It had surfaced most recently in David Copperfield’s famous struggles with the hieroglyphics of stenography—with “the changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different,” with “the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place,” and so on that plunge him into a “sea of perplexity” out of which he emerges, only to be confronted with a “procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters, the most despotic characters I have ever known” (chapter 38). In the earlier novel, however, Dickens extracts David from the morass. David “master [s]” “the tremendous vagaries” of shorthand, and his gaining command of those “arbitrary characters” becomes a testament to his, and his author‘s, character in the extended conceit of Dickens’s autobiographical novel. Pursuing the conceit in Bleak House and developing it in the customary mode of this novel—that is, “perversely” (p. 61)—Dickens graphically represents writing as being more inscrutable and less susceptible to mastery, as well as having pernicious and potentially lethal effects. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a “ ‘dark-looking case’ ” (p. 522), says Richard, who enters Chancery “from the outermost circle of ... evil” (p. 21), plunges into “ ’the mysteries’ ” (p. 650) of the impenetrable documents pertaining to the suit, and then himself becomes a “ ‘dark-looking case,’ ” presenting visible evidence of the “ ‘law-hand’ ” (p. 29) that leaves fatal “traces” (p. 651) on his face. In the “ ’Inkwich’ ” (p. 225) of Bleak House, Dickens represents writing as having the capacity to blemish, blight, and even bewilder unto death.

Such a “ ‘dark-looking case’ ” is not the only one Dickens presents, however. There is the testament of the novel as a whole. It is as though because language is a “union of mind and matter,” to adapt the novel’s own terms for “the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby with Mr. Jellyby” (p. 54), Dickens has become newly sensible of the physical qualities of words and of the possibilities incorporated, as it were, in writing, giving us, for example, “Chizzle” and “Mizzle ... vaguely promising themselves that they will ... see what can be done for Drizzle,” pursuing the “shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties” that go on in Chancery, and making their way into “the midst of the mud and ... the heart of the fog” (p. 21), where the Lord Chancellor is addressed by Mr. Tangle: “ ’Mlud’ ” (p. 22). The Babel of the novel is audible as babble. This, again, is not a new characteristic of Dickens’s style. Such perfervid verbosity has ample precedents. One need only think of Jingle in The Pickwick Papers—of the verbal bricolage he emits; of the slogans, catchphrases patched into his telegraphic idiom; of the jangling, rattling sound of his disjointed utterances: “ ‘Ah! Regular mangle—Baker’s patent—not a crease in my coat, after all this squeezing—might have ”got up my linen“ as I came along—ha! Not a bad idea that—queer thing to have it mangled when it’s upon one, though—trying process—very’ ” (chapter 15). In fact, one might say that Dickens amplifies the Jingle principle in Bleak House, which is, among other things, a “mangling” of genres, ranging from the dateline to the gothic, from the nursery rhyme to apocalypse, and a mingling of voices and tongues, ranging from the oracular to the vernacular and including high literary language alongside middle-brow, muddled, and illiterate speech.