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House of Charles Dickens. Retelling of Dickens' Bleak House

"Cold House"

Bleak House is one of those rare cases where journalistic sensitivity to the topic of the day was in perfect agreement with the artistic intent of the novel, although, as is often the case with Dickens, the action is pushed back several decades. The Chancery Court, the reform of which was much talked about in the early fifties (by the way, it was delayed for a long time by government corruption and routine, which, according to Dickens, were a direct consequence of the then two-party system), the Chancery Court became the organizing center of the novel, smashing the vices of the social system as a whole . Dickens met the “charms” of the Chancery Court in his youth, when he worked in a law office, and at the Pickwick Club he fiercely criticized his monstrous red tape, telling the story of the “chancery prisoner”. Perhaps he became interested in him again under the influence of newspaper hype.

Having unfolded an impressive picture of society, Dickens is likely to win an even more brilliant victory when he does not let the reader forget for a moment that this very network is established vertically: the Lord Chancellor sits on a woolen cushion at the top, and Sir Leicester Dedlock spends his days in his Lincolnshire manor. but the foundation of the cumbersome structure rests on suffering, it presses on the fragile and unwashed shoulders of street sweeper Joe, a sick and illiterate ragamuffin. Retribution is not long in coming, and the fetid breath of the Lonely Tom rooming house, where the same outcasts vegetate with Joe, breaks into the cozy nests of the middle class, does not spare the most domestic virtue. Dickens' exemplary heroine Esther, for example, catches smallpox from Joe. In the first chapter of the book, London and the Chancery Court are shrouded in fog, the second chapter takes you to the rain-flooded, cloudy Chesney Wold, to a majestic country house where the fate of the government office is decided. However, the indictment brought against society is not without nuances. The Lord Chancellor, for example, is a benevolent gentleman - he is attentive to Miss Flyte, who has been driven to insanity by judicial adjournments, and talks paternally with the "Chancellor's wards" Ada and Richard. The firm, stubborn Sir Leicester Dedlock 1 is nonetheless one of Dickens' most sympathetic characters: he generously cares for all who are directly dependent on him, maintains chivalrous fidelity to his beautiful wife when her dishonor is revealed - there is something in this something even romantic. And is it really necessary, finally, to abolish the Court of Chancery and correct the system which Sir Leicester considers to be God-given to England? Who will feed the aged father of Mr. Voles and his three daughters, if Voles loses the opportunity, with royalties and court fees, to let Richard Carston go around the world? And what will become of the miserable wreckage of Cousin Volumnia, a fragment of the Regency, with her necklace and baby talk, if her benefactor Sir Leicester loses his right to determine the fate of the country?

Without saying it directly anywhere, Dickens makes it clear that a society that allowed Joe to die from hunger and loneliness is doubly disgusting, throwing a piece to other equally unfortunate ones. Here, of course, Dickens' disgust for patronage and dependence, which determines relations between people, was expressed: he knew what it was from his own family, especially in the last fifteen years of his life. To say that Chancellor's Court and Chesney Wold symbolize fog and dampness would be a misnomer, since one immediately comes to mind such vague, vague symbols as the sea in Dombey and Son or the river in Our Mutual Friend. The most remarkable thing is that both the Chancellor's Court and the fog together symbolize England, but they also exist in their own right. Composition, symbolism, storytelling in Bleak House - in short, everything, with the possible exception of the plot, is artistically convincing, since their complexity does not negate the simple and clear logic of the action. So, the found will puts an end to the Jarndis litigation and brings nothing to anyone - everything was eaten by legal costs; the disgrace and death of his wife plunge the proud world of Sir Leicester into dust; a bunch of charred bones and a stain of thick yellow liquid will be left after "spontaneous combustion" by the alcoholic Crook, the buyer of junk and iron scrap, his "Lord Chancellor" in the world of rags, famine and plague. A society that is rotten from top to bottom makes a full turn in the pages of this amazing novel.

This is not the place to dwell on the long and varied list of dramatis personae 2 novels, we will only say that, as a rule, selfish and therefore vulgar heroes are drawn to their own kind, close into small groups, neglecting the family and people dependent on them - but also behaved towards the people and the ruling classes of England. Mr. Turveydrop, a fat man and a living memory of the time of the Prince Regent, thinks only of his manners; Grandfather Smallweed and his grandchildren, who never knew childhood, think only of gain; the itinerant preacher Mr. Chadband thinks only of his voice; Mrs. Pardigle, who encourages her children to use pocket money only for good deeds, thinks of herself as an ascetic when she delivers church tracts to houses where they sit without bread; Mrs. Jellyby, who has completely abandoned her children, becomes disillusioned with missionary work in Africa and enters the struggle for women's rights (in the face of a glaring national disaster and missionary work, and these rights drove Dickens into a rage). And finally, Mr. Skimpole, this charming undergrowth, not a fool to live at someone else's expense, and sharp on the tongue, does not get tired of artlessly blurting out his own opinion about himself. All of them, like children, selflessly indulge in their trifles, and hunger and disease go by without attracting their attention.

As for Joe. the embodied symbol of the victim, then this image, I think, deserves the highest praise. Neither ponderous pathos, nor even an undramatic reading of the Lord's Prayer on his deathbed can weaken the impression left on him by the shy and stupid, like a small animal, Joe - an abandoned, downtrodden, hunted creature. The image of an abandoned and homeless child in Dickens in the case of Joe received its fullest expression. There is nothing sublime and romantic in the image of Joe; Dickens does not “play along” with him at all, except for hinting that natural decency triumphs over evil and immorality. In a book that emphatically denies virtue to wild Africans, Joe (like Hugh the groom in Barnaby Rudge) is the only tribute to the traditional image of the noble savage. Dickens' compassion for the poor was most clearly expressed in the scene where Goose, an orphan servant in the Snagsby house (that is, the last person in Victorian life), marveling and sympathizing, observes the scene of Joe's interrogation: she looked into an even more hopeless life; the poor always come to each other's aid, and the kind-hearted Goose gives Joe her supper:

“Here you are, eat, poor little boy,” says Gusya.

“Thank you very much, ma'am,” says Joe.

- Do you want to eat?

- Still would! Joe answers.

“Where did your father and mother go, huh?”

Joe stops chewing and stands tall. For Goose, that orphan, nurse of a Christian saint whose church is in Tooting, patted Joe on the shoulder, for the first time in his life he felt that the hand of a decent man had touched him.

“I don't know anything about them,” says Joe.

I don't know about mine either! Goose exclaims.

“Poor boy” in the mouth of Goose sounds almost “masterly”, and this alone convinces me that Dickens managed to convey high pathos and deep feeling, keeping a mischievous smile on his face and not falling into sentimentality.

Most readers of Bleak House today will probably disagree with my assessment of the novel, as it ignores what they see as the main flaw of the novel—the character of the heroine, Esther Summerson. Esther is an orphan, and only halfway through the book do we learn that she is Milady Dedlock's illegitimate daughter. Taken under the care of Mr. Jarndis, she lives with him with his other wards.

