![]() to 2 p.m., before he stopped for lunch-or at least his hand stopped often his mind was left behind in the shadowy world of his novel … After lunch there was usually a long walk, which he needed to calm himself down and also to work up his ideas for the next day’s writing. “Dickens’s new writing routine at Tavistock House began with breakfast served punctually at 9:30am, always ‘a rasher of bacon and an egg and a cup of tea.’ That was followed by regular hours spent working on Bleak House, usually from 10 a.m. Of the daily composition of Bleak House, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes: ![]() And he needed all his powers of concentration to construct what would be his most intricate novel, an edifice as grand and imposing in its own way as the city whose inner workings he was attempting to depict. Dickens dreaded the songs of the street musicians who paraded outside the house at all hours of the day when mentally drafting a scene his face would acquire a look of the deepest absorption, and the slightest noise would send a spasm of pain across it. The big event in the life of Dickens and his family was their relocation to Tavistock House in Bloomsbury, an eighteen-room house protected from the streets by iron gates and immense hedges. The big event of the year in England was the Great Exhibition, which Dickens praised decorously in public but privately begrudged for bringing the unwashed masses into the city. Dickens was, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has noted, roughly halfway through his career as a novelist. In all respects it conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard, and full of ghosts and unseen presences.” - Peter Ackroyd Historical Context It is a serious London, full of mysteries of the past and mysteries of origin. The rich and the poor, the sick and the well all mingle together, which is one of the themes of the book. And yet at the same time this London world is so perilous, so cruel and so close to death and disaster all the time, that you fear for the characters in the novel. ![]() It is a London world where people are tightly bound together with ties of duty and ties of love and charity. “ Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London, the close-packedness of London, if you like, where everything is connected to everything else. A Look-Ahead to Week One of David Copperfield.Hello, friends! Is the measure of a culture its treatment of the least? Is it better to earn one’s money or wait for something to turn up? Are we our brother’s keeper?īut before we venture into the labyrinth, a few quick links: ![]()
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