73
PARENTS AND CHILDREN IN BLEAK HOUSE
Dingeman van Wijnen
Parents and children, their relationships, or lack of relationships,
or distorted and quite often even reversed relationships, seen to be
a prominent feature in most of Dickens's novels^. Especially the
reversed parent-child relationships are intersting; and'to me Jenny
Wren, the little doll's dress-maker in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND who calls
her father her 'child', her 'bad boy', remains one of the finest
specimens of the class.
But the parent-child theme is prominent in many forms, and quite often
it is used to illustrate and emphasize the main theme in the novel
concerned. These links between subordinate themes in a novel (parent-
child relationships) and the main theme in a novel (e.g. the corrupting
power of money in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, so that the child that earns the
money through industry becomes the parent of the father that spends it
on drink) are characteristic of the narrative method of Dickens. As Robert
Donovan says, when he contrasts James ans Dickens, 'the richness and
infinite variety of human experience are suggested by the sheer weight
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of example, by the incredible multiplication of instances this is
how Dickens works when he deals with one aspect of human experience in
one particular novel as well. We see the vice he wants to expose come
back in an infinite variety of forms; it creeps in again and again in
many often quite subtle ways.
In this essay I want to examine the parent-child theme in BLEAK HOUSE.
The prominence of* this theme in the novel has been noted by several
critics. Some only make a passing remark on the fact ('one of the
novel's major themes, that of parants and children'"^; 'Esther's story
is primarily about parents and children and their impoverished relation-
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ships' Others elaborate upon it and mention examples:
Collins talks about characters displaying 'their sense of responsibility,
or lack of it, in their relationships with children and young
persons', and he mentions several orphans and children with more (or
less) satisfactory parents' and he concludes 'that the failures out-
weight the successes, both in number and litarary force