Jamie The Obscure

Continuing with my book quotes, here are some from my most favorite book, Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens was the master of coincidence. Displaying England and English society in all its glory and faults, he weaves a tale of mystery, love, and hardship. From the Court of Chancery to the slums of London, he encompasses all of the levels of society. Sir Leicester Deadlock and his Lady, the epitome of aristocracy; Esther Summerson, an orphan that lacks family but is rich in love and kindness; Jo, a desolate crossing sweeper who embodies and represents all of the destitute who live in the slums; along with many other colorful characters make this book something beyond a classic. Showing a penchant for social satire and humanitarianism, Dickens creates his most memorable characters, with hilarious and touching vividity. Lacking the innocence of his earlier novels, you could tell that Dickens had very much grown up and become adamant in issues of social reform. Showing the lighter side and the most sinister side of England at that time, this is a book that I will never tire of reading.



"As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." (describing a particularly dreary, foggy day in London.)



"Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth." (enter the Court of Chancery and all of it's fuddling, muddling ways. Entrance to the infamous case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.)



"On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be- as here they are- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might." (In reference to the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce; the precipice for this whole story. All who have a place in this story, are directly or indirectly wrapped up in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or in the Court of Chancery.)



"This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give- who does not often give- the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!' " (Describing the ineptitude and ridiculousness of the Court of Chancery.)



"Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it." (Pertaining to the case. All of the court officials and spectators, save a few, favor the case as an ongoing humorous joke.)



"But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air." (Describing the aristocratic world and its want of compassion and emotion.)



"Sir Leicester Deadlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be done up without Deadlocks." (Describing Sir Leicester Deadlock and his very prideful thoughts of himself and his family.)



"She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life." (Esther describing her godmother who raised her; who was a stern, unforgiving, unloving lady.)



"Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy, at any time, to anybody's heart, and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me." (Esther's thoughts of her young self. Comparing herself to her doll.)



" 'Con-found Mrs Rachael!' said the gentleman. 'Let her fly away in a high wind on a broomstick!'

I began to be really afraid of him now, and looked at him with the greatest astonishment. But I thought that he had pleasant eyes, although he kept muttering to himself in an angry manner, and calling Mrs Rachael names." (Esther meets a odd man in a coach, after being sent away after her godmother's death.)



" 'I don't care!' she said. 'Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don't care- but if he was to come to our house, with his great shining lumpy forehead, night after night till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn't have anything to say to him. Such asses as he and Ma make of themselves!' " (Caddy Jellyby's thoughts on Mr. Quale, her mother, and their causes.)



" 'Strange, indeed! all this wasteful wanton chess-playing is very strange. To see that composed Court yesterday jogging on so serenely, and to think of the wretchedness of the pieces on the board, gave me the headache and heartache both together. My head ached with wondering how it happened, if men were neither fools nor rascals; and my heart ached to think they could possibly be either.' " (After Richard's first visit to the Court of Chancery. Little does he know that he will soon be one of those fools.)



"...and all the other children got up behind the barouche and fell off, and we saw them, with great concern, scattered over the surface of Thavies' Inn, as we rolled out of its precincts." (Pertaining to the Jellyby children, who were uncared for, due to their mother's devotion to her cause, Borrioboola-Gha.)



"The notes revived, in Richard and Ada, a general impression that they both had, without quite knowing how they came by it, that their cousin Jarndyce could never bear acknowledgments for any kindness he performed, and that, sooner than receive any, he would resort to the most singular expedients and evasions, or would even run away. Ada dimly remembered to have heard her mother tell, when she was a very little child, that he had once done her an act of uncommon generosity, and that on her going to his house to thank him, he happened to see her through a window coming to the door, and immediately escaped by the back gate, and was not heard of for three months." (Describing Mr Jarndyce's odd benevolence.)



" 'She is like the morning,' he said. 'With that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe.' " (Mr Harold Skimpole describes Ada.)



" '...here you see me utterly incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!' " (Mr Skimpole, being a simple childish adult, applies to Richard and Esther to save him from being taken in for debt.)



" 'Then you didn't think, at all events,' proceeded Mr Skimpole, 'to this effect. "Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine; loves to hear the wind blow; loves to watch the changing lights and shadows; loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great cathedral. And does it seem to me that I am about to deprive Harold Skimpole of his share in such possessions, which are his only birthright!" You thought nothing to that effect?'

'I-certainly-did-NOT,' said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly renouncing the idea was of that intense kind, that he could only give adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have dislocated his neck." (Mr Skimpole wonders at his detainer's lack of feeling for his situation.)



" 'I verily believe that the announcement in the newspapers when his mother was confined, was "On Tuesday last, at her residence in Botheration Buildings, Mrs Skimpole of a son in difficulties." ' " (Mr Jarndyce describes Mr Skimpole after finding out that he had gotten money out of Richard and Esther.)



