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What is Bleak House about?
What is the plot of Bleak House by Charles Dickens?
What is the plot of Bleak House by John Jarndyce?
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Bleak House Full Book Summary. Esther Summerson describes her childhood and says she is leaving for the home of a new guardian, Mr. Jarndyce, along with Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. On the way to the home, called Bleak House, they stop overnight at the Jellybys’ chaotic home.
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- Bleak House: Study Guide
Overview. Bleak House, published serially from 1852 to 1853,...
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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.
Synopsis. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is an interminable law case in the Court of Chancery, concerning two or more wills and their beneficiaries. Frontispiece, Chesney Wold, home of Sir Leicester Dedlock. Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife Honoria live on his estate at Chesney Wold. Lady Dedlock is a beneficiary under one of the wills.
- Charles Dickens, George Harry Ford, Sylvère Monod
- Serialised 1852–1853; book form 1853
- 1852
- Novel
Bleak House Summary. Lady Dedlock, the wife of aristocratic nobleman Sir Leicester Dedlock, is extremely bored in her fashionable London townhouse. She is considered a cold, haughty woman, but there is a rumor that she is not of noble birth and that Sir Leicester married her despite this.
The plot of the story is set amid the uncompromising slowness and the Byzantine character of the law and the Court of Justice (Chancery). It has been argued that the novel helped bring about reforms in the legal system. John Jarndyce is the owner of an estate called Bleak House, which gives its name to the title.
Bleak House is a novel by English Victorian author Charles Dickens, published between 1852-1853. The expansive narrative covers many plots, including the first-person account of the life of Esther Summerson and an ongoing court case concerning a large inheritance thrown into chaos by the existence of contradictory wills.
