***THE NOVEL***
In chapter 22 of Bleak House, I came across a particularly depressing section. Mr. Bucket and Mr. Snagsby have gone to Tom-all-Alone's to find Jo, and while they are looking for him, they come across two women. They are the wives of brickmakers from Hertfordshire, two destitute women, one with a newborn baby. Bucket notices the child, and asks how old it is, the answer; three weeks. Bucket asks whose child it is, and a very disturbing quote emerges: "'I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died.' 'Ah, Jenny, Jenny!' says the other woman to her; 'better so. Much better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!" Now this disturbs Bucket as well as the reader, and he questions the woman about it. Her reply in summary is that she is scared of how the boy is to be brought up in such a horrible environment, with an abusive father, and what good kind of life could he possibly have? She knows his life will be hard, and he will become hardened by its roughness. She loves the child so much that she wishes for him to not have to experience this harsh existence, an existence very similar to Jo's, I would imagine. In this passage, we see how the novel is threaded in a way that Dickens sheds light on the plight of the poor. It's a topic we discussed in class; the hopelessness of the poor in London at that time. From the very beginning of the book, Dickens described the never-ending fog, the black sooty flakes falling from the sky, the mud, the ash, the filth- it's a recurring theme throughout the novel. I think Dickens was perhaps trying to do something to help by describing an awful place like Tom-all-Alone's. The passage I have described is so sad; it pulls at the heartstrings that this woman would rather have her child die than have him experience his life as a poor child out on the streets of London. She doesn't mean it literally, of course, but it strikes the reader to the core- at least it struck me that way.