"...the turkey in the poultry-yard, always troubled with a class grievance (probably Christmas)...." (just a funny quote whilst describing Sir Leicester's country home, Chesney Wold.)



" 'This, you must know, is the Growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.' " (Mr Jarndyce describing the room he most frequents.)



" 'And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends.' " (Mr Jarndyce on the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce)



" 'He is a ward in Chancery, my dear. Kenge and Carboy will have something to say about it; Master Somebody-a sort of ridiculous Sexton, digging graves for the merits of causes in a back room at the end of Quality Court, Chancery Lane- will have something to say about it; Counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the Satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be handsomely fee'd, all around, about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general, Wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with Wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don't know; so it is.' " (Mr Jarndyce explains Wiglomeration as pertaining to Richard beginning a career.)



"He had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all." (Mr Jarndyce explains the difference between truly charitable people, and those that like to think they are charitable and want everyone else to think so also.)



"We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazen and shrivelled- though they were certainly that too- but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent." (Esther describing Mrs Pardiggle's unhappy children. Mrs Pardiggle, who, like Mrs Jellyby, has a cause to occupy her time, portions off her children's allowances to different charities.)



"Mrs Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book, as if it were a constable's staff, and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it, as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station house." (Esther describing how Mrs Pardiggle takes the poor brickmaker's family into "religious custody" to try to set them to rights. Needless to say, the brickmaker who is a drunk and a wife beater, could care less.)



" 'We have been misdirected, Jarndyce, by a most abandoned ruffian, who told us to take the turning to the right instead of to the left. he is the most intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth. His father must have been a most consummate villain, ever to have had such a son. I would have that fellow shot without the least remorse!'

'Did he do it on purpose?' Mr Jarndyce inquired.

'I have not the slightest doubt that the scoundrel has passed his whole existence in misdirecting travellers!' returned the other. 'By my soul, I thought him the worst-looking dog I had ever beheld, when he was telling me to take the turning to the right. And yet I stood before that fellow face to face, and didn't knock his brains out!' " (Enter Mr Boythorn, Mr Jarndyce's boyhood friend, who once knocked out a bully's two front teeth for picking on Mr Jarndyce. He is loud in his vehemence, but gentle by nature, as attested by the small canary he owns that eats out of his hand and perches on his head.)



"Guster is minding the shop, for the 'Prentices take tea in the kitchen, with Mr and Mrs Snagsby; consequently, the robe-maker's two daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the two 'Prentices to distraction, as they fondly suppose, but are merely awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose hair won't grow, and never would, and, it is confidently thought, never will." (I thought this was funny. While thinking that they are awakening feelings in the two 'Prentices, they are only awakening the admiration of poor Guster, the Snagsby's housegirl.)

"My Lady's maid is a Frenchwoman of two-and-thirty, from somewhere in the Southern country about Avignon and Marseilles- a large-eyed brown woman with black hair; who would be handsome, but for a certain feline mouth, and general uncomfortable tightness of face, rendering the jaws too eager, and the skull too prominent. There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy; and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head, which could be pleasantly dispensed with- especially when she is in an ill-humour and near knives." (Describing Lady Deadlock's maid, Mademoiselle Hortence, who is rather angry and vindictive.)



"Why, yes. It cannot be disguised. There are, at Chesney Wold this January week, some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set up a Dandyism- in Religion, for instance. Who, in mere lackadaisical want of an emotion, have agreed upon a little dandy talk about the Vulgar wanting faith in things in general; meaning, in the things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low fellow should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling, after finding it out! Who would make the Vulgar very picturesque and faithful, by putting back the hands upon the Clock of Time, and cancelling a few hundred years of history.

There are also ladies and gentlemen of another fashion, not so new, but very elegant, who have agreed to put a smooth glaze on the world, and to keep down all its realities. For whom everything must be languid and pretty. Who have found out the perpetual stoppage. Who are to rejoice at nothing, and be sorry for nothing. Who are not to be disturbed by ideas. On whom even the Fine Arts, attending in powder and walking backward like the Lord Chamberlain, must array themselves in the milliners' and tailors' patterns of past generations, and be particularly careful not to be in earnest, or to receive any impress from the moving age." (More descriptions of the aristocracy and how they view the world from their easy-chairs and snug fires.)



"He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear. He had such a neck-cloth on (puffing his very eyes out of their natural shape), and his chin and even his ears so sunk into it, that is seemed as though he must inevitably double up, if it were cast loose. He had, under his arm, a hat of great size and weight, shelving downward from the crown to the brim; and in his hand a pair of white gloves, with which he flapped it, as he stood poised on one leg, in a high-shouldered round-elbowed state of elegance not to be surpassed. He had a cane, he had an eye-glass, he had a snuff-box, he had rings, he had wristbands, he had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was like nothing in the world but a model of Deportment." (Esther's impressions of Mr Turveydrop, Caddy Jellyby's soon to be father-in-law, and his Deportment.)



