Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Bleak House
FictionMysteryClassicsComing of AgeFamily & Domestic Fiction
138 chapters·43h 30m listening
4.02from 116,629 ratingson Goodreads
"Bleak House" by Charles Dickens is a novel published between 1852 and 1853. At its center lies Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an endless legal case in the Court of Chancery involving conflicting wills. The story follows Esther Summerson, an orphan with a mysterious past, and Lady Dedlock, an aristocrat harboring a dangerous secret. As a lawyer investigates Lady Dedlock's hidden connection to a deceased pauper, multiple lives become entangled in the grinding machinery of the law, leading to revelation, illness, murder, and tragedy in fog-shrouded London.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published in monthly parts in 1852 and 1853, Bleak House opens in the London fog that surrounds the Court of Chancery, where the inheritance case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on for generations. Esther Summerson, an orphan taken in by John Jarndyce, becomes companion to his young wards, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, who are themselves parties to the suit. Charles Dickens alternates Esther’s own narrative with a sweeping present-tense narrator, moving from aristocratic Chesney Wold to the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s. The novel attacks a legal system that consumes the lives caught up in it, and binds its many characters together through a secret in the past of Lady Dedlock, pursued by one of English fiction’s first police detectives, Inspector Bucket.
Characters
Esther Summerson — Narrator
A modest young woman taken into John Jarndyce's household who gradually confronts the mystery of her origins.
John Jarndyce — Guardian
The generous master of Bleak House, weary of the lawsuit that bears his family name.
Ada Clare — Ward of Chancery
A gentle young woman placed under Jarndyce's care alongside her cousin Richard.
Richard Carstone — Ward of Chancery
An uncertain young man whose hopes become increasingly bound to the family lawsuit.
Lady Dedlock — Aristocrat
A fashionable woman whose concealed past threatens the security of her position.
Mr. Tulkinghorn — Lawyer
The Dedlock family's secretive legal adviser, intent on discovering what Lady Dedlock hides.
Inspector Bucket — Detective
An observant police officer whose investigations connect the novel's households and mysteries.
Jo — Crossing-sweeper
A homeless boy whose precarious life exposes the neglect surrounding the legal and social establishment.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was the defining English novelist of the Victorian age and, in his own lifetime, its most famous writer. When his father was imprisoned for debt the twelve-year-old Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory, and the experience runs under everything he wrote about childhood, poverty and institutions that fail the people in them. Publishing in monthly instalments, he wrote for an audience that read each part as it appeared, which is part of why his books are built of cliffhangers and crowds of minor characters nobody forgets. His novels include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.