Dickens took a bold step by taking Esther as a co-author - half of the book is written on her behalf. This decision seems to me very reasonable - after all, only in this way can the reader enter the life of victims broken by society; on the other hand, in other chapters, where the author is narrating, he will see a system of harassment and persecution in the aggregate 3 . Esther is a resolute and courageous heroine, of which her search for her mother is especially convincing, when the secret of my lady has already been revealed - by the way, these scenes belong to Dickens's best images of the dynamics of action; Esther has the courage to tell Mr. Skimpole and Mr. Vowles to their faces what useless people they are - for the timid and feminine heroine of Dickens, this means something. Unfortunately, Dickens fears that we ourselves will not be able to appreciate the virtues of Esther, which, naturally, are thrift, frugality and sharpness, and therefore makes her, impossible to be embarrassed, repeat for us all the praises lavished on her. This shortcoming may be characteristic of sensible girls, but in order to be consistent with the Dickensian ideal of femininity, the girl should be modest in her every word.

The inability and unwillingness to understand female psychology turns into another shortcoming, and a much more serious one: according to the logic of the novel, the Jarndis litigation destroys everyone who is involved in it, but the logic also turns out to be overturned, as soon as we learn that the shameful misconduct of milady and her role as a plaintiff in the process are not related to each other. This is all the more striking when the half-witted petitioner Miss Flyte tells how her sister went down a bad path: the family was drawn into judicial red tape, became impoverished, and then completely broke up. But Miss Flyte's sister is not in the novel, and her fall is muffled; the fault of Milady Dedlock forms the central intrigue of the novel - but Milady is beautiful; and Dickens demonstrates a complete deafness to the nature of a woman, resolutely refusing to analyze the annoying spot on the past milady, or even to explain in plain terms how it all happened, no matter that the book rests on this secret. But let's not be too picky: Esther is much prettier and livelier than the eternal bustle of Ruth Pinch; and Milady Dedlock, having lost her boring and impregnable decorum, is a much more vital character than that other proud and beautiful woman, Edith Dombey. Even Dickens' Achilles' heel seems to be less vulnerable in this ruthless judgmental novel.

But what is salvation, according to Dickens? By the end of the novel, several positive personalities and commonwealths are selected. The most remarkable thing here is Mr. Rouncewell and everything behind him. This is an “iron master” from Yorkshire, who made his way through life on his own, where factories and forges noisily and joyfully chat about the prosperous world of work and progress, sing a waste through the decrepit world of Chesney Wold with its paralyzed owner. Esther leaves for Yorkshire with her husband, Allen Woodcourt; he carries the hands and heart of a doctor to people - this is a tangible help, not like a vague philanthropy in the early novels of Dickens.

And isn't it ironic that the enterprising industrial North, the outpost of English capital in the Victorian era, took on another crushing blow from Dickens? In 1854, the novel Hard Times was published.

After completing the publication of Bleak House, Dickens, in the company of his young friends, Wilkie Collins and the artist Egg, left for Italy. It was nice to take a break from England, work, family, although the young companions sometimes irritated him, which was partly due to their modest means, which of course prevented them from keeping up with Dickens everywhere.

Returning to England, he made his first contribution to the cause of the coming decade by giving real paid public readings in Birmingham; the proceeds from the performances went to the Birmingham Institute and the Middle Counties. All three readings, which were a great success, were attended by his wife and sister-in-law 4 . However, for the time being, he ignores the surging flood of invitations. It is difficult to say how much longer the respite in work that promised depression would have continued if the falling demand for Home Reading had not forced Dickens to take up a new novel, or rather, had not hurried him with a monthly tribute, since the idea of a new work had already matured. Perhaps his recent trip to Birmingham had awakened in his soul the horror of the Midland blast furnaces, expressed for the first time with such force in a nightmarish vision of infernal furnaces and distraught, murmuring people in the Antiquities Shop. A journalist arrived in time to help the artist, agitated by a twenty-three-week strike and lockout at the cotton mills in Preston - in January 1854, Dickens traveled to Lancashire to witness the battle between business owners and workers. Already in April, the first issue of the novel "Hard Times" will be published. The success of the novel returned to Home Reading the brilliance of its glory and material prosperity.

Notes.

1. ... persistent in his delusions Sir Lester Dedlock- Deadlock ("dead-lock") means "stagnation", "dead end". As in most cases, the name of a Dickensian hero is at the same time a means of characterizing him.

2. Actors ( lat.).

3.... bullying and harassment- Probably, the opinion of many Dickensian critics is not without foundation, that he owed the new compositional device (writing a story on behalf of different persons) to the technique of a detective novel, in the genre of which his young friend Wilkie Collins worked so successfully. In a 20th century novel change of plans is no longer a novelty (D. Joyce, W. Faulkner).

4. ... all three readings ... were attended by his wife and sister-in-law- the first public reading was held in Birmingham City Hall on December 27, 1853; Dickens read A Christmas Carol.

London home of Charles Dickens

The house in London where Charles Dickens lived

The Charles Dickens Museum is located in Holborn, London. It is located in the only house that has survived to this day, where the writer Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine once lived. They moved here in April 1837, a year after their marriage, and lived there until December 1839. There were three children in the family, a little later two more daughters were born. In total, the Dickens had ten children. As the family grew, the Dickens moved to larger apartments.

It was here at the very beginning of the 19th century that Dickens created Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

The museum contains exhibits that tell both about the Dickensian era as a whole, and about his writing career, about the works and characters of the writer, about his personal and family life. In 1923, Dickens' house on Doughty Street was under threat of demolition, but was bought out by the Dickens Society, which had already existed for over twenty years. The building was renovated, and in 1925 the house-museum of Charles Dickens was opened here.

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Katherine Dickens - writer's wife

They married in the spring of 1836. The honeymoon of 20-year-old Katherine and 24-year-old Charles lasted only a week: in London, obligations to publishers awaited him.

The first years of marriage with the Dickens couple lived Mary, Catherine's younger sister. Dickens adored her, lively, cheerful, spontaneous. She reminded Charles of his sister Fanny, with whom the most precious childhood memories were associated. Her innocence made the writer feel the guilt inherent in Victorian men ... But he curbed his natural passion in every possible way. It is unlikely that Katherine liked such coexistence, but she did not have the habit of making scenes for her husband. One day, the three of them returned from the theater, and Mary suddenly lost consciousness. From that moment on, Charles did not let the girl out of his arms, and her last words were intended only for him. She died of a heart attack. On the tombstone, he ordered to engrave the words “Young. Beautiful. Good." And he asked his relatives to bury him in Mary's grave.

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The Dickens Society, which existed by that time for more than 20 years, managed to buy this building, where the Charles Dickens Museum was organized. For a long time only specialists and students of literary faculties knew about him. However, interest in the writer's work has recently begun to grow strongly, and on the eve of his 200th birthday, very large sums were invested in the renovation and restoration of the museum. The updated and restored museum opened just a month after the start of work - December 10, 2012.

The restorers have tried to recreate the true atmosphere of the Dickensian house. Here, all the furnishings and many things are authentic and once belonged to the writer. According to the museum staff, the specialists did everything to make the visitor feel that the writer was only away for a short while and will return soon.

They tried to recreate the Charles Dickens Museum as a typical English dwelling of a middle-class family of the 19th century, although Dickens himself was always afraid of poverty. The kitchen has been restored here with all the attributes, a bedroom with a luxurious bed and a canopy, a cozy living room, a dining room with plates on the table.

Portrait of young Charles

Portrait of Charles Dickens by Samuel Drummond These Victorian-style plates feature portraits of Dickens himself and his friends. On the second floor is his studio, where he created, his wardrobe, his desk and chair, shaving kit, some manuscripts and first editions of his books are carefully preserved. There are also paintings, portraits of the writer, personal items, letters.