" 'O!' said the old lady, apostrophising him with infinite vehemence, 'I could bite you!' " (A lady giving vent to her feeling on Mr Turveydrop and how he treats his dancing master son, who works and toils all day, every day, to enhance his father's Deportment.)



"Mr Quale, who presented himself soon after our arrival, was in all such excitements. He seemed to project those two shining knobs of temples of his into everything that went on, and to brush his hair farther and farther back, until the very roots were almost ready to fly out of his head in inappeasable philanthropy." (More on Mr Quale and his shiny knobs)



"...he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where benevolence took spasmodic forms; where charity was assumed, as a regular uniform, by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from falling, rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down." (More of Mr Jarndyce's feelings on Mrs Jellyby, Mr Quale, Mrs Pardiggle, and the like.)



" '...he did what he had to do, sir,' said Mrs Blinder, unconsciously fixing Mr Skimpole with her eye; 'and it's something, in this world, even to do that.' " (Mrs Blinder explains to Mr Jarndyce about Mr Coavinses, who once tried to take Mr Skimpole for debt, but Esther and Richard bailed him out. Coavinses died and left three young children. Mr Jarndyce gets the oldest, Charley, who has been working to take care of the younger two, to be Esther's little maid, while he sends Tom to school, and the baby Emma to be raised by Mrs Blinder until she can go to school.)



" 'There again!' exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. 'I am of a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!' " (Enter Mr Gridley, the Man From Shropshire, who is also something of a joke in the Court of Chancery, and is very angry about it.)



"The idea of his taking himself to task, with that laughing face and heedless manner, and with a fancy that everything could catch and nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous." (Describing Richard and his ways.)



"I suppose there is nothing Pride can so little bear with, as Pride itself..." (I found this an interesting and true statement.)



"Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to any one else, that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years, in this business, to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you- the profound philosophical prescription- the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can't at all agree about that. Move on!" (Describing poor Jo, and how he is to "Move on" from London to points unknown, nor cared for, just so long as he is gone.)



"So, Mr Chadband- of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin..." (Pertaining to Reverend Chadband and his way of going on, without ever saying anything.)



"His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade." (Describing Mr Guppy's; clerk to Kenge and Carboy, Mr Jarndyce's lawyers, who is also enamoured and stalking Esther Summerson; friend Mr. Jobling's attire.)



"That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their 'coming' round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's 'coming' triangular!" (Esther on Richard's carefree attitude toward his career and life in general.)



" 'Krook's last lodger died there,' observes Mr Guppy, in an incidental way.

'Did he though!' says Mr Jobling

'There was a verdict. Accidental death. You don't mind that?'

'No,' says Mr Jobling, 'I don't mind it; but he might as well have died somewhere else. It's devilish odd that he need go and die at my place!' Mr Jobling quite resents this liberty; several times returning to it with such remarks as, 'There are places enough to die in, I should think!' or, 'He wouldn't have liked my dying at his place, I dare say!' " (Conversation between Mr Guppy and Mr Jobling, after Guppy makes a proposition to Jobling for his assistance in a matter that Mr Guppy is pursuing.)



" 'And how does the world use you, Mr George?' Grandfather Smallweed inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.

'Pretty much as usual. Like a football.' " (Conversation between Mr George and Mr Smallweed. I found this funny because it's how I feel most of the time.)



"His beignity, as he raised his future daughter-in-law and stretched out his hand to his son (who kissed it with affectionate respect and gratitude), was the most confusing sight I ever saw." (Mr Turveydrop's Deportment is astonishing after he learns that his son and Caddy Jellyby are to be married, and will always take care of him.)



"The house in Thaives' Inn had bills in the windows announcing that it was to let, and it looked dirtier and gloomier and ghastlier than ever. The name of poor Mr Jellyby had appeared in the list of Bankrupts, but a day or two before; and he was shut up in the dining room with two gentlemen, and a heap of blue bags, account-books, and papers, making the most desperate endeavours to understand his affairs. They appeared to me to be quite beyond his comprehension; for when Caddy took me into the dining room by mistake, and we came upon Mr Jellyby in his spectacles, forlornly fenced into a corner by the great dining-table and the two gentlemen, he seemed to have given up the whole thing, and to be speechless and insensible." (Esther describing the conditions of the Jellyby's, particularly Mr Jellyby, who is now bankrupt, due in large part to his wife's flagrant inattention to her home because of Borrioboola-Gha.)



