Patricia Ingham, Ed.: Bleak House

Patricia Ingham, ed. Bleak House. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2011. Pp. 832. $19.95. This book is presumably intended for undergraduate use; it seems in some respects modeled after popular Norton Critical editions. Unfortunately, few undergraduates will find this volume useful, and even fewer scholars (or librarians) will want to add it to their collections. Ingham's introduction attempts to give a kind of overview of social and literary context of novel, and to touch on some of Dickens's key themes, techniques, and characters. But introduction is poorly crafted, with weak organization, slack attention to detail, and some unconvincing ideas. Ingham describes Dickens as having a manic personality (17), and as having written only of his major by 1853 (18). In a consideration of literary context of Bleak House, Ingham identifies two types of Victorian social novels, of pre-1840s ... and those of post-1840s (19), offering Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charlotte Bronte's Shirley as two examples of each type--but four novels she mentions were originally published in 1840, 1841, 1848, and 1849, and thus belong to neither category. In her discussion of Dickensian language, Ingham notes that his ungrammatical sentences add an almost poetic force to opening description of what she terms a London peculiar (Dickens himself calls fog a London particular) (25). In her interpretation of novel, Ingham feels that Judgement, Equity, and Circle are Key Terms in Novel (28), and indeed they are important, but are they more so than, say, love, duty, family, or identity? She offers an eccentric interpretation of Esther's deadly story when she is married to Woodcourt, with Esther's final speech cut off by some outside censor (40). Ingham concludes her interpretation with a look at film adaptations, in which she confuses versions from 1920 and 1985 (41), and mentions Richard Carstone, and end of Chancery suit, only in connection with 1985 film (42). She concludes her introductory essay on an odd note, saying that happy ending of 2005 film predated global economic downturn by some (43). Ingham's writing relies with wearying frequency on passive constructions, scare-quotes, italics, and free-floating demonstrative pronouns. Some of her sloppy sentences simply don't make sense: for example, she writes, Dickens, had written years erler [sic], makes same point (31). More disturbingly, her introduction contains over 40 misquotations from Bleak House, and from other sources she reprints in appendices, which may make readers question her editorial skills. In a brief note on text, Ingham says her edition is based on the first complete volume publication in 1853, and provides information about chapters included in each of original serial parts. Ingham notes that she corrects short list of items Dickens included in his list of errata, and says she also corrects what are obviously typographical errors (49). But what is an obvious typo to one reader may not be obvious to another, and in absence of an emendations list there is simply no way for a reader to reconstruct original readings of Ingham's copy-text. Without this ability, reproducing Dickens's first edition text--itself a fine idea--loses its value. My collation of first four chapters of Ingham's text with first serial installment reveals two omitted commas, seven relocated semicolons, a superfluous capitalization, two instances of roman type where Dickens clearly gives italics, and two added close-quotes. The close-quotes are necessary corrections, and one might argue, I suppose, that any semicolon inside close-quotes is an error, whether or not Dickens thought so. But surely omission of commas, and of italics, are faults, and in any case, a responsible editor needs to be quite clear about precisely how she is fiddling with her copy-text. …

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