Agent Scully does Lady Dedlock.  My battered Penguin with Gillian Anderson on the cover.

There are still a couple of Dickens' I haven't read yet (Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop) and though you may be shocked by this admission I am glad, since they give me something to look forward to, for I am finding Dickens as enjoyable now as when I was twelve.   Perhaps even more so.  Who else can capture so vividly the realities of the vast extremes of wealth and poverty in a corrupt society, from the grand estates of the entitled elite to the unspeakable filth and abject misery of the slums?  "A savage, but often comic indictment of a society that is rotten to the core," as my Penguin back copy reads.  No wonder Bleak House seems so modern.

The news lately is that Americans are staying put, not moving about as much as we did when the housing market was strong.  But of course, nothing compares with what the English will do to hold on to their homes (and associated fortunes), at least those like Mr Jarndyce with his Bleak House and Lord and Lady Dedlock with their stately manor Chesney Wold.  Jane Mulvagh, in Madresfield, The Real Brideshead (London: Doubleday, 2008) tells the story of one house (Madresfield), and one family (the Lygon family) who have kept that house for nearly one thousand years, including a battle fought in the High Court of Chancery similar to that of the fictional Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Bleak House.  The Lygon family fought claimants to the so-called "Jennens Inheritance" in a case that dragged on for 170 years, as generation after generation stepped forward to stake a claim.  "A mythology grew up around the Jennens Inheritance," Mulvagh writes.  "Unexpected legacies were the stuff of Victorian dreams, promising unparalleled social advancement... many hung their hopes on such pipe dreams and were encouraged by the plots of Victorian novels -- a sub-genre which was dubbed 'the fiction of probate' -- in which lives were transformed by a vast inheritance or wasted in the expectation of one." (Mulvagh, p. 130-131). [NB: Hon. Hugh Patrick Lygon, 1904-1936, said to be Waugh's model for Brideshead's Sebastian]

I recently went on Google Maps to find that, inexplicably, high-resolution visuals exist of the little town where I grew up -- I say inexplicably since I want to assure you that far more important parts of this country remain to be photographed at this impressive level of detail.  I was even able to view a bare patch of field where the house I was raised in once stood, surrounded by tidy squares and rough oblongs of leafless woods and hillside (the photography done, one can safely assume, in early Spring).  I could move the little Google Man to stand on the road.  I could see the ridge beyond and the barn which was, inexplicably, still there.  I realize that people who have grown up in the Rain Forest or in various War Zones around the world must be accustomed to the experience of returning to the places they remembered and loved to find nothing left, or nothing but smoldering ruins and empty space, or nothing but tree stumps, but I must confess, to do so courtesy of satelite photography on your home computer is a trifle disconcerting.  A thousand years?  My family didn't make it through one generation.  A local developer bought the property from the people we sold it to, even before my dad died.  The new owner "accidentally" burned down the house but saved the barn. 

Still, the question of housing aside, you only need to leaf through an old issue of Vanity Fair with the latest article on Bernie Madoff or watch the HBO remake about Grey Gardens (the Bouvier Bleak House), to realize nothing has changed all that much from Dickens' time.  There are still plenty of folks clinging to the wealth and position they had once or else dreaming pipe dreams of quick wealth and unparalleled social advancement.  Conniving lawyers, pompous sycophants, duplicitous money-lenders, delusional ladies with secrets, the desperate rich and the poor who are doomed to be duped by them -- Bleak House could have been written yesterday.