Bleak House: Allusions 6 key examples

In the Bible, after Noah and his ark full of animals run aground on Mount Ararat, the waters that cover the earth recede. It would have been easy for Dickens's  Victorian audience to place this reference and to imagine the grand scale of the muddy wasteland left behind. It also makes the idea of the dinosaur somewhat incongruous, as there are no dinosaurs in the Bible. This tension between modern science  and Christian tradition is echoed a lot in the book, where old and new worlds collide in industrial, modernizing London and traditional, historical London (although Charles Darwin wouldn't publish his definitive work on evolution until 1859, seven years after Bleak House came out.)

The grand scale of the dinosaur echoes the grand scale of London—Dickens gives an image of a street on Holborn Hill wide enough to accommodate a dinosaur "forty feet long or so." This is probably not accurate, but it helps to give the reader a sense of the metropolis's sprawling size. The placement of Lincoln's Inn in this passage—admittedly an old institution, but not older than the Flood—and the muddy wasteland world that surrounds it also point to the great age and the decrepitude of Chancery. Holborn is imaginatively envisioned as being older than Noah's Ark, and the courts of Chancery as being around when the dinosaurs walked.

The tale of Dick Whittington (the "namesake" Richard refers to) is a semi-fictional story of Richard Whittington, a merchant who became the Mayor of London in the 1300s. It's a charming story about a self-made man and his cat beating the odds. It's also a sharp left turn away from the tone of Bleak House, in which poverty seems like an inescapable condition for most people.

The London that leads into the suburbs and then into the country is very different from the sooty, still London of Chancery. Juxtaposed with the "immense metropolis," the bucolic and charming images of "beautiful horses" and countryside filled with "farmer's wagons" and "scents of old hay" seem like a fairy-tale dream. The sensory language of "clear-sounding" bells also evokes the Whittington story and its "cheerful" influences for Richard and the reader. Unlike the folktale, though, these bells seem to be telling the group they're in the right place outside of London, where they're suddenly so happy they could "all three have sung" along. In the folk-tale, the bells urge the main character to "turn back" to London and claim his destiny: here, they seem to suggest that the young people should stay out.

Skimpole here makes a racist and stereotypical allusion to a "Sultan" commanding his "slave," describing how he would have liked to have had Neckett's head brought to him before seeing his sweet children. This is obviously—even to Esther, who "cannot help but smile" at his "light way of touching these fantastic strings"—excessively insensitive and self-centered. It also demonstrates how much Skimpole overestimates how seriously everyone takes him.

Shortly after this, Skimpole implies that Neckett was a useless figure before his death, but that because seeing his children makes Skimpole feel happy and charitable, Neckett's life did indeed have a purpose:

But what turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most deserving man; that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these social virtues!

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Neckett's death is not tragic to Mr. Skimpole. Regardless of the fact that Neckett has left behind three orphans, it's a good thing, because it allows Skimpole to see he has been "developing" the "social virtues" of Neckett's children. Dickens's use of hyperbole here only makes Skimpole's speech seem even more pompous and self-important than these statements otherwise would.

The hyperbole in this part of the novel almost seems too much, as Dickens makes Mr. Skimpole out to be pretty absurd even before this second passage. Although he has money, he's not a character to whom one would usually compare the splendor of a Sultan, for example. Similarly, it's laughable that he decides Neckett's life was worthwhile because it gave him a moment of self-satisfaction. Skimpole doesn't see his self-congratulation as a "benefactor" to the "charming children" as improbable or his speech as hyperbolic at all, however, which only makes it seem sillier. 

Dickens combines the image of the "clogged lamps" of Equity (the law practiced in Chancery) with the "fathomless pockets" of Argus's hundred eyes. Argus, whose job in Greek legends was to watch carefully over a precious treasure, had the special skill of being able to see everywhere at once. Through Dickens's simile, the court of Lincoln's Inn is also symbolically able to do this, as the law "watches" all aspects of British life. The sensory language of this complex passage is all visual, as it all relates to Dickens's allusion to Argus watching his surroundings. 