"Shadow" Dickens on the wall of the hall, as it were, invites you to look at the office, dining room, bedrooms, living room, kitchen.

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Writer's office

Catherine Dickens room

Interior of Catherine Dickens' Room

Katherine and Charles

Bust of Katherine

Portrait of Katherine with sewing

Under the portrait in the window is the same sewing made by her hands... But the shot turned out not sharp... She was three years younger than him, pretty, with blue eyes and heavy eyelids, fresh, plump, kind and devoted. He loved and appreciated her family. Though Katherine didn't stir up the passion in him that Maria Bidnel did, she seemed to be the perfect match for him. Dickens intended to make himself known loudly. He knew that he would have to work long and hard, and he liked to do everything quickly. He wanted to have a wife and children. He had a passionate nature and, having chosen a life partner, he sincerely became attached to her. They became one. She was “his better half”, “wife”, “Mrs. D.” - in the early years of their marriage, he called Katherine only that and spoke of her with unbridled delight. He was definitely proud of her, as well as the fact that he managed to get such a worthy companion as his wife.

Salon-studio where Dickens read his works

The needs of Dickens family members exceeded his income. A disorderly, purely bohemian nature did not allow him to bring any order into his affairs. He not only overworked his rich and fruitful brain, forcing it to overwork creatively, but being an unusually brilliant reader, he tried to earn decent fees by lecturing and reading passages from his novels. The impression of this purely acting reading was always colossal. Apparently, Dickens was one of the greatest reading virtuosos. But on his trips he fell into the hands of some dubious entrepreneurs and, while earning, at the same time brought himself to exhaustion.

Second floor - studio and private office

On the second floor there is his studio where he worked, his wardrobe, his desk and chair, shaving kit, some manuscripts and first editions of his books are carefully preserved. There are also paintings, portraits of the writer, personal items, letters.

Victorian era painting

Dickens armchair

Famous portrait in a red chair

Dickens' personal desk and manuscript pages...

Dickens and his immortal heroes

The museum holds a portrait of the writer, known as "Dickens' Dream", painted by R.V. Bass (R.W. Buss), illustrator of Dickens' book The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. This unfinished portrait depicts the writer in his office, surrounded by the many characters he created.

Mary's young sister-in-law's bedroom

In this apartment, Dickens suffered the first serious grief. There, his wife's younger sister, seventeen-year-old Mary Gogard, died almost suddenly. It is difficult to imagine that the novelist, who had married for love only a year and a half earlier, felt a passion for a young girl, almost a child, who lived in his house, but it is certain that he was united with her by more than brotherly affection. Her death so struck him that he abandoned all his literary work and left London for several years. He kept the memory of Mary throughout his life. Her image stood before him when he created Nelly in the Antiquities Shop; in Italy he saw her in his dreams, in America he thought of her in the noise of Niagara. She seemed to him the ideal of feminine charm, innocent purity, a delicate, half-blown flower, mowed too early by the cold hand of death.

Bust and original documents

Charles' dress suit

Authentic lamp in Mary's room

canopy bed...

English translator...)))

The guide to the museum was given out for a while and only in English, so we are very grateful to Olga for her invaluable help...)))

Bureau for papers with documents...

Medical devices...

Dickens' favorite chair...

Exhibition room of quotes and sayings...

The Museum organized an exhibition "Dickens and London", dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great English writer. Under the roof and in the side rooms of the building there are interesting installations.

Bust of Father Dickens

Dickensian London

Portraits of Dickens children and their clothes

Catherine was a very persistent woman, she never complained to her husband, did not shift family concerns to him, but her postpartum depression and headaches irritated Charles more and more, who did not want to recognize the validity of his wife's suffering. Home idyll, born of his imagination, did not correspond to reality. The desire to become a respectable family man went against his nature. I had to suppress a lot in myself, which only exacerbated the feeling of dissatisfaction.

With children, Charles also showed the duality characteristic of his nature. He was gentle and helpful, entertained and encouraged, delved into all the problems, and then suddenly cooled off. Especially when they reached the age when his own serene childhood ended. He felt the constant need to take care, first of all, that the children would never experience the humiliations that fell to his lot. But at the same time, this concern was too burdensome for him and prevented him from continuing to be a passionate and tender father.
After 7 years of marriage, Dickens increasingly began to flirt with women. Katherine's first open rebellion about this struck him to the core. Having grown fat, with faded eyes, barely recovering from another birth, she sobbed muffledly and demanded that he immediately stop his visits to the “other woman”. The scandal erupted because of the friendship of Dickens in Genoa with the Englishwoman Augusta de la Rua.
A complete break with Catherine occurred after Charles began to show signs of attention to her younger sister Georgia.
The writer published in his weekly "Home Reading" a letter, called "angry". Until now, the public did not suspect anything about the events in the writer's personal life, now he told everything himself. The main theses of this message are as follows: Katherine herself is to blame for their break with his wife, it was she who turned out to be unsuitable for family life with him, for the role of wife and mother. Georgina is what kept him from breaking up. She also raised children, since Katherine, according to her husband, was a useless mother (“Daughters turned into stones in her presence”). Dickens did not lie - his feelings for women were always distinguished by a special either negative or positive intensity.
All their actions, which they committed from the moment he rewarded them with a negative "image", only confirmed in his mind that they were right. So it was with my mother, and now with Katherine. Much of the letter was dedicated to Georgina and her innocence. He also admitted to the existence of a woman, for whom he "experiences a strong feeling." With his public confession, which, after a long habit of keeping his spiritual secrets, became extreme in its form and content, he seemed to win another "battle with life." Won the right to break with the past. Almost all friends turned their backs on the writer, taking the side of Katherine. This he did not forgive them until the end of his life. At the same time, he composed another letter to refute the storm of gossip and rumors that had risen. But most newspapers and magazines refused to publish it.

Once, in my presence, one of the Chancellor's judges kindly explained to a society of about one and a half hundred people, whom no one suspected of dementia, that although prejudice against the Chancellor's Court is very widespread (here the judge, it seems, looked sideways in my direction), but this court in fact almost flawless. True, he admitted that the Chancery Court had some minor mistakes - one or two throughout its activities, but they were not as great as they say, and if they happened, it was only because of the "stinginess of society" : for this pernicious society, until very recently, resolutely refused to increase the number of judges in the Chancellor's Court, established - if I am not mistaken - by Richard the Second, and by the way, it does not matter which king.

These words seemed to me a joke, and had it not been so ponderous, I would have ventured to include it in this book and put it into the mouths of Speechful Kenge or Mr. Voles, since either one or the other probably invented it. They might even add to it a suitable quotation from Shakespeare's sonnet:

But it is useful for a stingy society to know what exactly happened and is still happening in the judicial world, therefore I declare that everything written on these pages about the Chancellor's Court is the true truth and does not sin against the truth. In presenting the Gridley case, I have only recounted, without changing anything in substance, the story of a true incident, published by an impartial man who, by the nature of his profession, had the opportunity to observe this monstrous abuse from the beginning to the end. A lawsuit is now pending before the court, which was begun almost twenty years ago; in which sometimes from thirty to forty lawyers spoke at the same time; which has already cost seventy thousand pounds in legal fees; which is a friendly suit, and which (I am assured) is no closer to an end now than it was on the day it began. There is also another famous litigation in the Chancellor's Court, still undecided, which began at the end of the last century and absorbed in the form of court fees not seventy thousand pounds, but more than twice as much. If other evidence were needed that litigations like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce exist, I could put them in abundance in these pages to the shame of ... stingy society.

