False, fragmented and unfair, Dickens's 19th-century London offers a grimly prophetic vision of the world today. Terry Eagleton on why Bleak House remains one of our most urgently contemporary novels
Some novels, like some alcoholic drinks, improve with age. A century or so after they first appear, they may seem more urgently contemporary than they were on the day of their publication. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, published in the mid-18th century, has a claim to being the greatest of English novels - not least if you think size matters, as it is certainly the longest. But the Victorians found it prudish and preachy, and only with the advent of modern feminism did this astonishing portrait of a cruelly exploited woman come triumphantly into its own. The paranoid fictions of Franz Kafka only really came alive once we had witnessed the rise of totalitarian states. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent includes the first suicide bomber in English literature, which makes it more relevant now than it was when it first appeared in 1907.
The same might be said of one of the most magnificent of all English novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House. At first glance, this claim might be doubted. The book opens with one of the great Victorian literary set pieces, a vision of London shrouded from end to end in fog; and pea-soupers, along with Peelers, are features of 19th-century London which have passed away. This fog, however, is more symbolic than real. It is a dank, clammy, putrid, fetid ooze that seeps into every crevice of Victorian society, from the East End slums to the Lord Chancellor's chambers. Later in the book, it will merge into the foul infection which creeps from the human cesspit of Tom-all-Alone's to contaminate the fashionable suburbs.
This is a clairvoyantly ecological vision. Dickens sees his society as rotting, unravelling, so freighted with meaningless matter that it is sinking back gradually into some primeval slime. In Our Mutual Friend, London is one huge dust heap, and "dust" is a Dickensian euphemism. The whole place is awash with garbage, and human beings are becoming hard to distinguish from bits of rag and bone. The sinister Krook of Bleak House dies by spontaneously combusting, reduced to a few spots of grease, as though this whole top-heavy system is in danger of imploding.
What also spontaneously combusts in the book is its central plot: the Kafkaesque legal case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, which has dragged on for so long that there is nobody still around who understands what it is about. The lawsuit finally eats up its own expenses and collapses. It is one of Dickens's many images of a social order which is out of control - one that works by its own impenetrable logic, callously indifferent to the human lives it is supposed to serve.
The fog is symbolic of this social opaqueness. Men and women in this world are caught up together in the same sombre narrative, their lives subtly intermeshed. In Bleak House, Jo the illiterate crossing-sweeper, the decaying aristocracy of Lord and Lady Dedlock, and the saintly middle-class narrator Esther Summerson are all secretly interconnected without being aware of it. But this is a plot that no one of them is able to fathom. The unlettered Jo and Krook quite literally cannot "read" the world around them. Only the novelist himself can bring these hidden relations to light, laying bare the logic of a world that no one any longer can decipher as a whole.
This, too, has a prophetic feel to it. It is, so to speak, Dickens's version of globalisation. The more unified the world is, the more fragmented it feels. In Bleak House, as in the global banking system, everything connects with everything else; but like the fog, the contagious fever and the lawsuit, these are negative images of human solidarity. It is as though any more positive version of human relations is now impossible to represent. Characters in Bleak House live in their own secluded, sealed-off worlds: the crazed Miss Flite, the washed-up Dedlocks, the destitute Jo, the paranoiacally suspicious Krook, the scatologically named Mr Turveydrop. The system that brings them together also forces them apart. For these figures, there is no such thing as society - and this, ironically, at exactly the point when society feels more "total" than ever before.
Social life, as usual with Dickens, is just a bewildering assortment of eccentrics, grotesques, amiable idiots and moral monstrosities. They have no language in common, as each sports his or her unique mode of speech like an eye-catching disability. The only thing they share, ironically, is solitude. Jo is an orphan, like so many Dickensian children; but being orphaned is now a collective condition, as society disowns responsibility for its citizens.
What governs this world, as in Little Dorrit or Great Expectations, is money. But money is no longer just in the miserliness of a Fagin: it is now a system that imprisons and denatures even those supposed to be in command of it. The staggeringly rich financier in Little Dorrit, Merdle (another suggestively excremental name), is a mouse of a man terrified of his own butler and driven finally to suicide. The government officials who supposedly run the state bureaucracy advise you confidentially to steer well clear of it. Crime, poverty and deepening inequality are now apparently "Nobody's Fault" - one of Dickens's original titles for Bleak House.
Dickens no longer trusts that all this could be set to rights, as it might have been in his earlier fiction, by some bumbling paternalist with a twinkle in his eye and a purse in his fist. Nor can he turn to the family as a refuge from a heartless society. The families of Bleak House are more a microcosm of society than an alternative to it. They tend to be twisted patriarchal set-ups, domestic versions of the oppressive state. Dickens's fiction is full of failed fathers and false paternalists, prematurely aged children and waifs of indeterminate age. The whole socio-sexual network is somehow diseased. In Great Expectations, the hero's mother is actually his sister, while his brother-in-law plays the role of his father. Harold Skimpole, the bohemian artist of Bleak House, has hordes of children and little to feed them on; but whereas the young Dickens would have sneakingly admired this extravagant irresponsibility, Skimpole is unmasked as a squalid egotist.
Are there no points of light in this darkening vision? There are a few, but they are hardly adequate. Dickens was close to some of the utilitarian reformists, sharing something of their Blairite, briskly modernising spirit. The positive characters in Bleak House are men with practical skills who get something done, characters such as Woodcourt (a physician), Bucket (a detective) and Rouncewell (an inventor). They are the hard-headed types who will dispel the fog, uncover concealed connections and patch up a social order bound together by little more than the rotting parchment of its bureaucracy.
Yet if Bleak House urges this solution, it also protests against it. Its imaginative insight is at odds with its politics. It would take a good deal more than improved medical care and sanitation to repair the false, dehumanised society it portrays. Bleak House, like quite a lot of novels, is a good deal more radical than its author. Its creative power is so deep that it puts into question its own reformist solutions. Nobody ever accused our own Blairites of doing that.
Terry Eagleton is the author of a new preface to Bleak House for the relaunched Penguin Classics series (£4.99)
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