Mr. Skimpole (center)

Ah, back to Bleak House. Chapter V contains the delicious description of Krook’s rag-and-bone shop.  It’s so vivid that it makes you see and even smell the place, with its towers of junk always threatening to topple over, like an entire Goodwill store crammed into one tiny room. It’s testament to how the Victorians recycled before the word was even invented. Very little had to be thrown away in Victorian times: if you had leftover junk like bones, grease, clothing, or scraps of fabric, paper, or metal, there was always someone lower down on the social ladder who’d buy it and use it up.

After that scene, it’s a mixed bag. In Chapter VI, we meet the worthless freeloader Skimpole, whom Dickens wisely lets implicate himself through his dialogue. My dissertation director hated Skimpole with a passion, and I can see why: the guy’s the Hipster Grifter of the Victorian era, getting by on his charm until others wise up to him. Skimpole claims he has the “soul of a child,” and therefore such concepts as time and money have no meaning for him. Consequently, he’s always in debt and needing to be bailed out. If he was around today, he’d be a reality show participant.

Skimpole reminds me of those people who go around acting like jerks and insulting others to their faces, and then, when called out on it, say, “Hey, I’m just being myself. This is who I am. If you don’t like it, don’t hang out with me. You don’t want me to be fake, do you?” Ah, the last dregs of the great Romantic movement. Authenticity is overrated.

Chapter VII of BH is of less interest: it’s  full of mainly dull exposition about the Dedlocks and their circle. Then chapter VIII comes along to renew my irritation with both Dickens and Esther.

Visiting the poor with Mrs. Pardiggle (seated). I love her expression.

In chapter 8, we are introduced to Mrs. Pardiggle, another iteration of Mrs. Jellyby. Unlike Mrs. Jellyby, though, Mrs. Pardiggle is allowed to speak for, and thus damn, herself. She does some kind of nebulous “improving” work among the poor of London, who neither want her help nor profit from it; she gives her (miserable) children allowances merely so she can brag about the kids “willingly” donate them to charity (reminding me an awful lot of this Slate column.) Dickens skillfully likens Mrs. Pardiggle’s “charity work” to the empty work-for-work’s sake that goes on in Chancery; she’s a human bureaucracy, endlessly preaching, hectoring, lecturing, and asking for contributions, to no end other than to prop up her own self-image as a “busy” person (“I am incapable of fatigue, my good friend, I am never tired, and I mean to go on until I have done.”)

Where Dickens loses me, though, is when he once again contrasts Pardiggle with the sainted Esther Summerson. Esther says:

I thought it best to be as useful as I could, and to render what kind services I could to those immediately about me, and to try to let that circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself

and I think we’re meant to take it as the right and “natural” approach to charity. The other non-satirized characters in the book—the Bleak House coterie of Mr. Jarndyce, Ada, and Richard – certainly have no end of praising Esther for her “kind services” to them.

But Esther’s position is a very conservative one, and one very much in keeping with a constrained vision of woman’s proper role. It’s classic angel-in-the-house: the good that Esther does for her family and friends is supposed to somehow seep out into greater society. If Pardiggle is ineffectual through lack of substance, Esther is ineffectual through narrowness.

And we’re inadvertently shown just how ineffectual Esther is in the final scene of the chapter, in which she witnesses one poor woman comforting another after the death of her baby, and can only make the episode into a sentimental tableau:

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten [by their husbands; emphasis mine], so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

In her way, Esther’s as bad as Pardiggle: using the poor for a melancholy thrill,  a pretty mental engraving instead of using them as badges of her moral worth, but using them all the same.