Charles Dickens

Bleak House

Sarah Sammis

It's a heavy volume of 1034 pages (that includes the intro and many appendices). 

What is the Bleak House? It is an old mansion, home of John Jarndyce and his three wards: Ester, Ada and Richard. It is also the squalid conditions of Tom's-All-Alone. It is the bleak out come of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. It is the Victorian shame of an illegimate child. There are many bleak houses in this book. 

Bleak House carries a warning against the excesses of nuisance suits and the danger of a laissez-faire government which it wraps up in a delightful albeit complex and dense comedic romance of a young woman supposedly orphaned and sent to live with her guardian who is stuck in a generations long lawsuit over an estate. Interestingly, I recently read an American story that obviously borrowed heavily from Bleak House. To anyone who enjoys Bleak House, I recommend The Big Mogul by Joseph C. Lincoln.

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly instalments 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 a mostly 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 v Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills. The litigation, which already has taken many years and consumed between £60,000 and £70,000 in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Dickens's assault on the flaws of the British judicial 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 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 criticised Dickens's portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in the enactment of 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.[1] 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 the themes of the novel. The English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth set the action in 1827.

Bleak House (Illustrated)

Gabe Cortez

Barbara Williford

Bleak House is filled with so many wonderful and colorful characters. Follow the journey of Esther, an orphan girl taken in by her guardian and befriended by the Jarndyce cousins. There are many subplots surrounding all the many characters with vivid detail and descriptions. From humor to heartbreak, love to death, wealth to poverty, Bleak House is filled with stories surrounding the court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

Bleak Houseis Dickens's most enigmatic and masterly novel; a savage, blackly comic indictment of a legal system that devours the innocent and a society that is rotten to the core, from upper-class drawing rooms to foggy London slums. As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the courts, it threatens to destroy everyone in its wake, from Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, whose inheritance is gradually consumed by costs, to Esther Summerson, whose parentage is a deepening and scandalous mystery.

Isa s

I really feel that this review won’t (and can’t) do the book justice, because I really struggled with this audiobook. I listened to the free LibriVox edition read by Mil Nicholson. She gives every character it’s separate voice, which is a good thing. But somehow her voice didn’t hold my attention. I couldn’t concentrate on listening to the audiobook; or at least I couldn’t remember long after listening what I had actually listened to. I think the main problem in this case was that Mil sometimes overdid it with the character voices, making it too slow or too strident.
In-between classes I sometimes read some passages as ebook, so I got into the book around halfway through (then my listening experience also improved a bit) and by the end I had gotten enough content to know that I actually like it. I really loved the ending. I’ll probably reread it one day (really reading this time; or an audiobook with another narrator).
This is certainly one of the few audiobook-editions that I can’t recommend.

** spoiler alert **
           I LOVED THIS BOOK!! definitely one of my favorites! the intricate web of characters and plots was so fascinating and i personally fell in love with Esther! I loved her goodness and the light she brought to the novel, i thought her story was inspiring and i loved her connections and care for everyone in the novel. The descriptions, while lengthy, were another piece i really liked about the storytelling of the novel and i liked the way the story unfolded. I didn’t see a lot of things coming and i really have the urge to go back and reread it now that i know where it all leads up to! Jarndyce was such a lovely character as well, along with Ada and Charley and while I really grew to dislike Richard, I cried when he passed. I also really liked Lady Dedlock, she was such a complex character and her freezing to death after being called “cold” in the early bits of the novel was awful yet brilliant!! I had to read this for class, and I’m glad I did because I didn’t know what to expect when I started and it isn’t something I would have read on my own. Wonderful writing, wonderful plot, loved every moment!

Terry Eagleton

In the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance.

Jade Flynn

Grand, technically virtuosic, with a Kafkaesque court case that you never really understand. A labyrinthian book.

Francine Corry

Bruce Erickson

Tom Gregson

iamazoo

Hannah Swithinbank

Juliana

Bleak house

Boothby

Gillian Rose

MK Rosencrants

Aaron McCollough

Vivian

Yuvraj Jha

Haley Murray

Cal Desmond‐Pearson

Noha Abdelaziz

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - -between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket. And it is a fable about redemption, in which a bleak house is transformed by the resilience of human love.

Bleak House

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