Not only is it a still night on dusty high roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a fringe of trees against the sky with the grey ghost of a bloom upon them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows where the houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it, where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the bolder region of rising grounds, rich in cornfield wind-mill and steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watchers stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light that appears to be presented only to him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest.
pg. 668
The geography of this sentence seems to cover all; we begin on a high hill with a grand view of the surrounding land, behold the river and effortlessly follow its meandering path down to the sea, stop briefly to consider the distant deep, only to be arrested by the vision of a boat coming into a harbor beaconed in by a lighthouse's light, and then come back to rest in the middle of the city of London. At the beginning, it seems the night is the subject; then, the stillness of that night; and by the end of the sentence we discover what we've known all along, that sound is the paragraph's main concern, building up to what will be the crescendo of the passage, where "every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating."
And what is that sound? The noise of life? And why not, after all, characterize it that way? Dickens ranges both high and low to give a full portrait of London society, from street sweepers to Baronets, and weaves together every character's fate in a way that suggests that despite their differences, they all are part of the same entity, this vast vibrating glass, the consciousness contained within the muddy, foggy, wet, dispiriting city of London.
The novel is anchored by an ongoing case in the English courts of equity, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which has gone on for so long with so little progress that the original claimants are long dead and it is their various descendants who stand to reap a reward from its successful resolution, despite the fact that the case is nowhere near its conclusion. In the end, the case is a joke, Dickens's damnation of the entire court, but it serves to draw all the main characters into a common orbit, just as the city does, and there might be a statement inherent in their juxtaposition, where both are foggy, muddy entities around which the huddled masses gather to look for some meaning, the courts seem populated with dust, decay, and a grinding forth of the lowest form of existence--there are no people there, just lawyers, judges, claimants, and cases--whereas the city in contrast seems to sing with sympathetic life, for all the mean tragedies and awful loves won and lost, it is still a wondrously alive thing.
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