_02 25:36

And don't you think, as you read it, you're almost hearing the scratch of his nib on the page. You almost feel that you know he's just come up with this solution to that problem, and he's introduced a series of characters and ideas that will shed light on this corner. Like so quite late on you meet some characters who are going to be very important. Uh the fellow who turns out to be the son of the deadlock's um housekeeper, r Rancewell, I think her name is. Uh, and one of his most malevolent characters, Grandfather Smallweed, who really is as repulsive a figure as anyone.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yes, Smallweed, um he reminds me of uh Francis Bacon, you know, the screaming popes.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

Yes, absolutely. He's got a smeared quality to him.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Yes. He's horrifying, isn't he? But what's so brilliant, because it's Dickens, there's something uh hilarious about it as well. Absolutely. He he wins himself trying to throw cushions at his wife.

unknown 26:33

Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

And he keeps his feet in the drawer of his chair like a paper foot bath, I think is the phrase.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

It is phenomenal. And we're laughing here, and it's worth it if if people are listening and thinking, oh, I'm gonna read uh Bleak House, it sounds amazing, and it is amazing, and I think you'll be astonished. It doesn't have the uh Pickwickian joviality in many places uh that you associate with some of Dickens that you get with Mr. McCauber and David Copperfield, for example. It's darker, it's a more adult novel in a strange sort of way, and that that's a thrilling thing because you realize that Dickens was almost throwing away the thing that made him most popular, and that is the creation of adorable characters that you're all going to imitate, like Mrs. Gamp, that you can all do an imitation of virtually, like Uriah Heap, even the, you know, he makes them darker, more tragic, or more malevolent. I mean, Mr. Jondyce is perhaps a more serious, although he is totally adorable, version of Mr. Pickwick, and he is benign and he's friendly. But somehow Mr. Pickwick is a bit of an ass. And we we love him for it. He's just a little too innocent. And that's what made him so popular in the early days of Dickens' writing, of course, is that he was a twinkly little set of eyes through which to see England as they travelled around. But in the case of John Dice, he has been soured and embittered by the horror of watching people fall for the John Dice case. But he hasn't turned himself into a sour and embittered man. But very notably for someone as benevolent as he is, and he is genuinely one of the kindest men you'd ever meet in fiction, um, he has his moods. He is a I won't say he's bipolar exactly, but he warns people who who do to whom he's close that just occasionally he has to go and sit alone and not be disturbed in w what is nicknamed, the growlery, where he has to growl. It's a bit like Churchill and his uh black dog, and uh I have it, and um many many people tuning in will will know exactly what that's about. You need a growlery, you need to sit somewhere. Doesn't matter how charming you are, it's not a gift that can keep on giving. Sometimes life takes things out of you. So even the even the jolly, totally good characters have I won't say a dark side exactly, but they're fully featured with with the human instincts, including the the sadder ones.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Yes, and I think Dickens plays a bit with the reader on that. Uh certainly if you're aware of Pickwick. Um a character like Harold Skimple, for example, who charms everyone at the beginning. And it makes me think, I'm sure I heard you say once in an interview, Stephen, and it really struck me, and it wasn't pursued, uh the the comment that you made. But you were saying about how there are no grown-ups anymore.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Yes, it is a it is a thing I I often talk about in the world, and you know, uh this is not an attack on any particular piece of modern culture, but the fact is that the most money is made in the world for adults as well as for young adults and and youth and children from movies about people with superpowers who have, you know, fly around with sparks flying from their arse and totally visible and so on. And and and and a sort of pseudo-exegesis has built up around it, where they can be talked about as if they're Shakespeare and have the depth of and you know, and I sound as if I'm mocking, and I'm not. I can sit down and watch Avengers Assemble. Uh and I think, yeah, what's this? You know, I like Robert Downey Jr. and then, you know, some nice people in it, and they're quite fun. But but, you know, it is for children. These are child children's entertainments. Yes. Thirty years ago, that's what they would be. And the world has changed. And people go around wearing sports clothes as adults. That that uh, you know, that is I mean, I'm I'm guilty myself. This is uh known as a polo shirt and baseball hats, and everything is uh, you know, you go in meetings. There used to be a time, and I'm not I'm not supporting these institutions, they're of course part of the elite that we all despise, but five-star hotels, for example, used to make people wear suit and tie to go in them. They they had to stop that because every Hollywood director and every kind of uh start-up billionaire wore children's clothes. War and then they also th they would go to the and sit there and a waiter would come and what can I get you? So and they'll say, hey, I'll I'll have a milkshake and a burger. Which is very Trumpian, isn't it, actually? It is. I mean, and this is children's food, I'm sorry, but it is. And and it's children's food and children's entertainment and children's books, you know, um, are uh kept over into adulthood. And Dickens seemed to have a similar view about adults who stay childish. And there's more than one example, in a way, in uh League House. Uh there's a sort of infantilism uh about quite a few characters, the turvy drops. Uh, you know, that I mean I love that. And it's almost as if Dickens is mocking himself, because I think people, you know, he's called the great Victorian writer, and of course he is uh primus into paris or no, primus into non-paris. First among non-equals. Um but almost all his books are set in the past. They're usually set in a Hanoverian reign, not not not the Victorian, not the Sax Coburg, if you like. Um and and that's true of Bleak House as well. I uh I think it's considered to be set in the reign of George IV in the uh 1820s, maybe a tiny bit early, just before Victoria gets onto the throne. And of course his most popular novel, one of the most popular novels ever written, Tale of Two Cities, uh, is obviously set in the in the uh at the time of the French Revolution. And um almost all his books actually are set in the past, David Copperfield and you know all all the others. They're, you know, if you think of a typical Dickensian costume, it's actually late Georgian, it's not Victorian that you see the men in. Um and so in the case of Turvidrop, who's a dancing teacher, or he's he he lets his son do all the work, he lives in the period of the Regency and d dimly claims acquaintance with Prinny, the the the the the Prince Regent, and wears the clothes and the corsets and the slightly exaggerated, you know, fobs and quizzing glasses.

