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Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Foreshadowing Fires:
Bleak House foreshadows the spontaneous combustion that eventually kills Mr. Krook. This first happens in Chapter 5, when Dickens describes Krook's shrunken body and the alcoholic fumes that leak from his breath:
He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within.
Something that's "cadaverous" is like a "cadaver": a dead body. Krook is already practically dead here, even though he's breathing. The reader gets an initial hint that something unusual's going on inside him through Dickens's reference to the "fumes" he emits. Plenty of other people in this novel drink alcohol, but nobody else ever steams like a dragon "as if they were on fire within."
Dickens takes up this language of death and fire again in Chapter 32, where the combustion occurs. He begins his description with the many flames of lamps and candles in the street outside Krook's place. He then describes Krook's shop and later his body in similar terms to the man's "cadaverous" introduction. When Krook is found by Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle, they can't tell if they're seeing him or just more debris until, horrified, they realize what they're looking at. The two men find
the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he IS here!
The reader isn't quite sure what could have happened at this point. However, the "small" and "broken" log covered with white ash recalls the "withered," white-haired, and "sunken sideways" descriptions of Krook's appearance earlier. Although Mr. Krook's actual death by spontaneous combustion is fantastical, Dickens does a lot to foreshadow both its cause and its importance to the plot. Even though spontaneous combustion is most improbable, it is discussed just as realistically and foreshadowed as intensely as other, more likely causes of death in Bleak House.
Related Themes:
Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Lonely Animals:
In Chapter 7, Dickens's third-person omniscient narrator uses anthropomorphism to imply that the Dedlocks are less happy than the animals who live at their house, as remembering the past is only safe for the dumb animals of the estate:
There may be some motions of fancy among the lower animals at Chesney Wold. [...] So, the mastiff, dozing in his kennel [...] may think of the hot sunshine [...] So the rabbits with their self-betraying tails, frisking in and out of holes at roots of trees, may be lively with ideas of the breezy days when their ears are blown about [...]
Be this as it may, there is not much fancy otherwise stirring at Chesney Wold. If there be a little at any odd moment, it goes, like a little noise in that old echoing place, a long way, and usually leads off to ghosts and mystery.
Dickens goes through a taxonomy of the estate's domestic and wild animals, having them think through happier times as they gently dream. Although it's raining and miserable, they have "motions of fancy" which allow them to distance themselves from the "wet weather" of Lincolnshire and the "old echoing" of Chesney Wold. The sensory language Dickens uses here to describe the animals' memories is bucolic and charming, as visual images of "lively" rabbits "frisking" and physical sensations of "hot sunshine" are described.
When the animals here engage in "fancy," Dickens means that they are remembering or daydreaming about the past. For humans, though, there is "not much fancy" in Chesney Wold. Daydreaming of the past only "leads off to ghosts and misery." The easy access to past happiness the animals enjoy contrasts sharply with the danger of recalling the past for Lady Dedlock, the mistress of the house. Although the Dedlocks have money, their past eventually destroys all the benefits of their privilege.
When the wealthy Lady Dedlock is reminded of her past transgressions and her closely guarded secrets, she is horribly ashamed. Engaging in the "fancy" of remembering previous events only "leads off to ghosts" and makes her miserable. These animals, however, even though they have nothing, can innocently enjoy memories and dreams which allow them to remember happier times. Dickens spends a long time describing these detailed "fancies" of the animals at Chesney Wold: the exhaustive descriptions extend for an entire page. When Dickens makes it clear that money can't protect Lady Dedlock from the "misery" that "hunts" her in Chapter 55, her situation seems even more unhappy and her privilege even more useless. Even the dogs who sleep on her floors are happier than she is.
Related Themes:
Chapter 16
Explanation and Analysis—Tenement Property:
Dickens uses the language of squalor and desperation to bring the tenement homes of London alive for the reader, and to foreshadow Jo's tragic death. In Chapter 16 Dickens describes "Tom-All-Alone's," Jo's home, in the following way:
Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings.
The tenement housing and slums of urban London were in their worst state when Dickens was living and working in the city. The reader is told that even the houses in this street aren't conventionally owned as property; they have been seized as squats by "bold vagrants" who are exploiting other poor Londoners by renting the places out. In a novel as concerned with property law as Bleak House, this injustice seems especially grave. Survival is directly linked to one's access to safe and consistent housing. Because no one owns these houses, it's implied that no one can really "live" there. This plays out poorly but predictably for Jo.