There is another circumstance that I would like to briefly mention. Since the day Mr. Crook died, some people have denied that so-called spontaneous combustion is possible; after the death of Crook was described, my good friend, Mr. Lewis (who quickly became convinced that he was deeply mistaken in believing that specialists had already ceased to study this phenomenon), published several witty letters to me in which he argued that spontaneous combustion could not be Maybe. I should note that I am not misleading my readers either intentionally or through negligence and, before writing about spontaneous combustion, I tried to study this issue. About thirty cases of spontaneous combustion are known, and the most famous of them, which happened to the Countess Cornelia de Baidi Cesenate, was carefully studied and described by the Verona Prebendary Giuseppe Bianchini, a famous writer who published an article about this case in 1731 in Verona and later, in the second edition, in Rome. The circumstances of the death of the Countess do not give rise to any reasonable doubt and are very similar to the circumstances of the death of Mr. Crook. The second in the series of the most famous incidents of this kind may be considered the case that took place in Reims six years earlier and was described by Dr. Le Cays, one of the most famous surgeons in France. This time, a woman died whose husband, through a misunderstanding, was accused of her murder, but was acquitted after he filed a well-reasoned appeal to a higher authority, since it was irrefutably proven by witness testimony that the death followed from spontaneous combustion. I do not consider it necessary to add to these significant facts and those general references to the authority of specialists, which are given in chapter XXXIII, opinions and studies of famous medical professors, French, English and Scottish, published at a later time; I will only note that I will not refuse to acknowledge these facts until there is a thorough "spontaneous combustion" of the evidence on which judgments about incidents with people are based.

In Bleak House, I deliberately emphasized the romantic side of everyday life.

At the Chancery Court

London. The autumn court session - "Michael's Day Session" - has recently begun, and the Lord Chancellor is seated at Lincoln's Inn Hall. Unbearable November weather. The streets are as slushy as if the waters of a flood had just receded from the face of the earth, and a megalosaurus about forty feet long, plodding along like an elephantine lizard, would not have been surprised to appear on Holborn Hill. The smoke spreads as soon as it rises from the chimneys, it is like a small black drizzle, and it seems that the soot flakes are large snow flakes that have put on mourning for the dead sun. The dogs are so covered in mud that you can't even see them. The horses are hardly better - they are splashed up to the very eyecups. Pedestrians, completely infected with irritability, poked each other with umbrellas and lost their balance at intersections where, since dawn (if only it was dawn on this day), tens of thousands of other pedestrians have managed to stumble and slip, adding new contributions to the already accumulated - layer on layer - dirt, which in these places tenaciously sticks to the pavement, growing like compound interest.

Fog is everywhere. Fog on the upper Thames, where it floats over green islets and meadows; the mist on the lower Thames, where, having lost its purity, curls between the forest of masts and the riverside dregs of the big (and dirty) city. Fog in the Essex Marshes, fog in the Kentish Highlands. Fog creeps into the galleys of the coal-brigs; fog lies on the yards and floats through the rigging of the great ships; fog settles on the sides of barges and boats. The fog dazzles the eyes and clogs the throats of the elderly Greenwich pensioners wheezing by the fires in the house of care; the mist has penetrated the stem and head of the pipe that the angry skipper smokes after dinner, sitting in his cramped cabin; the fog cruelly pinches the fingers and toes of his little cabin boy, trembling on the deck. On the bridges, some people, leaning over the railing, look into the foggy underworld and, shrouded in mist themselves, feel like in a balloon hanging among the clouds.

In the streets, the light of gas lamps here and there glimmers a little through the fog, as sometimes the sun glimmers a little, at which the peasant and his worker look from the arable land, wet as a sponge. In almost all the shops, the gas was lit two hours earlier than usual, and it seems that he noticed this - it shines dimly, as if reluctantly.

A wet day is dampest, and thick fog is thickest, and muddy streets are dirtiest at the gates of Temple Bar, that leaden-roofed ancient outpost that admirably decorates the approaches, but blocks access to some leaden-fronted ancient corporation. And next door to Trumple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, in the heart of the mist, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his Supreme Court of Chancery.

Charles Dickens

COLD HOUSE

Foreword

The dyer cannot hide the craft,

So damn busy on me

An indelible seal lay down.

Oh, help me wash away my curse!

In Bleak House, I deliberately emphasized the romantic side of everyday life.

At the Chancery Court

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Chancery Court- in the era of Dickens, the highest, after the House of Lords, the judicial authority in England, the Supreme Court of Justice. The dual system of English justice - "justice by law" (based on customary law and judicial precedents) and "justice by equity" (based on the "orders" of the Lord Chancellor) was administered through two institutions of justice: the royal Courts of Common Law and the Court of Equity.

At the head of the Supreme Court of Justice - the Chancery Court - is the Lord Chancellor (he is also the Minister of Justice), who is not formally bound by parliamentary laws, customs or precedents and is obliged to be guided in the "orders" issued by him by the requirements of justice. Created in the feudal era, the Court of Chancery was intended to complement the English judicial system, to control decisions and correct the errors of the Common Law Courts. The competence of the Chancery Court included the consideration of appeals, contentious cases, consideration of requests addressed to the supreme authorities, the issuance of orders for the settlement of new legal relations and the transfer of cases to the Common Law Courts.

Judicial red tape, arbitrariness, abuse of chancellor judges, the complexity of the judicial procedure and the interpretation of laws, the intricacies of the relationship between the Courts of Common Law and the Court of Justice have led to the fact that the Court of Chancery over time has become one of the most reactionary and hated by the people state institutions.

Currently, the Chancellery is one of the divisions of the Supreme Court of Great Britain.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Landport, a suburb of the city of Portsmouth (Southern England). His father, an officer of the naval commissariat, was transferred shortly after the birth of the boy to the Chatham Docks, and from there to London.

Little Dickens got acquainted early with the works of Shakespeare, Defoe, Fielding, Smollet, Goldsmith. These books struck the imagination of Charles and forever sunk into his soul. The greatest English realists of the past prepared him for the perception of what reality revealed to him.

The Dickens family, which had modest means, was in increasing need. The writer's father was bogged down in debt and soon found himself in the debtor's prison of the Marshalsea. Having no money for an apartment, Charles's mother settled with his sister Fanny in prison, where the prisoner's family was usually allowed to stay, and the boy was sent to the wax factory. Dickens, who was then only eleven years old, began to earn his living.

Never in his life, even in its most cloudless periods, Dickens could not remember without a shudder the wax factory, the humiliation, hunger, loneliness of the days spent here. For a miserable wage barely sufficient for a lunch of bread and cheese, the little laborer, along with other children, had to spend long hours in a damp and gloomy basement, from the windows of which one could only see the gray waters of the Thames. In this factory, the walls of which were devoured by worms, and huge rats ran up the stairs, the future great writer of England worked from early morning until dusk.

On Sundays, the boy went to Marshalsea, where he stayed with his family until the evening. Soon he moved there, renting a room in one of the prison buildings. During his time in the Marshalsea, that prison for the poor and bankrupt, Dickens got to know the life and customs of its inhabitants intimately. Everything he saw here came to life with time on the pages of his novel Little Dorrit.