SPEAKER_04 32:49

Just then there appeared from a side door old Mr. Turvidrop. He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He was pinched in and swelled out, and strapped down as much as he could possibly bear. He stood poised on one leg, in a high-shouldered state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane, he had an eyeglass, he had a snuff box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature. He was not like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment. As he bowed to me in that tight state, I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

And it's as if D Dickens is sort of making fun of himself for being stuck in that same period, because one of the things critics now and then in his lifetime noticed was that a lot of his heroines were childlike. Little Nell and uh all those sort of and and um little Dorrit. The word little on uh is a sort of, you know, and children were his heroes after Pickwick Papers at least. Uh Oliver Twist, obviously, and and David Copperfield and Great Expectations narrated about childhood, going back to childhood, trying to sort out problems that childhood had caused, which we all know Dickens was naturally disposed to do with the awful childhood he had, um, and the scapegrace father that he reproduced in so many different stories. And so Dickens is stuck in his childhood, like a lot of people who've had an abusive or an unpleasant childhood. He's got issues to work out, as we now say, and he knows it, and and his critics knew it, and you know. Uh so I think in Bleak House he he kind of confronts it in a way. He gives us a character like Turvidrop, who is a sort of very extreme version of Dickens, stuck in the Regency period. And he gives us the wonderful uh Harold Skimpole, whom you mentioned, who the world agree is based on Lee Hunt, who was a great literary critic and a poet and a friend of Keats and a remarkable man, but who affected childishness himself. Oh, I understand nothing. I don't understand anything, I don't know the way the world works. What is this? A guinea? What can a guinea be? Uh a pound and a shilling. How does they're different? How can they oh no, I'm too stupid to understand. Could you sort it out for me? And maybe you give me some of your money here and I'll spend it for you, you know. So he has a life of complete luxury, spoiled by everybody around him, um, simply by pretending to be innocent. And um it's a it's an important sort of facet in this world of uh which is about guilt and innocence and is actually becomes a detective story, as I say. And so this person who pretends to be innocent, whom we we see straight away as a manipulative swine.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Absolutely. That thing you were saying about utilitarianism earlier, that sort of fight between that and romanticism. Yes. You also mentioned um William Guppy, and I think he's an interesting character in that he seems to fall between those two positions. Because there's a moment where Dickens mentions him as being both romantic and forensic at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

Absolutely. And of course he falls in love with Esther and proposes to her, and she sees him again after she's had her illness, her fever, which we assume is smallpox because it leaves her disfigured. And um he, of course, no longer wants to marry her. So he he's not only um he doesn't have the romantic sensibility of one who will sacrifice his, you know, his his possible happiness on the altar of his f fervent love, but he thinks, no, I don't want a wife who looks like that. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Sort of gets worse, doesn't it? Because Guppy makes the proposal and he is rejected. Then Esther suffers her illness, her face is disfigured, so he retracts the proposal and then makes it again.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

