Extract

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, fog down the river, fog creeping into the courts of Chancery where a lawsuit called Jarndyce and Jarndyce has ground on for generations, devouring fortunes and lives. Charles Dickens's 1853 masterpiece is the great novel of institutional England, a labyrinth of destinies stretching from the slums of Tom-all-Alone's to the aristocratic decay of Chesney Wold. Two narrators share the telling: one omniscient and scathing, the other a quiet young woman piecing together the secret of her own birth. Dickens populates his world with such ferocious abundance that the novel becomes a living city. It is his darkest work, a cathedral built to house the knowledge that the law devours those it claims to protect.