London of disadvantaged workers, outcasts, beggars and vagabonds was the school of life that Dickens went through. He forever remembered the emaciated faces of people on the streets of the city, pale, thin children, exhausted by the work of women. The writer experienced first hand how badly a poor man has in winter in torn clothes and thin shoes, what thoughts flash through his head when, on the way home, he stops in front of brightly lit shop windows and at the entrances of fashionable restaurants. He knew that from the fashionable quarters where the London aristocracy nestled comfortably, it was within easy reach to the dirty and dark alleys in which the poor huddled. The life of contemporary England to Dickens was revealed to him in all its ugliness, and the creative memory of the future realist preserved such images that over time excited the whole country.

The happy changes that took place in the life of the Dickens made it possible for Charles to resume his interrupted teaching. The writer's father unexpectedly received a small inheritance, paid off his debts and got out of prison with his family. Dickens entered the so-called Washington House Commercial Academy on Hamstedrod.

A passionate thirst for knowledge lived in the heart of a young man, and thanks to this he was able to overcome the unfavorable conditions of the then English school. He studied with enthusiasm, although the "academy" was not interested in the individual inclinations of children and forced them to learn books by heart. Mentors and their wards mutually hated each other, and discipline was maintained only through corporal punishment. Dickens' impressions from school were later reflected in his novels The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield.

However, Dickens did not have to stay long at the Commercial Academy. His father insisted that he leave school and become a clerk in one of the offices of the City. Before the young man opened a new and little known to him hitherto world of petty employees, entrepreneurs, sales agents and officials. The attentive attitude to a person, always characteristic of Dickens, to every detail of his life and character, helped the writer here, among the dusty office books, to find a lot of things that were worth remembering and which subsequently had to be told to people.

Dickens spent his free time from work in the library of the British Museum. He decided to become a journalist and took up shorthand with zeal. Soon, the young Dickens really got a job as a reporter in one of the small London newspapers. He quickly gained fame among journalists and was invited as a reporter to the Miror ov Parliament, and then to the Morning Chronicle.

However, the work of a reporter soon ceased to satisfy Dickens. He was attracted by creativity; he began to write stories, small humorous sketches, essays, the best of which he published in 1833 under the pseudonym Boza. In 1835, two series of his essays were published as a separate edition.

Already in the "Essays of Boz" it is not difficult to discern the handwriting of the great English realist. The plots of Boz's stories are unsophisticated; the reader is captivated by the veracity of stories about poor clerks, small businessmen striving to break into the people, old maids dreaming of getting married, about street comedians and tramps. Already in this work of the writer, his worldview was clearly revealed. Sympathy for man, pity for the poor and the destitute, which never left Dickens, make up the main intonation of his first book, in the "Essays of Boz" there has been an individual Dickensian style, you can see the variety of his stylistic devices in them. Humorous scenes, stories about funny and ridiculous eccentrics are interspersed with sad stories about the fate of the English poor. In the future, on the pages of Dickens's best novels, we meet heroes who are directly related to the characters in Boz's Sketches.

Boz's Essays were a success, but it was Dickens's novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club that brought Dickens real fame, the first editions of which appeared in 1837.

"Notes of the Pickwick Club" was commissioned to the writer as a series of essays accompanying the drawings of the then fashionable cartoonist D. Seymour. However, already in the first chapters of the book, the writer pushed the artist into the background. The brilliant text of Dickens became the basis of the book, the drawings of Seymour, and later Phiz (Brown), who later replaced him, were nothing more than illustrations for him.

The author's good-natured humor and contagious laughter captivated readers, and they laughed merrily with him at the amusing adventures of the Pickwickians, at the caricature of the British elections, at the intrigues of lawyers and the claims of secular gentlemen. It seems that everything that happens is unfolding in the atmosphere of the patriarchal and cozy Dingley Dell, and bourgeois self-interest and hypocrisy are embodied only by the swindlers Jingle and Job Trotter, who inevitably fail. The whole book breathes the optimism of a young Dickens. True, at times, gloomy shadows of people offended by life flicker on the pages of the novel, but they quickly disappear, leaving the reader in the company of mild-mannered eccentrics.

Dickens' second novel was Oliver Twist (1838). It was no longer about the adventures of merry travelers, but about "workhouses", a kind of correctional institutions for the poor, about charitable institutions, whose members think most of all about how to punish the poor for poverty, about shelters where orphans starve, about thieves' dens. And in this book there are pages worthy of the pen of a great humorist. But in general, the carefree intonations of the "Pickwick Club" are forever a thing of the past. Dickens will never again write a cloudless and cheerful novel. "Oliver Twist" opens a new stage in the writer's work - the stage of critical realism.

Life suggested to Dickens more and more new ideas. Not having time to finish work on Oliver Twist, he begins a new novel - Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and in 1839-1841 he publishes Antiquities Shop and Barnaby Reg.

Dickens' fame is growing. Nearly all of his books have been wildly successful. The remarkable English novelist was recognized not only in England, but also far beyond its borders.

Dickens the realist, a severe critic of the bourgeois order, was formed in the 30s of the 19th century, when important socio-political changes took place in his homeland, the insightful artist could not help but see how the crisis of the contemporary social system manifested itself in various spheres of life.

In England of this time, there was a distinct discrepancy between the economic and political organization of society. By the 30s of the 19th century, the so-called “industrial revolution” ended in the country, and the British kingdom turned into a major industrial power. Two new historical forces arose in the public arena - the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But the political structure of the country remained the same as it was more than a hundred years ago. The new industrial centers, numbering tens of thousands of people, had no representation in parliament. The deputies were still elected from some provincial town, which was completely dependent on the neighboring landowner. Parliament, to which the reactionary conservative circles dictated their will, finally ceased to be a representative institution.

The struggle for parliamentary reform that unfolded in the country turned into a broad social movement. Under the pressure of the masses in 1832, the reform was carried out. But only the industrial bourgeoisie, which abandoned broad democratic reforms, took advantage of the fruits of victory. It was during this period that the complete opposition of the interests of the bourgeoisie and the people was determined. The political struggle in England entered a new stage. Chartism arose in the country - the first organized mass revolutionary movement of the working class.

The people lost respect for the old fetishes. The growth of economic and social contradictions and the Chartist movement caused by them caused an upsurge in public life in the country, which in turn affected the strengthening of the critical trend in English literature. The imminent problems of social reorganization agitated the minds of realist writers who thoughtfully studied reality. And the English critical realists lived up to the expectations of their contemporaries. They, each to the extent of their perspicacity, answered the questions posed by life, expressed the innermost thoughts of many millions of Englishmen.

The most talented and courageous of the representatives of the “brilliant school of English novelists,” as Marx called them (this included C. Dickens, W. Thackeray, E. Gaskell, S. Bronte), was Charles Dickens. An outstanding artist who tirelessly drew his material from life, he was able to depict human character with great truthfulness. His characters are endowed with genuine social typicality. From the vague opposition of "poor" and "rich", characteristic of most of his contemporary writers, Dickens turned to the question of the actual social contradictions of the era, speaking in his best novels about the contradiction between labor and capital, between the worker and the capitalist-entrepreneur.

