7.1 Value profile: responsibility  (Page 9/10)

Responsibility in dickens' bleak house

Character sketches

• Esther Summerson : Esther believes in helping those around her. While she spends almost no time worrying about her own needs, she is entirely focused on those of her surrounding family, guardian, friends, and community. She finds an abstract conception of duty to be both difficult to comprehend and distracting since she is quite busy with helping those in her immediate surroundings.
• Mrs. Jellyby : Jellyby is entirely focused on the plight of the natives of the distant country, Borioboola Gha. She works tirelessly writing letters that inform others of their plight. She organizes activities to raise funds to help develop coffee plantations and to provide hungry children with food. While focused on the distant, she is completely unaware of what is going on around her. Her husband has lost his work and is depressed. Her children—we never know how many—run around unsupervised. There are several servants in the household but they drink, argue among one another, and generally do little to carry out their basic duties. When introduced to Jellyby, Esther notes jellyby’s peculiar habit of looking through one as if she were focused on the distant plight of those in Borrioboola Gha. Dickens calls Jellyby a “telescopic philanthropist.”
• Harold Skimpole : Harold Skimpole presents himself as a child. His lot in life is to give others pleasure by helping him. As for his own situation, he has a family that he neglect but somehow finds ways of attaching himself to those who supply him with the finer things in life: good food, drink, and fine clothes. He incurs debts which he foists off on other by pleading that he is incapable of understanding figures. He is but a child and all he asks for is to be able to live and to enjoy life.
• Richard Carstone : Richard Carstone is a handsome and talented young man. But he has trouble focusing on a career. He engages in studies in medicine and the law but is unable to focus on them and soon abandons them for a career in the military which he also abandons. He is a minor party to a long and complicated lawsuit. He devotes himself to its resolution placing all his hopes and efforts on coming into a substantial inheritance. His guardian, who was initially the source of his trust and love, is later seen by him as an opponent in the lawsuit. He interprets all his guardian’s actions as motivated by the desire to win the lawsuit and to claim the money that properly belongs to him (Richard).
• Mr. Tulkinghorn : Tulkinghorn is a highly regarded lawyer, a keeper and discoverer of secrets. He has a very British view of society. A person’s duty is to stay loyal to the duties of the station in which he or she was born. Those born aristocratic carry out their station of high fashion and the maintenance of large estates while those who are poor are relegated to working in the drastic employments available to their station. His job is to keep people in their stations and to prevent the rise of those who would usurp the stations of those born higher. In this way, he uses the law to maintain the natural order of society.