In the first paragraph of the novel, Dickens alludes to the biblical story of the Flood which drowned the world in the Bible's Book of Genesis, using imagery from that story to describe the sloshy density of the mud covering London:
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
In the Bible, after Noah and his ark full of animals run aground on Mount Ararat, the waters that cover the earth recede. It would have been easy for Dickens's Victorian audience to place this reference and to imagine the grand scale of the muddy wasteland left behind. It also makes the idea of the dinosaur somewhat incongruous, as there are no dinosaurs in the Bible. This tension between modern science and Christian tradition is echoed a lot in the book, where old and new worlds collide in industrial, modernizing London and traditional, historical London (although Charles Darwin wouldn't publish his definitive work on evolution until 1859, seven years after Bleak House came out.)
The grand scale of the dinosaur echoes the grand scale of London—Dickens gives an image of a street on Holborn Hill wide enough to accommodate a dinosaur "forty feet long or so." This is probably not accurate, but it helps to give the reader a sense of the metropolis's sprawling size. The placement of Lincoln's Inn in this passage—admittedly an old institution, but not older than the Flood—and the muddy wasteland world that surrounds it also point to the great age and the decrepitude of Chancery. Holborn is imaginatively envisioned as being older than Noah's Ark, and the courts of Chancery as being around when the dinosaurs walked.
Dickens alludes to an English folk tale at the beginning of Chapter 5. In doing so, he invokes the history of England and emphasizes the difference between the smoky streets of London and the fresh air of the "real country road," as Esther recounts:
At last we got into a real country road again, with windmills, rickyards, milestones, farmers’ wagons, scents of old hay, swinging signs and horse troughs: trees, fields, and hedgerows. It was delightful to see the green landscape before us, and the immense metropolis behind; and when a wagon with a train of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around. ‘The whole road has been reminding me of my namesake Whittington,’ said Richard [...]
The tale of Dick Whittington (the "namesake" Richard refers to) is a semi-fictional story of Richard Whittington, a merchant who became the Mayor of London in the 1300s. It's a charming story about a self-made man and his cat beating the odds. It's also a sharp left turn away from the tone of Bleak House, in which poverty seems like an inescapable condition for most people.
The London that leads into the suburbs and then into the country is very different from the sooty, still London of Chancery. Juxtaposed with the "immense metropolis," the bucolic and charming images of "beautiful horses" and countryside filled with "farmer's wagons" and "scents of old hay" seem like a fairy-tale dream. The sensory language of "clear-sounding" bells also evokes the Whittington story and its "cheerful" influences for Richard and the reader. Unlike the folktale, though, these bells seem to be telling the group they're in the right place outside of London, where they're suddenly so happy they could "all three have sung" along. In the folk-tale, the bells urge the main character to "turn back" to London and claim his destiny: here, they seem to suggest that the young people should stay out.
In Chapter 15, Dickens employs hyperbole to illuminate Mr. Skimpole's overestimation of his own importance and his total misunderstanding of social realities. Skimpole blithely discusses Mr. Neckett's death with Esther—getting Neckett's name mixed up with "Coavinses," the prison they've just visited— saying he had never really thought much of the man before seeing his children:
[...] look at Coavinses! How delightfully poor Coavinses (father of these charming children) illustrated the same principle! He, Mr Skimpole, himself, had sometimes repined at the existence of Coavinses. He had found Coavinses in his way. He could have dispensed with Coavinses. There had been times, when, if he had been a Sultan, and his Grand Vizier had said one morning, ‘What does the Commander of the Faithful require at the hands of his slave?’ he might have even gone so far as to reply, ‘The head of Coavinses!’
Skimpole here makes a racist and stereotypical allusion to a "Sultan" commanding his "slave," describing how he would have liked to have had Neckett's head brought to him before seeing his sweet children. This is obviously—even to Esther, who "cannot help but smile" at his "light way of touching these fantastic strings"—excessively insensitive and self-centered. It also demonstrates how much Skimpole overestimates how seriously everyone takes him.
Shortly after this, Skimpole implies that Neckett was a useless figure before his death, but that because seeing his children makes Skimpole feel happy and charitable, Neckett's life did indeed have a purpose:
But what turned out to be the case? That, all that time, he had been giving employment to a most deserving man; that he had been a benefactor to Coavinses; that he had actually been enabling Coavinses to bring up these charming children in this agreeable way, developing these social virtues!
Neckett's death is not tragic to Mr. Skimpole. Regardless of the fact that Neckett has left behind three orphans, it's a good thing, because it allows Skimpole to see he has been "developing" the "social virtues" of Neckett's children. Dickens's use of hyperbole here only makes Skimpole's speech seem even more pompous and self-important than these statements otherwise would.
The hyperbole in this part of the novel almost seems too much, as Dickens makes Mr. Skimpole out to be pretty absurd even before this second passage. Although he has money, he's not a character to whom one would usually compare the splendor of a Sultan, for example. Similarly, it's laughable that he decides Neckett's life was worthwhile because it gave him a moment of self-satisfaction. Skimpole doesn't see his self-congratulation as a "benefactor" to the "charming children" as improbable or his speech as hyperbolic at all, however, which only makes it seem sillier.
This novel contains the highly unusual motif of spontaneous combustion, an improbable event that happens to the shopkeeper Mr. Krook about two-thirds of the way through. In Chapter 32, the narrator ties together his death, an allusion to the classical theory of bodily "humours," and the ever-present theme of the Chancery's uselessness in the following way:
Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that Court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done [...] it is the same death eternally – inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only – Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.