With a deeply correct assessment of many phenomena of life, the English critical realists, in fact, did not put forward any positive social program. By rejecting the path of popular uprising, they did not see a real opportunity to resolve the conflict between poverty and wealth. The illusions inherent in the whole of English critical realism were also characteristic of Dickens. He also sometimes inclined to think that evil people, who are many in all strata of society, are to blame for the existing injustice, and he hoped, by softening the hearts of those in power, to help the poor. A similar conciliatory moralistic tendency is present to varying degrees in all of Dickens's works, but it was especially pronounced in his Christmas Tales (1843-1848).

However, "Christmas Tales" does not define all of his work. The forties were the heyday of English critical realism, and for Dickens they marked the period that prepared for the appearance of his most significant novels.

A significant role in the formation of Dickens' views was played by the writer's trip to America, undertaken by him in 1842. If at home Dickens, like most representatives of the English bourgeois intelligentsia, could have the illusion that the vices of contemporary social life were due primarily to the dominance of the aristocracy, then in America the writer saw the bourgeois legal order in their "pure form".

American impressions, which served as material for "American Notes" (1842) and the novel "The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843-1844), helped the writer to look into the very depths of the bourgeois world, to notice in his homeland such phenomena that are still eluded his attention.

There comes a period of greatest ideological and creative maturity of Dickens. In 1848 - during the years of a new upsurge of Chartism and the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Europe - Dickens' wonderful novel Dombey and Son was published, highly appreciated by V. G. Belinsky, in this book the realist artist moves from criticizing certain aspects of contemporary reality to a direct denunciation of the entire bourgeois social system.

Trading house "Dombey and son" - a small cell of a large whole. The contempt for man and the soulless, mercenary calculation of Mr. Dombey personify, according to the artist, the main vices of the bourgeois world. The novel was conceived by Dickens as the story of the fall of Dombey: life ruthlessly avenges trampled humanity, and the victory goes to the inhabitants of the Wooden Midshipman shop, who follow only the dictates of a good heart in their actions.

"Dombey and Son" opens the period of the greatest ideological and creative maturity of the great realist. One of the last works of this period was the novel Bleak House, published in 1853.

In Bleak House, Charles Dickens depicted both the public and private life of the English bourgeoisie with the ruthlessness of a satirist. The writer sees his homeland as a gloomy, “cold house”, where the prevailing social laws oppress and cripple the souls of people, and he looks into the darkest corners of this big house.

All kinds of weather happen in London. But in "Bleak House" Dickens most of all paints us a picture of a foggy, autumnally gloomy London. The fog that shrouds Lincoln Fields, where the Jarndyces v. Jarndyce judges have been sitting in the Lord Chancellor's courthouse for decades, is especially rare. All their efforts are aimed at confusing an already complicated case in which some relatives dispute the rights of others to an inheritance that has long ceased to exist.

No matter how different in their position and their individual traits, judges and lawyers, each located on the appropriate rung of the hierarchical ladder of the British court, all of them are united by an avid desire to enslave the client, take possession of his money and secrets. Such is Mr. Tulkinghorn, a respectable gentleman whose soul is like a safe that holds the terrible secrets of the best families of London. Such is the soft-spoken Mr. Kenge, who enchants his wards like a rabbit boa. Even young Guppy, who occupies one of the last places in the corporation of pulls and hook-makers, no matter what he has to face in life, operates primarily with the knowledge acquired in the office of Kenge and Carboy.

But perhaps the most quintessential of all the lawyers depicted in Bleak House is Mr. Voles. A lean gentleman with a pimply sallow face, always in black and always correct, he will be remembered by the reader for a long time. Voles always talks about his old father and three orphan daughters, to whom he allegedly seeks to leave only a good NAME as a legacy. In reality, he makes a good capital for them, robbing gullible customers. Ruthless in his greed, the hypocrite Voles is a typical product of the puritanical morality of the bourgeois, and WE will easily find many of his ancestors among the satirical images of Fielding and Smollet.

Back in The Pickwick Club, Dickens told his readers an amusing story about how Mr. Pickwick was tricked by lawyers when he was falsely accused of breaking his promise to marry his landlady, the widow Bardle. We cannot help but laugh at the case of Bardle v. Pickwick, although we feel sorry for the innocently injured hero. But the Jarndyces v. Jarndyses case is portrayed by the author in such gloomy tones that the fleeting smile caused by individual comical details of the story immediately disappears from the reader's face. In Bleak House, Dickens tells the story of several generations of people embroiled in senseless litigation and given into the hands of greedy and soulless lawyers. The artist achieves great persuasiveness in his narration - he shows the machine of English legal proceedings in action.

Many people, old and very young, completely broke and still rich, spend their lives in courtrooms. Here is little old Miss Flyte. Who every day comes to the Supreme Court with her tattered reticule, stuffed with half-decayed documents that have long since lost all value. Even in her youth, she was entangled in some kind of lawsuit, and all her life she did nothing but go to court. The whole world for Miss Flyte is limited to Lincoln Fields, where the Supreme Court is located. And the highest human wisdom is embodied in its head - the Lord Chancellor. But in moments the mind returns to the old woman, and she sadly tells how one by one the birds die in her miserable closet, which she called Joy, Hope, Youth, Happiness.

Mr. Gridley also comes to court, called here "the man from Shropshire", a poor man, whose strength and health were also swallowed up by judicial red tape. But if Miss Flyte reconciled herself to her fate, then indignation boils in Gridley's soul. He sees his mission in denouncing judges and lawyers. But even Gridley cannot change the course of events. Tormented by life, tired and broken, he dies like a beggar in George's gallery.

Almost all litigants in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce are destined for either Flyte or Gridley. On the pages of the novel, we see the life of a young man named Richard Carston. A distant relative of the Jarndis. A handsome, cheerful young man, tenderly in love with his cousin Ada and dreaming of happiness with her. He gradually begins to be imbued with a general interest in the process. Already in the first chapters of the novel. When the crazy old woman Flyte appears for the first time before the happy Ada and Richard, Dickens, as it were, reveals the symbol of their future. At the end of the book, embittered, tormented by consumption, Richard, who has spent all his and Ada's funds in this lawsuit, reminds us of Gridley.

Many people became victims of the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce case, and in the end it turned out that there was no case at all. Because the money bequeathed by one of the Jarndis went entirely to pay legal fees. Fiction, veiled by the ostentatious splendor of English legislation, people took for reality. Irresistible faith in the power of laws - such is one of the conventions of English bourgeois society, depicted by Dickens.

Dickens is especially outraged by the English aristocracy with its slavish commitment to empty fetishes and swaggering disregard for the environment. In Bleak House, this line of social criticism was embodied in the history of the House of Dedlocks.

At Chesney Wold, the Dedlock family home. As majestic as they are, the “flower” of London society is going to, and Dickens paints it with all the power of his satirical talent. These are arrogant degenerates, parasites bored from idleness, greedy for other people's misfortunes. Of all the congregation of slanderous ladies and gentlemen that make up the background of Chesney-Wold, Volumnia Dedlock emerges, in which all the vices of high society are concentrated. This faded beauty from the younger branch of the Dedlocks divides her life between London and the fashionable resort of Bath, between the pursuit of suitors and the pursuit of inheritance. She is envious and heartless, knows neither sincere sympathy nor compassion.

