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Liz
The brickmaker is a poor, working man whom Esther Summerson and Ada Clare meet on a philanthropic visit to his house with Mrs. Pardiggle. He is married to Jenny and lives with her friend Liz and Liz’s husband, who is also a brickmaker. Jenny’s husband is a drunk and spends all his earnings on gin. He beats his wife and children and has no intention of changing his ways. He virulently hates Mrs. Pardiggle, who comes repeatedly to his house to lecture him on religion and morality. The brickmaker feels patronized by Mrs. Pardiggle and rightly assumes that she is oblivious to the material need that he and his family live in. Although it is true that he squanders his money on alcohol, the brickmaker protests that he earns so little that it would hardly cover food, and that there is not point in washing his children because the water that they use to bathe in is filthy and unhygienic. Dickens uses the brickmaker to give voice to the poor, who in his time often lived in slums and subsisted on meager incomes which hardly left them enough to feed themselves or to care for their children.
The Brickmaker Quotes in Bleak House
The Bleak House quotes below are all either spoken by The Brickmaker or refer to The Brickmaker. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
‘I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she is a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby.’
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Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book, as if it were a constable’s staff, and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it, as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.
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The Brickmaker Quotes in Bleak House
The Bleak House quotes below are all either spoken by The Brickmaker or refer to The Brickmaker. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
‘I’ll save you the trouble. Is my daughter a-washin? Yes, she is a-washin. Look at the water. Smell it! That’s wot we drinks. How do you like it, and what do you think of gin, instead! An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides. Have I read the little book wot you left? No, I an’t read the little book wot you left. There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me. It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby.’
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book, as if it were a constable’s staff, and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it, as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
