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Charles Dickens Research Paper

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Money Worries in Dickens. Any great Victorian novel that wished to explore social issues could not escape the great theme of monetary connections, influences, corruptions and debts. For Dickens, heralded as ‘the master of the social novel’, money worries reappear again and again in his novels, in the form of the destitute orphan, the man languishing in debtors prison, the aristocrat carelessly paying a gold coin for inadvertently killing a child, and so forth. In Great Expectations and Bleak House, money is at the heart of the questions the novels grapples with; for instance, if money can make Pip a gentleman, or why Richard is so hopelessly attached to the promise of fortune from the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. The novels also express …show more content…

Bleak House also sees the spread of an actual virus, symptomatic of smallpox, which scars Esther and kills Joe, and hence Dickens puts the deadliness of the law case on par with a literal illness, by associating it with medical jargon. The perpetrators of this disease, the lawyers, are the only ones, who are immune to it, and Dickens alternates between mockingly praising them as an ‘eminently respectable legion’ (C. XXXIX, p. 387) and depicting them as parasitic ‘bloodless and gaunt’ (LX, 582) vampires. Once under their influence, and trapped by the lawsuit, there is no cure for Richard, and so the conclusion of the case culminates with his death in Chapter LXV. The horrible irony that underpins all of this is that any money to be won from Jarndyce and Jarndyce has long since been spent in legal expenses, and at the final verdict ‘they [the court attendees] were all exceedingly amused, and were more like people coming out from a Farce or a Juggler than from a court of Justice’ (615, LXV). Dickens imposes comedy on tragedy; to cement how ludicrous the court case is. Not only does the court-case leave a legacy of debt and death, the promise of a settlement of fortune was always an empty

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