"From time to time, I heard loud voices in the parlour over-head; and occasionally a violent tumbling about of the furniture. The last effect I am afraid was caused by poor Mr Jellyby's breaking away from the dining-table, and making rushes at the window with the intention of throwing himself into the area, whenever he made any new attempt to understand his affairs." (More on Mr Jellyby's desperate situation.)



"And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant countries and the stars they saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to be useful to some one in my small way." (Esther, being vague about Mr Woodcourt, a physician she is in love with, but won't admit to it, not even to herself. He is, during this part of the story, on a India ship, going to seek his fortune; which he does not do. He ends up being shipwrecked and becoming a hero for pulling the remaining passengers through their ordeal on a deserted island, until they are found.)



" 'This ends it. Of all my old associations, of all my old pursuits and hopes, of all the living and the dead world, this one poor soul alone comes natural to me, and I am fit for. There is a tie of many suffering years between us two, and it is the only tie I ever had on earth that Chancery has not broken.' " (Mr Gridley, the Man From Shropshire, speaking of mad little Miss Flite, before he dies. Another suitor broken on the wheel of Chancery.)



"Stertching forth his flabby paw, Mr Chadband lays the same on Jo's arm, and considers where to station him. Jo, very doubtful of his reverend friend's intentions, and not at all clear but that something practical and painful is going to be done to him, mutters, 'You let me alone. I never said nothink to you. You let me alone.' " (Mr Chadband attempts to reform Jo, who is beyond reformation.)



"This tends to the discomfiture of Mr Smallweed, who finds it so difficult to resume his object, whatever it may be, that he becomes exasperated, and secretly claws the air with an impotent vindictiveness expressive of an intense desire to tear and rend the visage of Mr George. As the excellent old gentleman's nails are long and leaden, and his hands lean and veinous, and his eyes green and watery; and, over and above this, as he continues, while he claws, to slide down in his chair and to collapse into a shapeless bundle; he becomes such a ghastly spectacle, even in the accustomed eyes of Judy, that that young virgin pounces at him with something more than the ardour of affection, and so shakes him up, and pats and pokes him in divers parts of his body, but particularly in that part which the science of self-defence would call his wind, that in his grievous distress he utters enforced sounds like a paviour's rammer." (Evil Mr Smallweed, wanting to abuse Mr George in a most infamous manner, cannot do it and makes a horrible spectacle of himself, which his evil granddaughter does not care for.)



"Phil makes no reply; but seizing the chair and its load sidles away, tightly hugged by the now speechless Mr Smallweed, and bolts along the passage, as if he had an acceptable commission to carry the old gentleman to the nearest volcano." (Mr George's servant, Phil Squod, chairs Mr Smallweed.)



"...they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden (where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting the horsehair out of the seat of the chairs and choking themselves with it)..." (Esther on the still distressed circumstances of the Jellyby's, before Caddy's wedding.)



" 'O! poor Pa,' said Caddy, 'only cried, and said he hoped we might get on better than he and Ma had got on. He didn't say so before Prince; he only said so to me. And he said, "My poor girl, you have not been very well taught how to make a home for your husband; but unless you mean with all your heart to strive to do it, you had better murder him than marry him- if you really love him." '

'And how did you reassure him, Caddy?'

'Why, it was very distressing, you know, to see poor Pa so low, and hear him say such terrible things, and I couldn't help crying myself. But I told him that I did mean it, with all my heart; and that I hoped our house would be a place for him to come and find some comfort in, of an evening; and that I hoped and thought I could be a better daughter to him there, than at home. Then I mentioned Peepy's coming to stay with me; and then Pa began to cry again, and said the children were Indians.'

'Indians, Caddy?'

'Yes,' said Caddy, 'Wild Indians. And Pa said,' -(here she began to sob, poor girl, not at all like the happiest girl in the world)- 'that he was sensible the best thing that could happen to them was, their being all Tomahawked together.'

Ada suggested that it was comfortable to know that Mr Jellyby did not mean these destructive sentiments.

'No, of course I know Pa wouldn't like his family to be weltering in their blood,' said Caddy; 'but he means that they are very unfortunate in being Ma's children, and that he is very unfortunate in being Ma's husband; and I am sure that's true, though it seems unnatural to say so.' " (Caddy explains to Esther and Ada about her father's admission to how he feels about his poor family.)



"...and if you had seen her, whenever I jingled my housekeeping keys, get up and attend me, certainly you might have thought that there never was a greater imposter than I, with a blinder follower than Caddy Jellyby." (Esther, not giving herself credit again, for teaching Caddy housekeeping.)



"The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if Mrs Jellyby's household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul's or Saint Peter's, the sole advantage they would have found in the size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to be dirty in. I belive that nothing belonging to the family, which it had been possible to break, was unbroken at that time of those preparations for Caddy's marriage; that nothing which it had been possible to spoil in any way, was unspoilt; and that no domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child's knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate upon it.