Dedlocks are the personification of the British nobility. They preserve their family traditions and hereditary prejudices with equal pride. They are firmly convinced that all the best in the world should belong to them and created for the sole purpose of serving their greatness. Having inherited their rights and privileges from their ancestors, they feel like owners not only in relation to things, but also to people. The very name Dedlok can be translated into Russian as "vicious circle", "dead end". And indeed. Deadlocks have long been frozen in one state. Life passes them by; they feel THAT events are developing, that new people have appeared in England - "iron masters" who are ready to claim their rights. Deadlocks are mortally afraid of everything new and therefore they close themselves even more into their narrow world, not allowing anyone from the outside and thereby hoping to protect their parks from the smoke of factories and plants.

But all the desires of the Deadlocks are powerless before the logic of history. And although Dickens, it would seem, exposes the Dedlocks only in the sphere of their private life, the theme of the social retribution of the British aristocracy is clearly heard in the book.

To show the illegitimacy of the claims of the English nobility, Dickens chose the most ordinary detective story. The beautiful and majestic wife of Sir Leicester, called to adorn the Dedlock family, turns out to be in the past the mistress of an unknown army captain and the mother of an illegitimate child.

Lady Dedlock's past stains her husband's family, and the Dedlocks are defended by legality itself in the person of lawyer Tulkinghorn and detective Bucket. They are preparing punishment for Lady Dedlock, not at the request of Sir Leicester, but because the Dedlock family is related to all these Doodles. Kudles, Noodles - the masters of life, whose political reputation in recent years has been maintained with great and great difficulty.

However, the end of Lord and Lady Dedlock received a deeply humanistic solution under the pen of the great artist. In their grief, each of them overcame the conventions of secular life that fettered him, and the blow that crushed the dignity of the titled spouses returned them to the people. Only the debunked Dedlocks, who lost everything in the eyes of society, spoke the language of genuine human feelings, touching the reader to the depths of his soul.

The whole system of social relations, shown by the realist writer in "Bleak House", is designed to protect the inviolability of the bourgeois legal order. This end is also served by British legislation and the conventions of the world, with the help of which a handful of the elect fence themselves off from the huge mass of their compatriots, brought up from childhood in respect for such principles, people are so imbued with them that they often free themselves from them only at the cost of their own lives.

The inhabitants of the "cold house" are obsessed with the thirst for money. Because of the money, members of the Jarndis family have been hating each other for generations and dragging them through the courts. Brother stands up to brother because of a dubious inheritance, the owner of which, perhaps, did not bequeath him even a silver spoon.

For the sake of wealth and position in society, the future Lady Dedlock renounces her loved one, the joys of motherhood and becomes the wife of an old baronet. She, like Edith Dombey, the heroine of the novel Dombey and Son, exchanged her freedom for the seeming well-being of a rich house, but found only misfortune and shame there.

Greedy for profit, lawyers deceive their clients day and night, moneylenders and detectives come up with cunning plans. Money has penetrated into all corners of the public and private life of modern Dickens England. And the whole country appears to him as one big family, litigating because of a huge inheritance.

In this society, poisoned by self-interest, two types of people easily form. Such are Smallweed and Skimpole. Smallweed embodies the typical characteristics of those who actively use the right to rob and deceive. Dickens deliberately exaggerates, trying to show how disgusting the appearance of a person for whom acquisitiveness becomes the goal and meaning of life. This little weak old man is endowed with tremendous spiritual energy, aimed solely at plotting cruel intrigues against his neighbors. He carefully monitors everything that happens around, lying in wait for prey. In the image of Smallweed, a modern bourgeois individual was embodied for Dickens, inspired only by a thirst for enrichment, which he vainly masks with hypocritical moral maxims.

The opposite of Smallweed. It would seem, Mr. Skimpole imagines, that he kind of lived in the house of John Jarndyce, a cheerful, handsome-looking gentleman who wants to live for his own pleasure. Skimpole is not a hoarder; he only enjoys the fruits of the dishonorable machinations of the Smallweeds.

The same social system, based on deceit and oppression, gave rise to both Smallluids and Skimpoles. Each of them complements the other. The only difference between them is that the first expresses the position of people who actively use the existing norms of social life, while the second uses them passively. Smallweed hates the poor: each of them, in his opinion, is ready to encroach on his money-box. Skimpol is deeply indifferent to them and only does not want the ragamuffins to come across his eyes. This selfish epicurean, who puts his own comfort above all else, like the representatives of the British aristocracy, does not know the value of money and despises all activity. It is no coincidence that he evokes such sympathy for Sir Leicester Dedlock, who feels a kindred spirit in him.

Smallweed and Skimpole are a symbolic generalization of those. Among whom in bourgeois England are material goods distributed.

To Dedlock and Skimpole, who mercilessly plunder the fruits of the people's labor, Dickens tried to oppose the young enterprising entrepreneur Rouncewell, whose figure is noticeably idealized, to Smallweed's hoarding. The writer saw only that in which Rouncewell differed from Dedlock and Skimpole, but did not notice how he resembled Smallweed. Naturally, the realist Dickens could not succeed in such an image. Less than a year later, Rouncewell was replaced by the factory owner Bounderbrby from Hard Times (1854), which embodied all the callousness and cruelty of his class.

Having correctly defined the contradiction between the aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie, Dickens also understood the main social conflict of the era - the conflict between the ruling classes as a whole and the people. The pages of his novels, which tell about the plight of ordinary workers, speak best of all for the sake of which an honest and insightful artist wrote his books.

The poor are deprived of their rights, they are also deprived of illusions about the prosperity of their homeland. The inhabitants of dilapidated dwellings, and more often of London pavements and parks, are well aware of how difficult it is to live in a "cold house".

Each of the poor people portrayed by Dickens in the novel has its own personality. Such is Goose, the little maid in Mr. Snagsby's house, a lonely orphan, sickly and downtrodden. All of her is an embodied fear of life, of people. The expression of fear is forever frozen on her face, and everything that happens in Cooks Court lane fills the girl's heart with quivering despair.

Joe from Lonesome Tom often comes here in Cooks Court Lane. No one can really tell where Joe lives and how he hasn't starved to death yet. The boy has no relatives or relatives; he sweeps pavements, performs small errands, wanders the streets, until somewhere he stumbles upon a policeman who chases him from everywhere: "Come in, do not delay! .." that Joe hears from people is the only thing he knows. Homeless tramp Joe is the embodiment of painful ignorance. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything ...” - Joe answers all questions, and how much human resentment sounds in these words! Feeling Joe wanders through life, vaguely guessing that some kind of injustice is happening in the world around him. He would like to know why he exists in the world, why other people live, that Joe is what he is, my lords and eminences, "reverend and unlike ministers of all cults" are to blame. It is them that the realist Dickens blames for the life and death of Joe.

Such is the story of one of the many inhabitants of the Lonely Tom quarter. Like a London tramp, Lonely Tom, forgotten by everyone, is lost somewhere between the fashionable houses of the rich, and none of these well-fed people want to know where he is, what he is like. Lonely Tom becomes in the novel a symbol of the hard fate of working London.

Most of the inhabitants of Lonely Tom meekly accept their suffering. Only among the brick-workers who huddle in miserable shacks near London, a half-starved existence gives rise to protest. And although Dickens is saddened by the bitterness of the bricklayers, he still thinks about their history.

Servants and maids, poor and beggars, eccentric renegades, somehow earning their own bread, crowd the pages of Bleak House. They are the good geniuses of those events that are unraveled by the clever hand of the artist, who knew well that even small people are involved in big things. Each of these humble workers has a role to play in the events described, and it's hard to imagine what the denouement of the novel would have been without the old campaigner George Rouncewell or the homeless Joe.

