Telescopic Philanthropy and London Particulars

The new serialization of Bleak House can remind us again of the quotations and allusions that Dickens, in this book, has given to the language.

Clean air acts may have banished fogs like the "London particular" which greeted Esther on her arrival in London, but the term is not forgotten.

On a cold day, John Jarndyce's image for distressing circumstances is immediately explicable ("If ever the wind was in the east," he says, as Miss Flite's caged birds, from Hope and Joy, to Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach, are named by Krook, "I think it's there today!").

The term "telescopic philanthropy", used to describe Mrs Jellyby's absorption in "Borrioboola-Gha" while neglecting problems nearer to home, is similarly comprehensible (and may be found in a number of online discussions of today's charitable endeavours).

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the Chancery suit which enmeshes characters from Lady Dedlock to the Wards in Jarndyce themselves, has become the type of an unending case. Recently, the Guardian headed a report of a (continuing) 12-year suit with the words "Carry on Jarndyce" Another set of complex "legal machinations" were described in the Observer of January 2003 as "worthy of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce."

Thick fog seeping through the streets of London is only one of many settings evoked by Dickens. Today the adjective "Dickensian" is as likely to be associated with snowy Christmas scenes, and Christmas cards with stage-coaches, as with Bleak House's grim vision of the Court of Chancery, and its desperate petitioners continually "expecting a judgement".

Oxford World's Classics: Bleak House.

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