Poor Mr Jellyby, who very seldom spoke, and almost always sat when he was at home with his head against the wall, became interested when he saw that Caddy and I were attempting to establish some order among all this waste and ruin, and took off his coat to help. But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were opened- bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs Jellyby's caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, footstools, black-lead brushes, bread, Mrs Jellyby's bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle-ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candle-sticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee grounds, umbrellas- that he looked frightened, and left off again. But he came in regularly every evening, and sat without his coat, with his head against the wall; as though he would have helped us, if he had known how." (More on the Jellyby's)



"We duly came back to breakfast, and Mrs Jellyby sat at the head of the table, and Mr Jellyby at the foot. Caddy had previously stolen upstairs, to hug the children again, and tell them that her name was Turveydrop. But this piece of information, instead of being an agreeable surprise to Peepy, threw him on his back in such transports of kicking grief, that I could do nothing on being sent for, but accede to the proposal that he should be admitted to the breakfast table. So he came down, and sat in my lap; and Mrs Jellyby, after saying, in reference to the state of his pinafore, 'O you naughty Peepy, what a shocking little pig you are!' was not at all discomposed. He was very good, except that he brought down Noah with him (out of an ark I had given him before we went to church), and would dip him head first into the wine-glasses, and then put him in his mouth." (Esther on Peepy, Caddy's young brother. I thought him sticking Noah headfirst in the wine was funny.)



"Then Caddy hung upon her father, and nursed his cheek against hers as if he were some poor dull child in pain. All this took place in the hall. Her father released her, took out his pocket handkerchief, and sat down on the stairs with his head against the wall. I hope he found some consolation in walls. I almost think he did." (Caddy taking leave of her desolate father.)



"Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash and sidle into corners, like a saddle-donkey." (Esther on trying to teach Charley to write.)



" 'Now, is it not a horrible reflection,' said my guardian, to whom I had hastily explained the unavailing efforts of the two women, 'is it not a horrible reflection,' walking up and down and rumpling his hair, 'that if this wretched creature were a convicted prisoner, his hospital would be wide open to him, and he would be as well taken care of as any sick boy in the kingdom?' " (Esther finds Jo very sick and takes him to Bleak House. This is Mr Jarndyce's feelings on the boy not being able to be admitted to a hospital.)



" 'As to dead men, Tony,' proceeds Mr Guppy, evading this proposal, 'there have been dead men in most rooms.' " (Mr Guppy tries to calm Mr Jobling.)



"Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally- inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only- Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died." (Description of Krook's death by spontaneous combustion, which was a new idea at the time.)



"To this trio, everybody in the court, possessed of sixpence, has an insatiate desire to exhibit hospitality in a liquid form." (Quote on how political parties got votes in those times.)



" 'Will somebody give me a quart pot?' exclaims her exasperated husband, looking helplessly about him, and finding no missle within his reach. 'Will somebody obleege me with a spittoon? Will somebody hand me anyhting hard and bruising to pelt at her? You hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!' Here Mr Smallweed, wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually throws Judy at her grandmother in default of anything else, by butting that young virgin at the old lady with such force as he can muster, and then dropping into his chair in a heap." (Mr Smallweed is always firing a cushion at his beloved wife when she starts rambling and chattering. Being without his cushion in this instance, he uses the nearest thing, which happens to be Judy.)



" 'She's worth her weight in gold,' returns the trooper.

'In gold?' says Mr Bagnet. 'I'll tell you what. The old girl's weight- is twelve stone six. Would I take that weight- in any metal- for the old girl? No. Why not? Because the old girl's metal is far more precious- than the preciousest metal. And she's all metal!' " (Mr George and his friend Mr Bagnet, discuss Mr Bagnet's wife; the old girl.)



" '...I would rather restore to poor Rick his proper nature, than be endowed with all the money that dead suitors, broken, heart and soul, upon the wheel of Chancery, have left unclaimed with the Accountant-General - and that's money enough, my dear, to be cast into a pyramid, in memory of Chancery's transcendent wickedness.' " (Mr Jarndyce on his estrangement to Richard and how the Court of Chancery has helped it along.)



"O, it was so much better as it was! With a great pang mercifully spared me, I could take back to my heart my childish prayer to be all he had so brightly shown himself; and there was nothing to be undone; no chain for me to break, or for him to drag; and I could go, please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he could go his nobler way upon its broader road; and though we were apart upon the journey, I might aspire to meet him, unselfishly, innocently, better far than he had thought me when I found some favour in his eyes, at the journey's end." (Esther on seeing her love, Mr Woodcourt, after her illness, when her looks were altered greatly.)



