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Properties tied up 'in Chancery' were not financially accessible to possible beneficiaries. The court was presided over by the Lord Chancellor, disputants in Chancery cases used solicitors to state their case to hired barristers who presented them in court (Wikipedia). In Bleak House Richard Carstone hires Vholes as his solicitor in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce Chancery case. Jo the crossing sweeper inhabits this slum created because the property is tied up in a Cour t of Chancer y suit. Gil es, Dr ur y Lane, and Bloomsbury have been suggested as the original.
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In his rag and bottle shop, he hoards the detritus of legal London that surrounds him, and his apartments house the victims of Chancery, little Miss Flite and the dying law writer Nemo. Mrs. Jellyby’s house is extremely chaotic and filled with dirty and neglected children. Mrs. Jellyby is a philanthropist and is only interested in her charity work in Africa. Esther befriends Mrs. Jellyby’s eldest daughter, Caddy, and Esther, Richard, Caddy, and Ada all go out for a walk the next morning. They end up near the court and meet Miss Flite, who invites them home to see her lodgings. Miss Flite lives above a rag and bone shop owned by a man named Krook, whose shop is a jumble of old law papers which Krook himself cannot read, as he is illiterate.
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Formerartilleryman, bassoon player, and proprietor of a small musical instrument shop at Elephant and Castle. An army friend of George Rouncewell, he acts as guarantor of George’s loan from Grandfather Smallweed. “An ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows, and whiskers like the fibres of a cocoa-nut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed, there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human orchestra” (27).
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Esther and Jarndyce then decide to set their wedding date for the following month. Bucket reports that a Jarndyce will has been found that is more recent than those involved in the lawsuit. Later Jarndyce gives Woodcourt a house to be called Bleak House and gives Esther his blessing to marry Woodcourt instead of him. The new will finally ends the case in Richard’s favour, but all the money in the estate has already been eaten up in legal costs. Although Richard dies that day, the remaining major characters enjoy happier fates.. All he said was so free from effort and spontaneous, and was said with such captivating gaiety, that it was fascinating to hear him talk” (6).
He hides his inner life from others, a secrecy not probed in Esther’s reticent narrative. Finally, in a novel that attacks false philanthropy, Jarndyce also seems reticent to carry out wholeheartedly his role as a representative of positive philanthropy. Mrs. Snagsby’s maid, “a lean young woman from a workhouse by some supposed to have been christened Augusta) . Really aged three or four and twenty, but looking around ten years older” (10). Esther Summerson’s childhood nurse, then known as Mrs. Rachael, “a stern, severe-looking, silent woman” (19).
(37) Esther asks Skimpole to discourage Richard’s obsession with the Jarndyce case, his distrust of Mr. Jarndyce, and his reliance on his new attorney Vholes. Skimpole says he is incapable of such “responsibility.” (38) Esther asks Guppy to abandon his pursuit of her personal history. Guppy, disconcerted by her changed appearance, agrees to do so, and makes her swear that she turned down his original proposal and that she understands that it cannot be renewed. (32) Guppy and Jobling wait in Nemo’s old rooms for an appointment with Krook at midnight, when he will turn over Nemo’s letters to them.
She is placed in a difficult position, however, for the openness and self-revelation called for in a narrator goes against the grain of her natural self-denigrating reticence. David Copperfield, as a man, may be expected to write his way to becoming the hero of his own story; Victorian women were expected to be far less assertive. Esther’s protestations that she is not clever and her embarrassment at writing about herself emerge from her attempt to reconcile the conflict between her role as narrator and the expectations placed on Victorian women. Though some commentators find evidence of Dickens’s language and inventiveness in her account, her style is still much plainer than the verbal pyrotechnics employed in the third-person narration.
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Like Oliver Twist, she bears a name that does not indicate her parentage, and her godmother oppresses her psychologically much as Oliver is oppressed by parish authorities. Like David Copperfield, Esther has a host of nicknames, indicative of her uncertainty about her identity and her willingness to accept the identities others give her. Her situation as a woman exaggerates the identity crisis faced by these Dickensian orphans, for the opportunities available to her are fewer than those available to David or Pip. Yet for all her reticence, Esther is not totally passive. She does, for example, resist Mr. Guppy’s attempts to claim her and her story.
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There is ample textual support for this despairing conclusion. In sharp contrast to the poverty and decay in the urban slums is Chesney Wold, the opulent country estate of Sir Leicester Dedlock, but it too has been wasted by the flood that has fogged in London. The floodgates have been opened, Sir Leicester repeatedly complains, and the waters are out in Lincolnshire. Lady Dedlock, “bored to death,” acts out the devastation that has been wrought on the landed aristocracy, and the legend of the Ghost’s Walk foretells the judgment that will fall upon the house. Esther has much in common with Dickens’s other “orphan” heroes.
There they consult with Mr. Tulkinghorn, the family lawyer. When he shows them some inconsequential documents pertaining to the Jarndyce case, she asks who copied them, faints, and is taken to her room. Meanwhile, Mr. Tulkinghorn goes to Krook’s shop and asks for the writer named Nemo. Krook directs him to Nemo’s room, but when Mr. Tulkinghorn gets there, he discovers that the writer has died of an opium overdose.
Although Dickens cited cases of spontaneous combustion in his preface to the novel, his intent was clearly symbolic. He used the episode as a way of suggesting the fate of Chancery and any institution that so blighted the nation and destroyed those who sought redress in the law. The lawsuit at the center of Bleak House that has been winding on interminably in the Court of Chancer y for several generations. John Jarndyce avoids a destructive obsession with the case, but his great-uncle Tom, Richard Carstone, and others are ruined by it.
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Mr. Tulkinghorn calls several people to search the room for any important legal documents. Mr. Tulkinghorn discovers that a poor boy named Jo, who sweeps the streets nearby, knew the writer a little and Jo is sent for at the inquest. Tulkinghorn learns that the handwriting Lady Dedlock asked about belongs to a copyist named Nemo and that he has died of an opium overdose.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, a reserved, steely man, explains that an anonymous law writer penned the document. Mr. Tulkinghorn continues to read and Lady Dedlock, who says she feels faint, retires to her room. Guppy’s friend who “has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a shabby air” (20). He takes Nemo’s rooms after the law writer’s death, using the alias “Weevle,” in order to keep an eye on Krook for Guppy (20). At the appointed hour when Guppy is supposed to get Hawdon’s papers from Krook, Tony and Guppy discover the old man’s extraordinary disappearance by spontaneous combustion (32). Tony also goes along when Guppy renews his proposal to Esther (64).
It is located at no. 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields (See number 7 on map above). Bleak House was published over the course of a year in a series of 20 installments. Dickens used this format for most of his novels and often adapted the novel as he went to suit his reader’s expectations.
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The Smallweeds claim the building as the property of Mrs. Smallweed, Krook’s sister. Guppy tells Lady Dedlock that he does not have the letters, that they were probably destroyed. (34) Smallweed demands that George pay the principal of his loan, but George does not have the money, and Mat Bagnet, his cosigner, is threatened. Tulkinghorn agrees to restore matters to their old footing for a sample of Hawdon’s writing.
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