Goodreads România discussion

Votul pentru Cartea Lunii noiembrie s-a încheiat și cartea câștigătoare este Casa Umbrelor. Tenebrele din titlu se aplică în egală măsură subiectului principal - o critică acidă la adresa sistemului judiciar englez de la acea vreme (cartea a fost publicată între anii 1852 – 1853) - dar și Londrei așa cum e descrisă de Dickens: ceață densă, mizerie, întuneric, străzi surprinse în nuanțe de cenușiu.



În concluzie, un roman semi-polițist, semi-istoric, semi-satiric... o carte masivă dar care ar trebui să țină cititorului bună companie la sfârșit de toamnă și prag de iarnă.

Ca întotdeaună, vă invit să dați aici un semn când o începeți și vă încurajez să ne lăsați și impresiile de parcurs.

Am găsit câteva detalii interesante despre contextul cărții într-un articol recent din New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

Condition-of-England novels like “Bleak House” are generally thought of in relation to what John Ruskin called “illth.” Illth is the underside of wealth, the damage that change leaves in its wake, the human cost of progress. Novels show what statistics miss or disguise: what life was actually like, for many people, in the most advanced economy in the world.

Dickens was a social critic. Almost all his fiction satirizes the institutions and social types produced by that dramatic transformation of the means of production. But he was not a revolutionary. His heroes are not even reformers. They are ordinary people who have made a simple commitment to decency. George Orwell, who had probably aspired to recruit Dickens to the socialist cause, reluctantly concluded that Dickens was not interested in political reform, only in moral improvement: “Useless to change institutions without a change of heart—that, essentially, is what he is always saying.”

In fact, a major target of Dickens’s satire is liberalism. We associate liberalism with caring about the poor and the working class, which Dickens obviously did. But in nineteenth-century England the typical liberal was a utilitarian, who believed that the worth of a social program could be measured by cost-benefit analysis, and very likely a Malthusian, who thought it necessary to lower the birth rate so that the population would not outstrip the food supply.
[...]

One of Dickens’s memorable caricatures in “Bleak House” is Mrs. Jellyby, and she, too, is easily misread. We see her at home obsessively devoted to her “Africa” project, while neglecting, almost criminally, her own children. (In the Dickens world, mistreating a child is the worst sin you can commit.) But Dickens is not ridiculing Mrs. Jellyby for caring about Africans. As Douglas-Fairhurst tells us, she was based on a woman Dickens had met, Caroline Chisholm, who operated a charity called the Family Colonization Loan Society, which helped poor English people emigrate. And Mrs. Jellyby’s project is the same: she is raising money for families to move to a place called Borrioboola-Gha, “on the left bank of the Niger,” so that there will be fewer mouths to feed in England. She’s a Malthusian.

E de inteles cumva interesul lui Dickens pentru copilariile furate. Din toata carte, imaginea cea mai puternica a ramas aceea a unui copil care e obligat sa caute de lucru pentru a-si putea sustine fratii orfani.

I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature, in her womanly bonnet and apron, through a covered way at the bottom of the court; and melt into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in an ocean.