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- Great Expectations (1861) Dickens achieved perfection with this gothic masterpiece about the ascent of a blacksmith’s apprentice from the Kent Marshes to the status of affluent London gentleman after he is bequeathed a fortune by a mysterious benefactor.
- David Copperfield (1850) This masterly bildungsroman charts the life and adventures of the eponymous hero, dispatched to live in an upturned boat on Yarmouth beach after his unworldly mother marries the cruel Edward Murdstone.
- Bleak House (1853) Dickens had begun his attack on the in-built absurdities of the bureaucratic behemoth that is the British legal system with Dodson and Fogg in Pickwick and revisited his contention that “the law is an ass” here to extraordinary effect.
- Oliver Twist (1839) Perhaps the best known of the author’s stories outside of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist casts its orphan hero among the thieves of London: Bill Sikes, Fagin and the Artful Dodger.
Aug 2, 2012 · 1. Bleak House. Kelly Hager, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Simmons College. “Not to put too fine a point upon it,” as meek Mr. Snagsby is wont to say, Dickens’s best novel is Bleak House.
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Bleak House, novel by British author Charles Dickens, published serially in 1852–53 and in book form in 1853 and considered to be among the author’s best work. Bleak House is the story of the Jarndyce family, who wait in vain to inherit money from a disputed fortune in the settlement of the extremely long-running lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. T...
The story begins in the High Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has gone on for generations and has “become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.” The current issue concerns two young wards of the court, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, who are seeking permission to take up residence with a distant cousin, Mr. John Jarndyce. Later, the lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn stops by the London home of Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife, Lady Dedlock. She is also connected with the suit, and, as the lawyer goes over affidavits with her, she takes a sudden interest in the handwriting on one of the documents.
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Esther Summerson is then introduced into the story. She was raised by her unfeeling godmother, who died when Esther was almost 14 years old. She then learned that her godmother was actually her aunt and that Mr. Jarndyce was now her guardian. He paid for her education in a boarding school and then engaged her to be a companion to Ada. The three young people arrive at Jarndyce’s home, Bleak House, to a warm welcome. As the novel goes on, Richard tries and discards several vocational options in the belief that he will inherit a substantial sum when the lawsuit is settled, and he and Ada fall in love.
Tulkinghorn learns that the handwriting Lady Dedlock asked about belongs to a copyist named Nemo and that he has died of an opium overdose. The lawyer also meets Jo, a street urchin who declares that Nemo was kind to him. Tulkinghorn subsequently relays this information to Lady Dedlock, and, after disguising herself as her maid, Hortense, she seeks out Jo and asks him to show her every place connected with Nemo. Later Tulkinghorn has a police detective, Inspector Bucket, seek Jo’s help in identifying the woman who was interested in Nemo. Jo recognizes Hortense’s clothing but not Hortense, who has been fired by Lady Dedlock. However, Tulkinghorn has promised to help Hortense find employment in return for her cooperation. Tulkinghorn begins searching for a sample of handwriting from a Captain Hawdon.
A lawyer’s clerk, Mr. William Guppy, tells Lady Dedlock that he has learned that Esther’s name is actually Esther Hawdon and that Nemo’s last name was Hawdon. Lady Dedlock realizes that Esther is her daughter from an affair with Captain Hawdon and that her sister, who had told her that the baby died, had taken Esther and secretly raised her. One day Lady Dedlock encounters Esther and reveals to her that she is her mother. During this time Tulkinghorn succeeds in acquiring a sample of Hawdon’s handwriting.
Legal corruption permeates this novel like a disease, issuing in particular from the Byzantine lawsuit with which all the book’s characters have a connection. Dickens provides his customary witty dissection of the layers of Victorian society. Characters—from the wearyingly earnest to the brilliantly shallow, from the foolish and foppish to the vampiristic and dangerous—are all illuminated in the darkness of Dickens’s outraged urbane opus. In reality, it is the public sphere as a whole that is satirized in Bleak House. Everything resembles Chancery: Parliament, the provincial aristocracy, and even Christian philanthropy is caricatured as moribund and self-serving. The narrative, which is split between the third person and Esther, concerns moral disposition as much as social criticism. The novel has also been hailed as a progenitor of the genre of detective fiction, with the methodical and dogged Inspector Bucket as the first police detective hero in English literature.
The most successful adaptations of Bleak House were television miniseries, including an 8-episode version in 1985, starring Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock and Denholm Elliott as John Jarndyce, and a 15-episode version in 2005.
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As Chesterton put it: "Bleak House is not certainly Dickens's best book; but perhaps it is his best novel". Harold Bloom, in his book The Western Canon, considers Bleak House to be Dickens's greatest novel. Daniel Burt, in his book The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time, ranks Bleak House number 12.
- Charles Dickens, George Harry Ford, Sylvère Monod
- 1852
Sep 23, 2011 · The difference here is that, while Harold Skimpole, Mr Tulkinghorn, Krook et al fizz with bright particularity, their job is to service the story – in Dickens's earlier novels the endless...
Jan 23, 2021 · There are also several books that discuss Bleak House at length: Robert Newsom’s Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition (1977) analyzes the mixture of romantic and realistic elements in the novel as a way of describing Dickens’s work more broadly and his relation to the central tradition of the ...
Bleak House was the ninth novel published by Charles Dickens, appearing in serialized form in twenty instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. Critics generally agree that this is one of the Dickens' most remarkable novels and his most complete.
