CHARLES. DICKENS

BLEAK HOUSE.

Zeke Taylor

I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another; how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.

Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart, and that he set up no monopoly, himself, in being unjustly treated by this monstrous system.

‘There again!’ said Mr. Gridley, with no diminution of his rage. ‘The system! I am told, on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into Court, and say, “My Lord, I beg to know this from you — is this right or wrong? Have you the face to tell 

 I have received justice, and therefore am dismissed?” My Lord knows he makes me furious, by being so cool and satisfied — as they all do: for myself at least !-I will accuse the individual workers of that system me I nothing of it. He sits there to administer the system. I mustn't go to Mt. Tulkinghorn, the solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Imustn't say to him go to when M hoow they gain by it while I lose, don't I?-I mustn't say to him I will -as they all do; for Lue something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or foul! He is not responsible. It's the system. But if I do no violence to any of them, LereI may! I don't know what may happen if I am carried beyond against me, face to face, before the great eternal bar!' His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage with- out seeing it. I bave done!' he said, sitting down and wiping his face. 'Mr. larndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it. I have been in prison for contempt of Court. I have been in prison for threat- ening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and that trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire, and I sometimes go beyond amusing them--though they have found it amusing, too, to see me committed into custody, and brought up in custody, and all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if I restrained myself. I tell them, that if I did restrain myself, I should become imbecile. I was a good- enough-tempered man once, I believe. People in my part of the coun- try say they remember me so; but, now, I must have this vent under my sense of injury, or nothing could hold my wits together. "It would be far better for you, Mr. Gridley" the Lord Chancellor told me last week, not to waste your time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire." "My Lord, my Lord. I know it would," said I to him, "and 1t would have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your high office; but, unhappily for me, I can't undo the past, and the past drives me here!"Besides' he added, breaking fiercely out, Tl shame them. To the last, I'll show myself in that Court to its shame. IfI knew when I was goir voice to spe here, and sen feet foremost!"" en I was going to die, and could be carried there, and had a O peak with, I would die there, saying, "You have brought me sent me from here, many and many a time. Now send me out, On- enance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its cOn Hi CApression that it did not soften, even now when he was quet ' he said,

The cross out of reach, as he lives in terrible  conditions, surrounded by Christians

And there he [Jo, very poor, beggar, just told to “move on” by constable, with nowhere to go, given some food] sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great Cross on the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral, glittering above a red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke. From the boy's face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city; so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach. There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams — everything moving on to some purpose and to one end — until he is stirred up, and told to 'move on' too.

BLEAK HOUSE. quotes

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