Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. The story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. Memorable characters include the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn, the friendly, but depressive John Jarndyce, and the childish and disingenuous Harold Skimpole, as well as the likeable but imprudent Richard Carstone. At the novel's core is long-running litigation in England's Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills, all of them seeking to bequeath money and land surrounding the Manor of Marr in South Yorkshire. The litigation, which already has consumed years and sixty to seventy thousand pounds sterling in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Dickens's assault on the flaws of the British judiciary system is based in part on his own experiences as a law clerk, and in part on his experiences as a Chancery litigant seeking to enforce his copyright on his earlier books. His harsh characterisation of the slow, arcane Chancery law process gave memorable form to pre-existing widespread frustration with the system. Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticized Dickens's portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in enactment of the legal reform in the 1870s. In fact, Dickens was writing just as Chancery was reforming itself, with the Six Clerks and Masters mentioned in Chapter One abolished in 1842 and 1852 respectively: the need for further reform was being widely debated. These facts raise an issue as to when Bleak House is actually set. Technically it must be before 1842, and at least some of his readers at the time would have been aware of this. However, there is some question as to whether this timeframe is consistent with some of the themes of the novel. The great English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth (see below), set the action in 1827.
Preface
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of acompany of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring underany suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though theshining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thoughtthe judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate ofprogress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing tothe "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared,had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by nomeans enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believeby Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body ofthis book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or toMr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must haveoriginated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an aptquotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:
"My nature is subduedTo what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!"But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should knowwhat has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, Imention here that everything set forth in these pages concerningthe Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth.
The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actualoccurrence, made public by a disinterested person who wasprofessionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrongfrom beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) thereis a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty yearsago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known toappear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amountof seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is(I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it wasbegun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yetdecided, which was commenced before the close of the last centuryand in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand poundshas been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities forJarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to theshame of--a parsimonious public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.
The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has beendenied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes(quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to havebeen abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious lettersto me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing thatspontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need toobserve that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readersand that before I wrote that description I took pains toinvestigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record,of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de BaudiCesenate, was minutely investigated and described by GiuseppeBianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished inletters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which heafterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond allrational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observedin Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous instance happened atRheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat,one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subjectwas a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of havingmurdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he wasacquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had diedthe death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. Ido not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and thatgeneral reference to the authorities which will be found at page30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences ofdistinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, inmore modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall notabandon the facts until there shall have been a considerablespontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrencesare usually received.
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side offamiliar things.
Preface
18/11/2017
Chapter 1 In Chancery
18/11/2017
Chapter 2 In Fashion
18/11/2017
Chapter 3 A Progress
18/11/2017
Chapter 4 Telescopic Philanthropy
18/11/2017
Chapter 5 A Morning Adventure
18/11/2017
Chapter 6 Quite at Home
18/11/2017
Chapter 7 The Ghost's Walk
18/11/2017
Chapter 8 Covering a Multitude of Sins
18/11/2017
Chapter 9 Signs and Tokens
18/11/2017
Chapter 10 The Law-Writer
18/11/2017
Chapter 11 Our Dear Brother
18/11/2017
Chapter 12 On the Watch
18/11/2017
Chapter 13 Esther's Narrative
18/11/2017
Chapter 14 Deportment
18/11/2017
Chapter 15 Bell Yard
18/11/2017
Chapter 16 Tom-all-Alone's
18/11/2017
Chapter 17 Esther's Narrative
18/11/2017
Chapter 18 Lady Dedlock
18/11/2017
Chapter 19 Moving On
18/11/2017
Chapter 20 A New Lodger
18/11/2017
Chapter 21 The Smallweed Family
18/11/2017
Chapter 22 Mr. Bucket
18/11/2017
Chapter 23 Esther's Narrative
18/11/2017
Chapter 24 An Appeal Case
18/11/2017
Chapter 25 Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All
18/11/2017
Chapter 26 Sharpshooters
18/11/2017
Chapter 27 More Old Soldiers Than One
18/11/2017
Chapter 28 The Ironmaster
18/11/2017
Chapter 29 The Young Man
18/11/2017
Chapter 30 Esther's Narrative
18/11/2017
Chapter 31 Nurse and Patient
18/11/2017
Chapter 32 The Appointed Time
18/11/2017
Chapter 33 Interlopers
18/11/2017
Chapter 34 A Turn of the Screw
18/11/2017
Chapter 35 Esther's Narrative
18/11/2017
Chapter 36 Chesney Wold
18/11/2017
Chapter 37 Jarndyce and Jarndyce
18/11/2017
Chapter 38 A Struggle
18/11/2017
Chapter 39 Attorney and Client
18/11/2017
Other books by Charles Dickens
More