Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London. It conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard
What has Bleak House, your first choice, done to shape your political views?
This is probably Dickens’s best evocation of a society in which your origins more or less determine your destiny. My job is essentially about trying as best you can to detach people’s life chances and their destiny from their origins, so that where you are born doesn’t determine where you die. Of course the whole point about Bleak House is that both its heroes and its transgressors are involved in that struggle against their origins. Esther Summerson, the slightly weedy central character, is born into these rather rocky circumstances, nobody quite knows where she comes from and therefore it’s unclear where she’ll end up. Lady Dedlock, the most interesting character, is transgressing because she has risen to a place where she should never have been. She gets her comeuppance: that’s the Victorian idea that you have to be careful and you can’t overdo your rising up the scale.
At the other end of the scale you’ve got poor Joe the crossing sweeper, whose fate is marked in his genes. He’s never going to be anything other than the dreadful, tragic figure that he is in the book. What Dickens is trying to do is to undermine, by satirising it, the idea that people get stuck in their fixed social positions.
The other point of the book, in terms of what I do at the commission, is about the role of the law. Bleak House tells us not to rely on the courts for justice. In the end, a just society can’t be delivered by people in a courtroom. We do quite a lot of that, but it’s fundamental to the way I approach anti-discrimination and social justice, to believe that in the end what will change things is how people behave rather than judicial remedy.
In Bleak House the extreme stratification of society is not changed by the ridiculous court cases, but in our world…?
We have a vast range of judicial remedies, but the idea that you can tackle racial or sex discrimination, or indeed, much more significantly, class discrimination, as a feature of our society either by legal action or by the laws that are passed in parliament really seems to me rather limited – it’s a mistaken strategy.
Read full interview
Trevor Phillips is a politician and broadcaster, who has spent the last seven years at the head of quangos responsible for combating discrimination. After growing up in London and Guyana, he was the first black president of the National Union of Students and the first leader of London’s elected assembly, where he clashed with Mayor Ken Livingstone for arguing that multiculturalism could mean more segregation in British society. He is current chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and has also advised the French government on social cohesion.
Another favourite author of yours is Charles Dickens. You have written a biography of Charles Dickens as well as other books exploring his work – so what made you choose Bleak House?
Well, Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London, the close-packedness of London, if you like, where everything is connected to everything else. It is a London world where people are tightly bound together with ties of duty and ties of love and charity. And yet at the same time this London world is so perilous, so cruel and so close to death and disaster all the time, that you fear for the characters in the novel. The rich and the poor, the sick and the well all mingle together, which is one of the themes of the book. It is a serious London, full of mysteries of the past and mysteries of origin. In all respects it conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard, and full of ghosts and unseen presences.
Do you think remnants of that city still survive in modern-day London?
Oh yes, you can find remnants of Dickensian London in various odd places, not so much as before the war, but still there are parts of London which for me have the sense and texture of Dickens.
I was thinking of somewhere like the Temple, which is very much part of legal life in London.
Yes, the Temple and also south of the river, like Borough High Street. There are parts of London which seem to be similar to 19th century London and manage to retain some of the atmosphere.
Read full interview
Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning novelist, broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of London Under and the bestselling London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River. He has won a number of accolades including the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature’s William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. He holds a CBE for services to literature