It is brilliant. And and your point, of course, romanticism is exactly the word I should have brought up when talking about that, the you know, the symbolic side of him. A lot of it is part of what used to be called the pathetic fallacy, w which is to say that uh in romantic writing, poetry uh and and fiction, the landscape and the weather take on the emotional uh experiences that are being undergone by the heroes of the book. So for the hero is stormy, the world is stormy, the things around him are transformed by him, and he usually is a him as a as a romantic hero, and by his sensibilities. And that's called the pathetic fallacy, pathetic in the sense of feeling. And so you can look on the book as having a lot of that, that the the explosion of Mr. Crook and and the um some of the more extreme descriptions of the world you can regard as symbolic and also as reflective of the nature of the characters and what they're undergoing, and of the mystery and the the sort of cancer at the heart of the flesh of the book. Um but what's so clever and great about Dickens is that his romantic pathetic fallacy is actually almost on a Zola-esque element of reality. It's a realistic portrait. And I know, I again, this is just sort of dimly recalling my research going on for 50 years ago. Um but but I I and it was before there was an internet, so it actually meant I physically had to go into libraries and do things with index cards. But um I know a lot of uh legal historians say that uh this book is extremely useful in terms of uh bringing to life the uh the the truth of the Chancery Court and the this ecosystem of lawyers and uh paralegals and uh uh uh legal stationers and so on. Um and of course Dickens, as we know, was a journalist who covered the law courts as well as Parliament. He covered the law. And so he did have a really deep understanding of how this incredibly complex and incomprehensible and impenetrable world was run. And therefore he could call out its corruption, and he could call out the danger it was to sanity and to to and sanity in both sense, in its original sense of health. Uh it is like a like a public health problem, the law, as he saw it. A public mental health problem, as we'd now say, it drove people mad. Uh and we see from the beginning, we see that process. Um we we're told it when we first meet John Dyson John Dyson, we meet some of these characters. Um who's the man from Shropshire? Um there's the man Mr. Gridley. Gridley, Mr. Gridley, poor Mr. Gridley. Uh and and of course we meet Miss Flight and and who who's uh Because the names are also part of that symbolic romantic thing that Miss Flight keeps birds and the birds are in the cage and she'll let them out when the case is you know over. They've all got symbolic names, uh truth, honesty, you know, prudence, and all that sort of thing, and they're all trapped. It's an image of the court case itself.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

Hope, joy, youth, peace, rest, life, dust, ashes, waste, want, ruin, despair, madness, death, cunning, folly, words, wigs, rags, sheepskin, plunder, precedent, jargon, gammon and spinach.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

So and we meet John Dice when he is appointed uh ward of these two wards in Chancery, who are children who are uh orphaned and uh they're not they're not related enough to stop them falling in love and marry. Uh so but they're both potential beneficiaries of the money from the will, if the case ever gets solved. And John Dice tells them with absolute clarity and certainty that they must never involve themselves in the case. Look at these people around us. Their lives have ruined, their minds have gone, that that John Dice has destroyed them, and they nod, these young, healthy new generation people, and we watch in horror, and it's one of the great stories of the book. It's so recognizable. A young man with ideals but also ambition and hope is slowly sucked into something he doesn't quite understand. It's the equivalent of him, I don't know, starting off day trading or or uh you know online and suddenly owing hundreds of thousands and then millions and then not being able to get out of it. All undertaken with the best motives, and when the family members, uh especially the women, say, Are you sure this is wise? Oh, you don't understand. I understand this. It's fine. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. How many times have men said that to women and been wrong and self-deluding in the most appalling way? And we watch Richard's journey in horror as that happens. And it it it is a total tragedy. He ends up dead, of course.

SPEAKER_04 41:46

It had given me a pang to hear Richard sob and see the tears start out between his fingers. But that was infinitely less affecting to me than the hopeful animation with which he said these words. I have looked well into the papers, Esther. I have been deep in them for months, he continued, recovering his cheerfulness in a moment. And you may rely upon it that we shall come out triumphant. It will be all right at last, and then you shall see.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

And it's very tragic, obviously, that Miss Flight outlives Richard. Yes. Old Miss Flight is alive at the end, and he isn't. Yes, it's very sad. And there's something else is that these characters fall into the trap of John Dice, but they seem to know that it's going to fail. But it's like an addiction where one part of their mind can see it for what it is, but at the same time they can't let it go. And that's true of all addictions, I can tell you.

