So I got a Kindle for my birthday last Friday, and reading on it is such a compelling experience that it’s inspired me to revisit a few classic British novels. I’m starting with Bleak House, which I tore through (as much as anyone can ‘tear through’ an 800+ page book) in preparation for my Ph.D. exams more years ago than I care to remember.

Re-reading books after a few years have passed is always interesting: you’re a little older, you’ve had some new experiences, all the cells in your body have regenerated—you are, in effect, a different person. And so the book seems different. You notice things that weren’t on your mental radar screen before. Different themes take on new resonance. Characters you once disliked now appeal to you because now you understand their motivations—or maybe you now can’t stand them, because you finally see what they’re all about.

So how’s Bleak House? To be honest, it’s getting on my nerves.  There’s a smugness to the novel, a moral surety to its narrators that I find off-putting. Dickens assumes that we readers are standing with him, loftily above his characters looking down on their foibles with bemusement and dismay. Sometimes, it seems a little unfair, even catty, as when the narrator says of Lady Dedlock:

She supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals . . . Yet every dim little star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices and . . . can tell you how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her all their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and her whole troop [of fashionable people] after them . . .

If you agree that Lady Dedlock (who you’ve barely even met when this passage appears in the novel) is a pompous fool, than this description is apt. But if you’d like to know more about her, then this passage has a Mean Girls ring to it. I can’t just sit back and complacently poke fun at the rich, at least not in this vein. It’s discomfiting.

Esther, self-effacing as ever.

Then there’s English literature’s greatest Mary Sue, Esther Summerson. Esther is given to utterances like the following:

My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she made so much of me!

As the Valley girls used to say, gag me with a spoon. If this woman were any more full of sweetness and light, she’d evaporate. But the thing is, we’re supposed to look past Esther’s self-effacing why-lil’-ol’-me? truckery and see her as the very soul of caring goodness. Maybe it’s a product of living in the Silicon Age, or maybe I’m just a crabby old sourpuss, but I can’t do it. I want to give her a few margaritas, intravenously, if needs be, and then hear what she really thinks about Lady Dedlock. (“You abandoned me, you — mildly irriating person, you! But I’m sure you had a good reason for doing so. And I forgive you. Not that you need forgiveness from me. Oh, I’m being so presumptuous!” See, I can’t even imagine her drunk.)

Then there’s Mrs. Jellyby. I harbor a certain sympathy for Mrs. Jellyby, perhaps because, were I not married to a very organized man, my house would resemble the cluttered nest in which she lives. Dickens means us to “tsk-tsk” over the fact that Mrs. Jellyby’s house is going to rot and ruin because she spends all her time canvassing on behalf of African natives—a pretty damned obvious “irony,” if you ask me, that Dickens sees fit to underscore with Esther’s observation that her eyes “had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”

Obviously, Mrs. Jellyby is that worst of creatures, one still condemned today—the bad mother. She can’t find anything in her house, her stays are showing out the back of her dress, and her astoundingly stupid children are too uncoordinated to prevent themselves from falling down the stairs or getting their heads stuck between the railings. (One of these kids is named Peepy, which always makes me think of Peepers from Sam and Max. Really, the chapter’s  a lot funnier if you imagine Mrs. Jellyby’s kids as the Soda Poppers.)

Sure, Mrs. Jellyby is a nincompoop, but I dislike the thinly veiled implication that if a woman has any interest outside house and home her domestic life will fall apart. And, yes, Dickens does make a valid point about do-gooders who ignore the problems close at hand in favor of the more romantic ones abroad—but he does pay a lot more attention to Mrs. Jellyby’s shortcomings as a mother and housekeeper than he does to her dubious moral stance. In fact, I think he missed an opportunity to show in greater depth how Mrs. Jellyby looks down on anyone not so devoted to a “cause” as she is. That’s something that would really strike a nerve among today’s “telescopic philanthropists.”

Still I prefer kooky Jellyby, with her hairpins askew and her curtains propped open with a fork (I once propped up a shaky table with a copy of The Closing of the American Mind, so, heh) to saccharine Esther. Will I be able to put up with Esther for the remainder of the book? I’ll give it a try.