LITERATURE QUESTIONS
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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“It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place.”
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“My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The fashionable intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and it knows all fashionable things.”
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“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!”’
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“I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll when we were alone together, ‘Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!’ And so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me-or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing-while I busily stitched away and told her every one of my secrets.”
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Detailed explanation-1: -There is indeed a law case at the center of Bleak House, the infamous case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a case that has dragged on for so long, involved so many documents and so many lawyers, and ruined so many lives that no one can keep track of it.
Detailed explanation-2: -The name of Bleak House had been nothing less than the symbol of desolation and loneliness in which anyone who had become entangled in the suit found himself.
Detailed explanation-3: -Bleak House is presented as a two-fold narrative, divided between the first-person retrospective of Esther Summerson and the immediate third-person point of view of an anonymous “narrator”.
Detailed explanation-4: -Bleak House is the story of the Jarndyce family, who wait in vain to inherit money from a disputed fortune in the settlement of the extremely long-running lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.