They leave flavour of their graves behind them

 

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Two passages from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House are a reminder of the demise of country houses. In this case it’s the demise of the fictional Dedlock family and Chesney Wold, their ancient family seat in Lincolnshire.


Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.

Charles Dickens - Bleak House (1852-53)


Even by Dickens’ time, the lure of a cosmopolitan life had created a sharp contrast with the staid life of managing a country estate with its onerous management, upkeep costs and predictable social routines. It was a trend all Dickens’ readers would have known about, linked to social changes which came with railways, steamships and new sources of wealth.

Now we have the National Trust looking after many of those country houses, an organisation mired in its own organic, low-carbon, midwit limitations. The NT never seems to bring out the vast significance of it all, the migration of the ruling class from country estate to cosmopolitan city life and on to fashionable resorts across the world. The trend continues.


But the house in town, which is rarely in the same mind as Chesney Wold at the same time, seldom rejoicing when it rejoices or mourning when it mourns, excepting when a Dedlock dies—the house in town shines out awakened. As warm and bright as so much state may be, as delicately redolent of pleasant scents that bear no trace of winter as hothouse flowers can make it, soft and hushed so that the ticking of the clocks and the crisp burning of the fires alone disturb the stillness in the rooms, it seems to wrap those chilled bones of Sir Leicester’s in rainbow-coloured wool.

Charles Dickens – Bleak House