SPEAKER_02 42:39

That's true of alcohol, it's true of you know drugs, it's true of betting. The terror and pity of that addiction is the part of the brain that knows that this is destroying the the addict. They know that. But nonetheless, they just have to. That next fix, that next day in court, that next you know, that next line of coke, that next drink, whatever it is, that next bet on that horse, and then I'll be clear. I just need that, and then the next and the next, and so on. And we and and and people watch by uh just in in a state of uh uh sorrow and horror, unable to intervene, as the modern phrase is. And and they try interventions with Richard, they all do. And but of course he also has his drug friend, you know. He has um who's the lawyer who uh is it Voles? Oh, the Voles, Mr. Voles, who's a dead, horrifying figure. Um kind of like a tomb, isn't he? And he sucks all the money, and uh and occasionally when he deigns to speak as a proper person, uh he's oh we we're getting there, we're getting there. Don't worry, don't worry. Just a little more money we'll be there.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

Yes, and he also makes the distinction uh between something that's immoral and unlawful. In Volse's mind, something unlawful is to be avoided, but there's not really any such thing as immoral.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

No, absolutely. Right, that's beautifully put. And I mean the more you talk about it, um I think it is one of those books that if you've read it once richly and enjoyed it and maybe then come back to it a few years later. When you then have a conversation with someone about it who who knows it as well as you do, you realise there are corners of it that you haven't even ever shared with anyone or even really thought consciously about that have uh a depth and a a magnificence and an interest and a a sort of they they help illuminate the the the whole thing and you'd never even considered them. It is full of these riches. It's very hard to to to describe exactly why it's such a satisfying and intriguing, beguiling read. Uh it I I want to read it again, and I I read it last apparently two years ago, I think. And actually, no, it was two years ago. I didn't read it. I had the enormous pleasure of being read it by Miriam Margalies, who is the greatest reader of Dickens, I think. Well, sh Martin Jarvis is brilliant too. But she does Bleak House Unabridged, um, and it's available for anyone who has one of those accounts with a talking book company, an audiobook company. And her characterizations are sublime. Her pacing and uh, you know, the drama she gives it without overreading is phenomenal. So maybe for some people that's the best way for them to approach the book. And it's a great opportunity. You can go for walks, and for three months at least, perhaps, depending on how long your walks are, you will have this phenomenal, complex, and thrilling novel uh read to you, uh, which is probably how Dickens would have liked it.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

Yes, I second that. Miriam Margleys' reading of Bleak House is fantastic, isn't it? All 40 hours or so of it. Yes, is that how long it is?

SPEAKER_02 45:45

Forty hours, my God.

SPEAKER_00 45:46

I'm sure it's at least 40 hours, yeah. And I think uh you know, our discussion points to the very seriousness of the book, but it is, as you say, a very thrilling and entertaining read, isn't it? It really carries you along.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Yes, I mean don't from I mean, I may have talked like a pretentious asshole, and I'm sure I have, but none of that uh should let the story get in the way of you. That's not how you experience reading it, but it may make you think in all kinds of different directions. And it has a lot of it uh qualities of Victorian melodrama, you know, the the dying woman hugging her dead uh her dead lover's uh tomb in the in the churchyard, and and you know, that's a very Victorian image. You can just see uh a sort of Dore or Domier uh engraving of it, can't you? And and and uh um uh you know the the the wistful death of of young Joe and uh going moving along for the last time to a better place and so on. You can see that there is some of the old Dickensian sentiment, but it's much less uh saccharin, much less, you know, the famous Oscar Wilde comment of uh you have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. Um it's nothing like as as as as sickly as as as that. Although I have a fondness for the old Curiosity Shop and Little Nell.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

I know. I love Nell. I don't find it funny at all. I wonder how serious Oscar Wilde was being.

SPEAKER_02 47:06

I think it's because in Oscar's time it was considered the acme of tragic literature. And I think he knew that while it was charming, and he he'd read and admired Dickens, that if Victorians thought tragedy stopped with Little Nell, they they really ought to think harder and deeper. I think. And also it's just a great gag. Oscar was never one to pass up the opportunity for a laugh. Listen, I must um I want to congratulate you, of course. You've worked with my very dear friend, the great director Tim Carroll, on uh a production of the A Christmas Carol, which I never got to see, but which I've seen bits of because it's been, you know, bits were videoed, and I have to say it looks absolutely stunning. Gosh, thank you. Are you going to be performing it elsewhere?

SPEAKER_00 47:50

Yes, absolutely. The details are still being finalized, but Yeah, and gosh, you'd be so welcome to come along and see it. Well, let me know, won't you, when it's next to it, and let your audience know when it's next going.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

I'm sure you will. I will. But it's been great talking to you, and as I say, you've sent me on my way to reread Bleak House, I think. It's just so great.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

Oh, well, I'm so thrilled. Thank you so much for your time, Stephen, and I'll let you know when this is up. It's a deal. Bye for now. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire. I want to keep adverts off this series. So if you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation, please follow the link in the description wherever you get this podcast, and you can make a small donation there. Thank you very much, and see you next time.