Despite their many "eyes,"  Dickens describes the Inns' view of life in Britain  as "clogged." Although like Argus it is "hundred-eyed," its vision is "bleared" and it can't see anything clearly. Nothing is simple or easily discernible in the view of the law in Bleak House.

The things that can be "seen" in this passage don't paint a brighter picture of life in London, either. The only "clear" images are those of "draughtsmen" and "conveyancers" working through the night. The windows of the Holborn neighborhood are warmly lit, but the light isn't restful. Instead, each pinpoint of light indicates someone working into the small hours on a mundane task. Rather than enjoying the world, these people are stuck at their desks  inside the labyrinth of the law courts, working hard on the "entanglement" of things. As Dickens has related the lights of Chancery to the eyes of Argus, each lit lamp symbolically becomes an "eye" on the worker who uses it. The lights of Lincoln's Inn imprison and guard its workers like Argus, another many-eyed monster. 

Dickens uses this bizarre method of killing off a character to dramatize the consequences of the law's slowness and inefficiency. Krook (who is nicknamed the "Lord Chancellor," and his rag-and-bone shop the "Court of Chancery") apparently dies because the "corrupted humors" of his body couldn't be contained and he exploded.

The "humours" Dickens mentions refer to a classical theory about the personality. The Greeks thought that a person contained four different kinds of fluid, which existed in different quantities within the body and which, if imbalanced, caused personality problems. Krook's humors are "corrupted" because of his close relationship to Chancery. They cause his death, and also signal its cause to his colleagues when they find what's left of him. Dickens states here that all Chancellors (and indeed, all lawyers) will suffer the same "inborn, inbred" fate. Evil deeds, it seems, will literally make a person explode with badness.

The event that prompts the investigation of Krook's rooms after he combusts is one of Dickens's most grisly scenes. The fluids of Krook's "humours" take disgusting physical form. As they look for him, Mr. Snagsby and Mr. Guppy smell burning flesh, observe that they are in a "horrible house," and see a "little thick nauseous pool" of liquid dripping from the ceiling, and "pouring out" through the window. This liquid is from Krook's exploded corpse. What drips through the window and onto Mr. Guppy is the debris of the "corrupted humours" of Krook's "vicious body." The vileness of someone's character is an unpleasant thing to find dripping upon oneself, and Guppy understandably threatens to "cut his hand off" if he can't wash himself clean.

Dickens represents this person's speech as it is meant to "sound" in Bleak House, mangling words and phrases to imitate this sort of upper-class accent. This manner of speaking—meant to seem funny to Victorian-era readers—is the author's interpretation of English speech so posh it's practically unintelligible. The cousin's stilted, chortling dialogue misses letters and clumps words together, indicating that he's speaking in a confusing and abbreviated way. 

The cousin is saying here that although he thinks Lady Dedlock is beautiful enough to "set up shop of women" (exceed most others), overall he finds her "rather alarming." Dickens goes on to allude to William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, invoking another "larming kind" of woman as he compares Lady Dedlock to the cruel and self-interested Lady Macbeth. The "debilitated cousin" says that like Lady Macbeth, Lady Dedlock is an "inconvenient woman" who might "get out of bed" and "bawthestablishment" ("bawl the establishment," or say something to rock the status quo.)

Like the legal jargon that Mr. Tangle and his lawyer colleagues speak, this kind of English is localized and period-specific to the 1800s. It is comprehensible to the Dedlocks and their friends because they are also presumably able to speak this way, being nobly born themselves. However, it seems nonsensical to the reader until it's looked at carefully, as it's much easier to understand when read aloud. Because it accurately represents how characters like this cousin might have "sounded" to each other, it contributes to the realism of Bleak House.

Although it's meant to amuse a Victorian reader, this "dialect" might seem quite cruel toward a disabled character, if taken out of context. It's difficult to tell whether Dickens means this "cousin" is actually mentally incapacitated, or if he's just "debilitated" by his extremely aristocratic rank and station. However, given how Dickens tends to characterize privileged people as incompetent, this probably amounts to the same thing in Bleak House.