Portraiture in a Bleak House
It may seem an odd thing to do at one’s leisure on a beautiful tropical island, but I spent much of my midwinter break a few weeks ago re-reading Bleak House . Partly inspired to do so by Dempsey’s People , I was also on the look-out for portraits because, I now realise, Charles Dickens’s mighty novel is absolutely crammed with them. Foremost, and of greatest significance to the plot, are the Dedlock family portraits—“a family as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable,” but whose “greatness seems to consist in their never having done anything to distinguish themselves, for seven hundred years.” These portraits fill the great rooms of the Dedlock seat of Chesney Wold, down in Lincolnshire. When Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock are in town or abroad and the house is shut up, the pictures of Dedlock ancestors seem (Chapter 2) “to vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has passed along the old ...