"There were many little occurances which suggested to me, with great consolation, how natural it is to gentle hearts to be considerate and delicate towards any inferiority. One of these particularly touched me. I happened to stroll into the little church when a marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had to sign the register. The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude cross for his mark; the bride, who came next, did the same. Now, I had known the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest girl in the place, but as having quite distinguished herself in the school; and I could not help looking at her with some surprise. She came aside and whispered to me, while tears of honest love and admiration stood in her bright eyes, 'He's a dear good fellow, miss; but he can't write, yet- he's going to learn of me- and I wouldn't shame him for the world!' Why, what had I to fear, I thought, when there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring man's daughter!" (Esther, worrying about how her new looks will effect her life and the people she loves, realizes that her worries are selfish and unwarranted.)



" 'My child, my child!' she said. 'For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Deadlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered; think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her, if you can; and cry to Heaven to forgive her, which it never can!' " (Esther meets her mother for the first and last time.)



"The little gauzy child, having whisked her sandals into the reticule and put on a trodden down pair of shoes, shook her head into the dowdy bonnet at one shake; and answering my inquiry whether she liked dancing, by replying, 'not with boys,' tied it across her chin and went home contemptuous." (Describing a rather hard little girl who is an apprentice to Prince and Caddy Turveydrop at the dance academy.)



"So in familiar conversation, private authorities no less disinterested will remark that they don't know what this age is coming to; that we are plunging down precipices; that now here is something else gone; that these changes are death to people like Vholes; a man of undoubted repectability, with a father in the Vale of Taunton, and three daughters at home. Take a few steps more in this direction, say they, and what is to become of Vholes's father? Is he to perish? And of Vholes's daughters? Are they to be shirt-makers, or governesses? As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs, and it being propsed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve the Vholses!" (Describing what a "respectable" man Richard's lawyer, Mr Vholes, is. He is not respectable in the least, and sucks Richard dry.)



" 'My experience teaches me, Lady Deadlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three-fourths of their troubles.' " (Mr Tulkinghorn to Lady Deadlock)



"I felt for my old self as the dead my feel if they ever revisit these scenes." (Esther on her old looks.)



"A habit in him of speaking to the poor, and of avoiding patronage or condescension, or childishness (which is the favourite device, many people deeming it quite a subtlety to talk to them like little spelling books), has put him on good terms with the woman easily." (Mr Woodcourt helps a poor brickmaker's wife. I found this to be true that many people, in thinking that they are being benevolent, tend to be rather condensending to the poor; treating them as if being poor is equal to being stupid.)



" 'He will get into worse trouble if he often misuses his large and heavy hand as he has misused it here. But you forgive him, brutal as he is, and I say no more of him, except that I wish he deserved it.' " (Mr Woodcourt to the poor brickmaker's wife on her abusive husband.)



"As he retraces his way to the point from which he descried the woman at a distance sitting on the step, he sees a ragged figure coming very cautiously along, crouching close to the soiled walls- which the wretchedest figure might as well avoid- and furtively thrusting a hand before it. It is the figure of a youth, whose face is hollow, and whose eyes have an emaciated glare. He is so intent on getting along unseen, that even the apparition of a stranger in whole garments does not tempt him to look back. He shades his face with his ragged elbow as he passes on the other side of the way, and goes shrinking and creeping on, with his anxious hand before him, and his shapeless clothes hanging in shreds. Clothes made for what purpose, or of what material, it would be impossible to say. They look, in colour and substance, like a bundle of rank leaves of swampy growth, that rotted long ago." (Mr Woodcourt descrying a poor boy, who so happens to be Jo.)



" 'It surely is a strange fact,' he considers, 'that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form should be more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog.' But it is none the less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains." (Mr Woodcourt on Jo's situation. Sadly, these sentiments still ring true today.)



"She uses some odd expressions, but is as cordial and full of heart as sanity itself can be- more so than it often is." (On Miss Flite)



"He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours! From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting about thee." (On Jo. Dickens wondering why so many people are so devoted to foreign missions, rather than starting at home.)



"He, too, shrinks from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He is of no order and no place; neither of the beasts, nor of humanity." (Jo, after being taken to Mr George's. He is so abused by society in general that he doesn't know how to relate.)



"Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlmen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day." (After Jo dies.)



"...wondering towards evening what his poor old mother is thinking about it, -a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his mother having departed this life, twenty years." (What Mr Bagnet tends to do on his birthday.)



"As he is not illustrious for his cookery, this may be supposed to be a matter of state rather than enjoyment on the old girl's part; but she keeps her state with all imaginable cheerfulness." (Mr Bagnet cooks for the old girl on her birthday, which is a rather scarey affair.)



"...he is himself directing the roasting of the poultry; and Mrs Bagnet, with her wholesome brown fingers itching to prevent what she sees going wrong, sits in her gown of ceremony, an honoured guest." (More on Mr Bagnet's lack of culinary skills.)



