Bleak House
by Charles Dickens(1853)
Novelc. 800 pages
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.”
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One great work, every day
by Charles Dickens(1853)
“London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.”
Charles Dickens(1853)
The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce drags through the Court of Chancery while generations of litigants wither and die, and Dickens uses it to indict an entire legal system, an entire society. The novel has two narrators: the omniscient voice that opens with fog everywhere, and Esther Summerson, whose modesty hides as much as it reveals. The plot is labyrinthine; the characters proliferate; the satire is savage. Dickens serialized it over nineteen months, and the installment structure shows: subplots multiply, mysteries deepen. The court case ends. The costs have consumed everything. The fog never quite lifts.