Dickens tells about all these glorious and honest people in one of his best works. He takes his readers to the stinking slums of Lonely Tom, to the rickety huts of bricklayers, where wind and cold easily penetrate, to attics where hungry children sit locked up until the evening. The story of how people who are naturally kinder and more sympathetic than many rich people suffer from hunger and die in poverty sounds like a cruel denunciation of the ruling system in the mouth of an English realist.

Dickens was never able to free himself from his liberal illusions. He believed that the position of the British working people would improve radically if the ruling classes were imbued with sympathy for them and concern for them. However, the writer's observations conflicted with his utopian dreams. So on the pages of his novels, starting with The Pickwick Club, grotesque images of all kinds of gentlemen from charitable societies appeared, whose activities serve anything - personal enrichment, ambitious plans, but not help for the destitute.

But, perhaps, the philanthropists from "Bleak House" - Jellyby, Chadband and others - succeeded the most. Mrs. Jellyby is one of those who have devoted her life to charity, from morning till night she is absorbed in the cares associated with missionary activities in Africa, and in the meantime her own family is in decline. Mrs. Jellyby's daughter, Caddy, runs away from home, the rest of the children, ragged and hungry, undergo all sorts of misfortunes. The husband is ruined; the servant plunders the surviving good. All Jellybees, young and old, are in a miserable state, and the hostess sits in her office over a mountain of correspondence, and her eyes are fixed on Africa, where the “natives” she takes care of live in the village of Boriobulagha. Caring for one's neighbor begins to look like selfishness, and Mrs. Jellyby ends up not much different from old Mr. Turveydrop, preoccupied only with her own person.

Mrs. Jellyby's "telescopic philanthropy" is a symbol of English philanthropy. When homeless children die nearby, in a neighboring street, the English bourgeois send pamphlets to save the lives of Boriobul Negroes, who are taken care of only because they may not exist at all in the world.

All the Bleak House benefactors, including Pardigle, Quayle, and Gasher, are distinguished by their unusually unsympathetic appearance and unpleasant manners, talk a lot about loving the poor, but have not yet done a single good deed. These are selfish people, often people with a very dubious reputation, who, although they rant about mercy, are only concerned about their own good. Mr. Gasher makes a solemn speech to the pupils of the school for orphans, urging them to contribute their pence and halfpence for a gift to Mr. Quayle, and he himself has already managed to receive an offering at the request of Mr. Quayle. Mrs. Pardigle works exactly the same way. An expression of rage appears on the faces of her five sons when this frightening-looking woman loudly announces how much each of her babies donated to one or another charitable cause.

Good deeds should be instructed by the preacher Chadband, but his very name passed from the Dickens novel into the general English dictionary in the meaning of "unctuous hypocrite".

The figure of Chadband embodies the hypocrisy of English charity. Chadband understood his mission well - to protect the well-fed from the hungry. Like every preacher, he is preoccupied with the less poor harassing the rich with complaints and requests, and to this end he intimidates them with his sermons. The image of Chadband is revealed already in his first meeting with Joe. Sitting in front of a hungry boy and devouring one tart after another, he utters his endless speeches about human dignity and love for one's neighbor, and then drives the ragamuffin away, ordering him to come again for edifying conversation.

Dickens understood that the English poor would not get help from people like Quayle, Gasher and Chadband, although they needed it more and more. But Dickens was able to oppose the sanctimonious official charity only with the private philanthropy of the good rich.

The favorite characters of the author of "Bleak House" - John Jarndis and Esther Summerson - are driven only by the desire to help the unfortunate. They save little Charlie, her brother and sister from need, help Joe, the bricklayers, Flight, Gridley, George Rouncewell and his devoted Phil. But how little does this mean in the face of the enormous disasters that are fraught with the "cold house" - the birthplace of Dickens! How many needy can the good-natured Mr. Snagsby distribute his half-crowns? Will the young physician Alley Woodcourt visit all the sick and dying in the London slums? Hester takes little Charlie to her, but she is already powerless to help Joe. Jarndis's money is of little use either. Instead of helping the underprivileged, he finances Jellybee's senseless activities and keeps the parasite Skimpole. True, sometimes doubts creep into his soul. At such moments, Jarndis has a habit of complaining about the "east wind", which, no matter how warm the "cold house", penetrates its many cracks and carries away all the heat.

The originality of Dickens's writing style appears with great distinctness in his novel Bleak House. The writer went through life, carefully looking at everything, not missing a single expressive detail of human behavior, not a single distinctive feature of the surrounding world. Things and phenomena take on an independent life in him. They know the secret of each of the heroes and predict his fate. The trees in Chesney Wold whisper ominously about Honoria Dedlock's past and future. The Roman soldier depicted on the ceiling in Mr. Tulkinghorn's room has long pointed to the floor, the very spot where the body of the murdered lawyer was finally found. The gaps in the shutters of Nemo's wretched scribe's closet resemble someone's eyes, which look at everything that happens in Cooks Court Lane, now with a curiously fixed, now ominously mysterious look.

The creative concept of Dickens is revealed not only through the thoughts and actions of the characters, but also through the entire figurative structure of the novel. In the realistic symbolism of Dickens, the whole complex interweaving of human destinies, the internal development of the plot is recreated. The writer succeeds in this because the symbol is not introduced by him into the novel, but grows out of life as the most convex expression of its tendencies and laws. Not concerned with petty credibility

And where Dickens deviates from the truth of life, he is also weaker as an artist. Two characters fall out of the figurative system of the novel, and how the characters are inferior to its other characters. This is John Jarndis and Esther Summerson. Jarndis is perceived by the reader in only one capacity - a kind, slightly grumpy guardian, who, as it were, is called upon to patronize all of humanity. Esther Summerson, on behalf of whom the narration is conducted in separate chapters, is endowed with nobility and prudence, but sometimes falls into "humiliation more than pride", which does not fit with her general appearance. Jarndis and Esther are deprived of great life credibility, since the writer made them bearers of his doomed tendency to make everyone happy in a society built on the principle that the happiness of some is bought at the price of the misfortune of others.

Bleak House, like almost all Dickens novels, has a happy ending. The Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce trial is over. Esther married her beloved Allen Woodcourt. George Rouncewell returned to his mother and brother. Peace reigned in the house of Snagsby; the Begnet family found a well-deserved rest. And yet, the gloomy tone in which the whole novel is written does not soften at the end of the book. After the successful completion of the events told by the author of Bleak House, only a few of his heroes survived, and if happiness fell to their lot, then it is cruelly overshadowed by memories of past losses.

Already in "Bleak House" the pessimism that permeated the last six novels of Dickens had an effect. The feeling of powerlessness in the face of complex social conflicts, the feeling of the worthlessness of the reforms he proposed were a source of deep sadness for the writer. He knew his contemporary society too well not to see how natural poverty, oppression, and the loss of human values are in it.

Dickens' novels are strong in their great life truth. They truly reflect his era, the hopes and sorrows, aspirations and sufferings of many thousands of the writer's contemporaries, who, although they were the creators of all the blessings in the country, were deprived of elementary human rights. One of the first in his homeland to raise his voice in defense of a simple worker was the great English realist Charles Dickens, whose works became part of the classical heritage of the English people.

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