"It is well for the old girl that she has but one birthday in a year, for two such indulgences in poultry might be injurious. Every kind of finer tendon and ligament that it is in the nature of poultry to possess, is developed in these specimens in the singular form of guitar-strings. Their limbs appear to have struck roots into their breasts and bodies as aged trees strike roots into the earth. Their legs are so hard, as to encourage the idea that they must have devoted the greater part of their long and arduous lives to pedestrian exercises, and the walking of matches. But Mr Bagnet, unconscious of these little defects, sets his heart on Mrs Bagnet eating a most severe quantity of the delicacies before her; and as that good old girl would not cause him a moment's disappointment on any day, least of all on such a day, for any consideration, she imperils her digestion fearfully. How young Woolwich cleans the drumsticks without being of ostrich descent, his anxious mother is at a loss to understand." (And even more on Mr Bagnet's lack of culinary skills. Poor old girl!)



"Last of our visitors, there was Mr Jellyby. Really when he used to come in of an evening, and ask Caddy in his meek voice how she was, and then sit down with his head against the wall, and make no attempt to say anything more, I liked him very much. If he found me bustling about, doing any little thing, he sometimes half took his coat off, as if with an intention of helping by a great exertion; but he never got any further. His sole occupation was to sit with his head against the wall, looking hard at the thoughful baby; and I could not quite divest my mind of a fancy that they understood one another." (Esther describes Mr Jellyby's visits to Caddy after her giving birth.)



"Mr Bucket coughs, and glances at Volumnia, rouged and necklaced, as though he would repectfully observe, 'I do assure you, you're a pretty creature. I've seen hundreds worse-looking at your time of life, I have indeed.' " (Inspector Bucket and his familiar manners to Sir Leicester's cousin.)



" 'Now, Mademoiselle,' says Mr Bucket, in a cool determined way, 'you go and sit down upon that sofy.' " (Inspector Bucket to Mademoiselle Hortence, after piecing things together nicely.)



"The old girl relieves her feelings, and testifies her interest in the conversation, by giving the trooper a great poke between the shoulders with her umbrella; this action she afterwards repeats, at intervals, in a species of affectionate lunacy: never failing, after the administration of each of these remonstrances, to resort to the whitened wall and the grey cloak again." (Mr George is taken to jail on murder charges. The old girl goes to find his long lost mother and brings her and her son together again. The old girl is so overcome with emotion that she can only express her feelings with her umbrella.)



"...he had so long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he said, that his words really had come to sound as if there were something in them." (on Sir Leicester and his weighty words.)



" 'Naturally there was no end to his tongue then. He might as well have been born with a yard and a half of it, and a remnant over.' " (Inspector Bucket on Jo's talking about things he shouldn't have been talking about.)



" 'Harold. Yes. He's a queer bird is Harold.' " (Inspector Bucket on Harold Skimpole.)



"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be." (Good quote for how rooms feel when the people that occupy them are no more.)



"...and consequently has supplied their place with distracting smoothings of the bed-linen, elaborate locomotion on tiptoe, vigilant peeping at her kinsman's eyes, and one exasperating whisper to herself of 'He is asleep.' In disproof of which superfluous remark, Sir Leicester has indignantly written on the slate 'I am not.' " (Volumnia tries to help during Sir Leicester's illness, but rather bungles it.)



"His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally." (On Sir Leicester's forgiving Lady Deadlock. Even the aristocratic and the poor have things in common.)



"Upon this wintry night it is so still, that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness." (I just liked how this was put.)



"...at other times, they divide their watches into short scraps of oblivion, and dialogues, not wholly free from acerbity, as to whether Miss Deadlock, sitting with her feet upon the fender, was or was not falling into the fire when rescued (to her great displeasure) by her guardian genius the maid." (Volumnia waits up with her cross maid, during Sir Leicester's illness.)



" 'She had better go. Her hands should be the first to touch her. They have a higher right than ours.' " (Mr Woodcourt about Esther, after they, along with Inspector Bucket, find Esther's mother.)



" 'I suppose the Lord Chancellor, and the Vice Chancellors, and the whole Chancery battery of great guns, would be infinitely astonished by such unreason and injustice in one of their suitors,' pursued my guardian. 'When those learned gentlemen begin to raise moss-roses from the powder they sow in their wigs, I shall begin to be astonished too!' " (Mr Jarndyce on his not getting involved in the Court of Chancery.)



" '....all generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose; but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.' " (Mr Jarndyce on Mr Woodcourt. I believe this to be true.)



"So slow, so eager, so bloodless and gaunt, I felt as if Richard were wasting away beneath the eyes of this adviser, and there were something of the Vampire in him." (Esther on Mr Vholes.)



