Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is a murder mystery—rather, it contains a string of mysteries, one of which involves obvious murder, while others involve missing persons, blackmail, and suspicious deaths, including one via (of all things) spontaneous combustion. The novel’s resemblance to the “murder mystery” genre is surprising in part because it is an anachronism, and in part because its framing device is specifically a legal narrative, as well as because nothing remotely resembling a murder mystery happens for ten whole chapters—that is, until the discovery of a dead body at the end of Chapter Eleven, and the arrival of a detective, later, in Chapter Twenty-Two. That’s when, so to speak, things start to get going.
Bleak House is an enormous hydra of a story, intertwining (and relentlessly developing) countless characters, multiple plots, lots of secrets, and at least two narrators (one is relatively-omniscient and unnamed, and one is the protagonist, Esther Summerson). My copy, a Penguin edition, is 1036 pages. The novel begins with, and principally concerns, many London denizens who have ties to an interminable legal case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which involves many different, incontestable versions of the same will that have prevented the case from reaching a conclusion (or from benefactors being named) for multiple generations.
The story begins, though, many years into the case, when the descendants of the original heirs, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, now wards of the court, are brought to live with their kind and generous distant relative, John Jarndyce, along with another orphan, Esther Summerson, a child with mysterious parental origins Jarndyce only knows little about. Among many other characters, the story is also just as much about Mr. Tulkinghorn, a dogged and sinister lawyer who slowly begins unearthing the past of the wealthy Lady Deadlock, and the overeager Mr. Guppy, a clerk for the law firm Kenge and Carboy, who is determined to find out more about Esther’s family background, in hopes that such efforts will increase her interest in marrying him. All of these characters discover, then, through different means, the Rag and Bottle Warehouse of the hoary and unsavory Mr. Krook, a crooked landlord and hoarder of many strange and seemingly meaningless objects, such as bones and papers (among the piles of which, unbeknownst to their illiterate keeper, rests the single document that can finally put to rest the drawn-out case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce).
But that takes a long time. For most of Bleak House, mysteries constantly rear up and new characters keep emerging, forming a thick, ever-expanding morass of personalities and stories that make it hard to sort through everything. Much like the Chancery Court case, much like the atmosphere of the novel itself; the story is absolutely suffused with fog—“fog everywhere,” the narrator says—and mud, both of which are so thick that dogs and horses seem indistinguishable from one another on the road. The fog is so heavy and full of flakes of soot, and the earth is so wet, that the world seems prehistoric; the narrator mentions it would not be surprising to see “a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” Time in Bleak House is its own phenomenon; it is long and slow and makes details hard to read or even discern at all. There are phenomena that cannot be explained; in Bleak House‘s most famous scene, characters enter the Rag and Bottle shop and discover that Mr. Krook has spontaneously combusted.
This is the world Bleak House, a world in which characters are given only one mission, and that is to figure things out, including about their own lives. Bleak House, according to Nancy Armstrong, can be most simply described as exploring “the question of how one acquires an identity in the modern urban world,” as well as how one leaves his or her identity upon departure from the world. And Bleak House is very much a Victorian novel for its mysterious about parentage and family identity. But dovetailing these questions which are existential on a philosophical level comes questions which are existential on a literal level. There are dead bodies in Bleak House!
And these questions all braided together. Indeed, the entire murder mystery subplot of Bleak House begins after an inquiry into a woman’s past. While working on the Jarndyce case, the sinister lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn discovers a connection between his client, Lady Dedlock (who is a potential beneficiary), and a homeless man called “Nemo” who lives in an impoverished area of London and whom he attempts to track down but discovers to be dead—beginning an investigation into the lives of many neighbors that he later transfers to a police detective, an affable cockney investigator named Mr. Bucket.
Bucket will eventually solve, or aid in solving, nearly all the mysteries that will eventually unfold in the novel’s sixty-seven chapters (including mysteries that are not necessarily in the purview of the police, such as problems concerning parentage and ex-lovers). Bucket is a plainclothes detective, of the newly established Detectives Division of the London Metropolitan police (ca. 1842, just ten years before Bleak House was begun).
Inspector Bucket poses a problem unique to the legacy of the detective—it is unclear if he is a hero or a villain. Probably, he’s just the police, which is to say, he’s neither (an odd change for Dickens, if this is the case, considering how loftily he vaunted the virtues and capacities of his friend Field, on whom Bucket was likely based, one year prior). Indeed, D.A. Miller has analyzed Bucket as being specifically designed to represent the benevolence of the “New Police,” as well as, writ-large, the positive “side” of the law and law-keeping—against the ancient, mismanaged, and inefficient Chancery Court. “Made so desirable as a sort of institutional ‘alternative’ to Chancery,” he writes, “the police derive their ideological efficacy from providing, within a total system of power, a representation of the containment of power.”
In this sense, Dickens is offering the police as an effect check to the rampant, out-of-control, and grindingly slow legal system, which keeps inheritances from landing in their rightful hands and allows prowling, manipulative men like Mr. Tulkinghorn to achieve high stature and control. Says Miller, “The shift from the court of Chancery dramatically localizes the field, exercise, and agents of power, as well as, of course, justifies such power, which, confined to a case of murder and contained in Mr. Bucket, occupies what we can now think of as the right side.” In other words, Bucket’s likeability and apparent ethics are petitions for the belief in the police as “the good guys.” As Tulkinghorn puts it to Snagsby in the office, that day: “Don’t mind this gentleman… this is only Mr. Bucket.”
As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, the basis for Bucket was Dickens’s good friend, Inspector Charles Frederick Field of the Detectives Department (as well as its eventual Chief). Field was the subject of numerous essays and short pieces by Dickens, telling the goings-on of the force, such as the 1851 “On Duty With Inspector Field.” In these pieces, which are clear propaganda in their support of the controversial new police force in London, Dickens creates a benevolent, efficient, friendly, upstanding, and considerate policeman.
It does not take long for Bucket to start showing up everywhere – even amateur cases which don’t seem to concern the police (Guppy’s curiosity regarding the resemblance between Esther and Lady Deadlock, for example), eventually do: Lady Deadlock vanishes towards the end of the novel, and it is up to Bucket, and Esther, to find her, at the grave of her love, Captain Hawton. Bucket covers a lot of ground; he is anyone and everywhere. His presence not only ensures justice be served when it needs to be, but who also solves the largest, most inconvenient and maddening problem in the entire book, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which exists prior to the book’s beginning; Bucket manages to solve a problem that runs deeper than his own story.’
And his presence seems to inspire others. Not only does he work out cases at home with his wife (who, the narrator notes, would also make a fine detective were she allowed to choose it as a profession), but he also asks other characters for their assistance in resolving his own cases. And some characters pursue their own investigations, including Tulkinghorn and Guppy, and the physician Alan Woodcourt. In Bleak House, detective work isn’t so much a systemic, sinister problem as something the community does anyway. In Bleak House, mysteries are everywhere, and everyone’s a detective.
