If you’re tempted to despair of your own family this Christmas, turn to Dickens for a reminder that it could be a whole lot worse, says reader Daniel Gooding
• More families in literature
Dickens and Christmas are so intertwined that those of a literary disposition often think of them together. It is usually Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family who spring to mind, as we make our yearly return to A Christmas Carol and the other Christmas Books. In contrast to these tales of hope and good cheer, Bleak House is, to use a phrase from the first chapter, “perennially hopeless”. Instead of the small and close-knit Cratchit family, we have the infamous Jarndyces: not so much a family as a disparate group of ill-matched individuals whose only real connection is their involvement in the never-ending legal dispute of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
As in many families, there are ongoing feuds: the boundary dispute between Lord Dedlock and Lawrence Boythorn; the unhappy marriage of the Snagsbys, trapped between his timidity and her suspicious mind. There are also eccentrics, such as the aptly named Miss Flite with her many birds, who is given to blurting out uncomfortable truths. Nearly everyone connected to the case is in some way polluted by it, as they are by the ever-present London fog.
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