Dickens uses this bizarre method of killing off a character to dramatize the consequences of the law's slowness and inefficiency. Krook (who is nicknamed the "Lord Chancellor," and his rag-and-bone shop the "Court of Chancery") apparently dies because the "corrupted humors" of his body couldn't be contained and he exploded.
The "humours" Dickens mentions refer to a classical theory about the personality. The Greeks thought that a person contained four different kinds of fluid, which existed in different quantities within the body and which, if imbalanced, caused personality problems. Krook's humors are "corrupted" because of his close relationship to Chancery. They cause his death, and also signal its cause to his colleagues when they find what's left of him. Dickens states here that all Chancellors (and indeed, all lawyers) will suffer the same "inborn, inbred" fate. Evil deeds, it seems, will literally make a person explode with badness.
The event that prompts the investigation of Krook's rooms after he combusts is one of Dickens's most grisly scenes. The fluids of Krook's "humours" take disgusting physical form. As they look for him, Mr. Snagsby and Mr. Guppy smell burning flesh, observe that they are in a "horrible house," and see a "little thick nauseous pool" of liquid dripping from the ceiling, and "pouring out" through the window. This liquid is from Krook's exploded corpse. What drips through the window and onto Mr. Guppy is the debris of the "corrupted humours" of Krook's "vicious body." The vileness of someone's character is an unpleasant thing to find dripping upon oneself, and Guppy understandably threatens to "cut his hand off" if he can't wash himself clean.
Dickens alludes to classical mythology within a simile in Chapter 32, referencing the Greek myth of Argus Panoptes. Describing the visual imagery of the "clogged lamps" of Chancery as being like the endlessly watching eyes of Argus, the narrator says:
From tiers of staircase windows, clogged lamps like the eyes of Equity, bleared Argus with a fathomless pocket for every eye and an eye upon it, dimly blink at the stars. In dirty upper casements, here and there, hazy little patches of candle-light reveal where some wise draughtsman and conveyancer yet toils for the entanglement of real estate in meshes of sheepskin, in the average ratio of about a dozen of sheep to an acre of land.
Dickens combines the image of the "clogged lamps" of Equity (the law practiced in Chancery) with the "fathomless pockets" of Argus's hundred eyes. Argus, whose job in Greek legends was to watch carefully over a precious treasure, had the special skill of being able to see everywhere at once. Through Dickens's simile, the court of Lincoln's Inn is also symbolically able to do this, as the law "watches" all aspects of British life. The sensory language of this complex passage is all visual, as it all relates to Dickens's allusion to Argus watching his surroundings.
Despite their many "eyes," Dickens describes the Inns' view of life in Britain as "clogged." Although like Argus it is "hundred-eyed," its vision is "bleared" and it can't see anything clearly. Nothing is simple or easily discernible in the view of the law in Bleak House.
The things that can be "seen" in this passage don't paint a brighter picture of life in London, either. The only "clear" images are those of "draughtsmen" and "conveyancers" working through the night. The windows of the Holborn neighborhood are warmly lit, but the light isn't restful. Instead, each pinpoint of light indicates someone working into the small hours on a mundane task. Rather than enjoying the world, these people are stuck at their desks inside the labyrinth of the law courts, working hard on the "entanglement" of things. As Dickens has related the lights of Chancery to the eyes of Argus, each lit lamp symbolically becomes an "eye" on the worker who uses it. The lights of Lincoln's Inn imprison and guard its workers like Argus, another many-eyed monster.
Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock have a "debilitated cousin" who speaks a dialect of English that is so aristocratically British that it's almost nonsense. For example, in Chapter 48 this "cousin" describes Lady Dedlock in the following way, while also alluding to William Shakespeare's play Macbeth:
she’s beauty nough – tsetup Shopofwomen – but rather larming kind – remindingmanfact – inconvenient woman – who will getoutofbedandbawthstablishment – Shakespeare.
Dickens represents this person's speech as it is meant to "sound" in Bleak House, mangling words and phrases to imitate this sort of upper-class accent. This manner of speaking—meant to seem funny to Victorian-era readers—is the author's interpretation of English speech so posh it's practically unintelligible. The cousin's stilted, chortling dialogue misses letters and clumps words together, indicating that he's speaking in a confusing and abbreviated way.
The cousin is saying here that although he thinks Lady Dedlock is beautiful enough to "set up shop of women" (exceed most others), overall he finds her "rather alarming." Dickens goes on to allude to William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, invoking another "larming kind" of woman as he compares Lady Dedlock to the cruel and self-interested Lady Macbeth. The "debilitated cousin" says that like Lady Macbeth, Lady Dedlock is an "inconvenient woman" who might "get out of bed" and "bawthestablishment" ("bawl the establishment," or say something to rock the status quo.)
Like the legal jargon that Mr. Tangle and his lawyer colleagues speak, this kind of English is localized and period-specific to the 1800s. It is comprehensible to the Dedlocks and their friends because they are also presumably able to speak this way, being nobly born themselves. However, it seems nonsensical to the reader until it's looked at carefully, as it's much easier to understand when read aloud. Because it accurately represents how characters like this cousin might have "sounded" to each other, it contributes to the realism of Bleak House.
Although it's meant to amuse a Victorian reader, this "dialect" might seem quite cruel toward a disabled character, if taken out of context. It's difficult to tell whether Dickens means this "cousin" is actually mentally incapacitated, or if he's just "debilitated" by his extremely aristocratic rank and station. However, given how Dickens tends to characterize privileged people as incompetent, this probably amounts to the same thing in Bleak House.
