Jellyby is a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public interests, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa" (IV, 4-10).
If someone applied this remark to anyone else, that person would be considered a nice person who does things for others, but not when applied to Ms. Jellyby. This is one of the ways Charles Dickens shows his disgust of people in Bleak House. Bleak House was written in 1852, in the Victorian time of England. Dickens saw so much wrong with his peers, country, and government that he talked about it in most of his books. Bleak House is one such book, and in it he shows that there are different types of communities, some which work and become representative of Bleak House, and others that fail as such. The communities are families, most of which fail, but some make it through relatively unscathed, and institutions that fail, not just individuals, but society.
As quoted above, one of the main failures shown in Bleak House is the failure of families. In Jellyby's case, she is a woman who is supposed to be this big champion of suffering and underfed people in Africa, but ignores her own children as a result. Esther and Richard make the remark, "She was a pretty woman with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if- and I quote Richard again- they could see nothing nearer than Africa" (IV, 19-23). This shows that even the main characters know that she doesn't care about her own children, just about whatever new crusade she can take up. Another example is Esther. She is a special case, being that she has two failed families, but ends up with a good one. The two she has that fails, is her aunt and her mother. Her aunt, Miss Barbary, and Rachel, both took care of Esther as a child, but they never saw to her mental comfort, just her physical.
