ABSTRACT
Bleak House (1853) is pervaded by allusions to Macbeth. There are allusions in the novel to other plays by Shakespeare, but the malignant forces of this particular play effectively enter the novel and coalesce with the evil that emanates from the Court of Chancery. This emanation essentially conveys itself through an extensive range of sinister animal imagery. Creatures such as the crow, the fox (a symbol of calculating watchfulness in the novel), the serpent, and the vampire, all of whose predatory habits readily associate them with such forces, are called upon to represent those individuals who, in their related vocations, sustain and reflect Chancery’s power, and prey on its victims. The black-clad figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s secretive and secret-searching solicitor, Tulkinghorn, for example, brings to mind the crow that ‘makes wing to the rooky wood’ in Macbeth (III, ii, 51) as, in chapter 10, he makes his way eastwards from his dusty nest (the word Dickens repeatedly uses to describe Tulkinghorn’s abode) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Snagsby’s establishment in Cook’s Court, reversing the course just taken by the crow that we have watched skimming through the dusk towards the Fields. It is true that Tulkinghorn is described in the same chapter as an oyster, ‘An Oyster of the old school, whom nobody can open’; 2 but until his murder in chapter 48 his image remains consistently crow-like whether he is in London or in Lincolnshire, for there he is to be seen at Chesney Wold pacing the leads outside his turret room ‘like a larger species of rook’ (p. 175). 3
