In the Library
Bleak House
Charles Dickens, 1853
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 26 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 68
- Length
- Length 353k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot matches the same panoramic ambition, but maps society through marriages where Dickens maps it through lawsuits.
£1.99
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Hugo builds the same cathedral-sized novel around injustice, but with more mercy and less fog.
£1.99
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Kafka distils Jarndyce and Jarndyce to its essence: a case that devours everyone who touches it.
£1.99
About the book
Fog everywhere: fog up the river, fog down the river, and at its densest heart the High Court of Chancery, where the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on so long that no living soul can say what it was first about. This is Dickens at his angriest and his grandest, the book where the antagonist is not a person but a process: a court that swallows fortunes and lifetimes at its own glacial pace, patient, impartial, and bottomless. Around that pit he assembles a whole nation. A great lady at Chesney Wold keeps a secret that could ruin her; a boy named Jo who sweeps a crossing and, knowing nothing and taught nothing, carries disease between the classes that swear they never touch. Two voices share the telling, one rising above the machine to watch it whole, the other Esther Summerson, who can measure the worth of everyone in England except herself. You come to it for the fog, and you leave unable to get it back out of your lungs.