One can hardly survive in Tom-All-Alone's, let alone "live." Jo struggles to stay afloat in his hardscrabble life in this filthy and falling-down place. Dickens foreshadows his eventual death by smallpox by telling the reader that in living there, Jo has merely "not yet died." He doesn't own his life. Rather, he's renting something which, like the "crazy houses" he pays to stay in, shouldn't be exchanged for money.
The place is "ruinous," not just crumbling, implying that it ruins people and things as well as itself being disheveled. "Ruinous" is also a Victorian English idiom for "too expensive," which is another wry piece of wordplay by Dickens's narrator. The street is "ruinous" in every way possible, as it costs people a great deal to live there, and that doesn't always mean money. Jo has nothing, and so Tom-All-Alone's eventually costs him his life.
Related Themes:
Chapter 32
Explanation and Analysis—Foreshadowing Fires:
Bleak House foreshadows the spontaneous combustion that eventually kills Mr. Krook. This first happens in Chapter 5, when Dickens describes Krook's shrunken body and the alcoholic fumes that leak from his breath:
He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire within.
Something that's "cadaverous" is like a "cadaver": a dead body. Krook is already practically dead here, even though he's breathing. The reader gets an initial hint that something unusual's going on inside him through Dickens's reference to the "fumes" he emits. Plenty of other people in this novel drink alcohol, but nobody else ever steams like a dragon "as if they were on fire within."
Dickens takes up this language of death and fire again in Chapter 32, where the combustion occurs. He begins his description with the many flames of lamps and candles in the street outside Krook's place. He then describes Krook's shop and later his body in similar terms to the man's "cadaverous" introduction. When Krook is found by Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle, they can't tell if they're seeing him or just more debris until, horrified, they realize what they're looking at. The two men find
the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he IS here!
The reader isn't quite sure what could have happened at this point. However, the "small" and "broken" log covered with white ash recalls the "withered," white-haired, and "sunken sideways" descriptions of Krook's appearance earlier. Although Mr. Krook's actual death by spontaneous combustion is fantastical, Dickens does a lot to foreshadow both its cause and its importance to the plot. Even though spontaneous combustion is most improbable, it is discussed just as realistically and foreshadowed as intensely as other, more likely causes of death in Bleak House.
Related Themes:
Chapter 40
Explanation and Analysis—Darkened Portraits:
Dickens foreshadows the death of Lady Dedlock in Chapter 40 through a series of visual images involving the Dedlock family portraits. These images spell out not only her impending death, but the downfall of the noble family as a whole:
But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my lady’s picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and darker rises shadow on the wall [...]
Although other portraits mentioned previously in this passage are illuminated beautifully by the sun, with one that even "seems to bathe in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows," Lady Dedlock's portrait is cast into gloom. The visual language of shadow and the retreat of the sun from the painting of Lady Dedlock is quite frightening here, especially as Dickens directly says it has the effect of "age and death" on the portrait. Sunlight is contrasted with darkness here, as the author aligns the visual imagery of the day with liveliness, and the evening with death.
The language is deliberately vague in this segment when Dickens says "the Dedlocks" are being brought "down into age and death." He might mean the portraits are being covered by the "veil or hood" of night, but could also mean that the house of Dedlock itself is failing. He emphasizes this ghostly idea with his visual descriptions of the "weird" shadow of the tree. The effects of shadow in the room make the painting of Lady Dedlock "turn pale" and "flutter" like a phantom in the mind's eye of the reader. Rather than being unmoving as paintings usually are, it's wavering with an impossible, spectral presence.
What's happening here to the portraits foreshadows what happens to Lady Dedlock later in Bleak House. Lady Dedlock's portrait becomes "veiled" and secretive in this passage, as she herself does when seeking Esther. Events beyond her control conspire more and more to destabilize her life as the book goes on, just as her painting is cast into deeper and deeper gloom by the shadows outside Chesney Wold rising "higher and darker."
The Dedlock family portraits almost seem as if they're being dropped into a hole, in this passage, as the sensory language of dusk surrounds and covers them. This small section, as the reader sees by Chapter 55, is all also grim foreshadowing for Lady Dedlock's approaching suicide. Just like the portraits covered by "shadow" and hidden, when Lady Dedlock kills herself she does so by climbing into someone else's grave. She is literally "brought down" into the darkness through this choice.
Related Themes:
