Day Twenty

4/20

The Book: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

ISBN: 978-1-59308-311-3

Suggested By: Rebecca Mitchell

Where: Home

When:9:00-9:45p

Music: None

Company: Family

Pages: 192 - 147 (55)

The Lead In: This week is really squeezing me between school and work. But I will push through this and enjoy the streak when I am further along.

The 411 on the 55: Jarndyce and Esther meet Caddy’s (Jellyby’s daughter) fiance and his father, who lives off his son and complains about how society is devolving. Afterwards the swing by Mrs. Flite’s house and look at her birds.

Richard is not doing well as a doctor and has decided to be a lawyer instead, though later he struggles with that as well. He’s kind of a tool. Jarndyce tells Esther all he knows about where she came from: how a stranger as him to care for her when she was twelve. A servant is sent from Mr. Dedlock’s house to see where Nemo lived and where he is buried (though in actuality, he isn’t buried, he’s tossed onto a pile of other dead vagrants.

Line of the Day: “He replied with a high-shouldered bow. ‘Where what is left among us of Deportment,’ he added, ‘still lingers. England - alas, my country! - has degenerated very much, and is degenerating every day. She has not many gentlement left. We are few. I see nothing to succeed us, but a race of weavers.’ pg 198

The Fact on the Fiction: Jarndyce and Jarndyce is, of course, the court case that serves as the background for the novel. The case concerns the fate of a large inheritance. It has dragged on for many generations prior to the action of the novel, so that, by the time it is resolved late in the narrative, legal costs have devoured nearly the entire estate. The case is thus a byword for an interminable legal proceeding. Dickens used it to attack the chancery court system as being near totally worthless, as any "honourable man among its [Chancery's] practitioners" says, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!" Wikipedia