"His laugh had not quite left him either; but it was like the echo of a joyful sound, and that is always sorrowful." (Esther on Richard.)



" '....The greatest wisdom that ever lived in the world could scarcely know Richard better than my love does.' " (Ada on Richard. Wisdom knows not what the heart knows.)



"I learned in a moment that he loved me. I learned in a moment that my scarred face was all unchanged to him. I learned in a moment that what I had thought was pity and compassion, was devoted, generous, faithful love." (Esther learns how Mr Woodcourt really feels.)



"He covered his eyes with his hand, and turned away his head. How could I ever be worthy of those tears?" (Esther describing Mr Woodcourt's reaction when she tells him that she is not free to return his feelings, though she does.)



" '...never believe, that I forget this night; or that while my heart beats, it can be insensible to the pride and joy of having been beloved by you.' " (Esther's words to Mr Woodcourt)



"He had called me the beloved of his life, and had said I would be evermore as dear to him as I was then; and I felt as if my heart would not hold the triumph of having heard those words." (Esther on her feelings after learning of Mr Woodcourt's love for her.)



"As I sat looking fixedly at him, and the sun's rays descended, softly shining through the leaves, upon his bare head, I felt as if the brightness on him must be like the brightness of the Angels." (Mr Jarndyce conveys his intentions to Esther.)



" 'It's a West wind, little woman, due West! Let no one thank me any more; for I am going to revert to my bachelor habits, and if anybody disregards this warning, I'll run away, and never come back!' " (How My Jarndyce feels after bringing Esther and Mr Woodcourt together.)



"As I naturally speculated on the object of these visits, and as I always associated something ludicrous with the visitor, it fell out that in laughing about Mr Guppy I told my guardian of his old proposal, and his subsequent retraction. 'After that,' said my guardian, 'we will certainly receive this hero.' " (The return of Mr Guppy, and his intentions.)



" 'My good lady,' returned my guardian, 'it is hardly reasonable to ask me to get out of my own room.'

'I don't care for that,' said Mrs Guppy. 'Get out with you. If we ain't good enough for you, go and procure somebody that is good enough. Go along and find 'em.'

I was quite unprepared for the rapid manner in which Mrs Guppy's power of jocularity merged into a power of taking the profoundest offence.

'Go along and find somebody that's good enough for you,' repeated Mrs Guppy. 'Get out!' Nothing seemed to astonish Mr Guppy's mother so much, and to make her so very indignant, as our not getting out." (Mrs Guppy takes offense to Esther rejecting her son, though he lost all interest in her after seeing her for the first time after her illness. He decided to renew those devout feelings in a business like manner, which Esther politely declined. Above is his mother's reaction.)



"A smile irradiated his face, as she bent to kiss him. He slowly laid his face down upon her bosom, drew his arms closer round her neck, and with one parting sob began the world. Not this world, O not this! The world that sets this right." (On Richard's death. Very sad.)



"...like charmers reduced to flirting with grim Death, after losing all their other beaux..." (This quote refers to those who run the rumour mills. It was in the middle of a sentence, but it struck me.)



"Mr Boythorn showed a manifest desire to abandon his right of way, and do whatever Sir Leicester would: which Sir Leicester, conceiving to be a concession to his illenss or misfortune, took in such high dudgeon, and was so magnificently aggrieved by, that Mr Boythorn found himself under the necessity of committing a flagrant trespass to restore his neighbour to himself. Similarly Mr Boythorn continues to post tremendous placards on the disputed thoroughfare, and (with his bird upon his head) to hold forth vehemently against Sir Leicester in the sanctuary of his own home; similarly, also, he defies him as of old in the little church, by testifying a bland unconsciousness of his existence. But it is whispered that when he is most ferocious towards his old foe, he is really most considerate; and that Sir Leicester, in the dignity of being implacable, little supposes how much he is humoured. As little does he think how near together he and his antagonist have suffered, in the fortunes of two sisters; and his antagonist, who knows it now, is not the man to tell him. So the quarrel goes on, to the satisfaction of both." (Mr Boythorn trying to defer to Sir Leicester after his misfortunes, but Sir Leicester takes such offence to the thought that Mr Boythorn has to redouble his efforts, all with the best of intentions.)



"The help that my dear counted on, did come to her; though it came, in the Eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand, and how its touch could heal my darling's heart, and raise up hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God." (On Ada and her child, and how she found solace after Richard's death.)



"He is constant in his patronage of Peepy, and is understood to have bequeathed him a favourite French clock in his dressing room - which is not his property." (On Mr Turveydrop and Peepy.)



"We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband, but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree, but I hear his praises, or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night, but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain, and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministrations. Is not this to be rich?" (Esther on her husband, and how there is more than one way to be rich.)