(0)

Bleak House

E-book


"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.

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. 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.

Characters in Bleak House:

As usual, Dickens drew upon many real people and places but imaginatively transformed them in his novel. Hortense is based on the Swiss maid and murderess Maria Manning. The "telescopic philanthropist" Mrs Jellyby, who pursues distant projects at the expense of her duty to her own family, is a criticism of women activists like Caroline Chisholm. The "childlike" but ultimately amoral character Harold Skimpole is commonly regarded as a portrait of Leigh Hunt. "Dickens wrote in a letter of 25 September 1853, 'I suppose he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words! ... It is an absolute reproduction of a real man'; and a contemporary critic commented, 'I recognized Skimpole instantaneously; ... and so did every person whom I talked with about it who had ever had Leigh Hunt's acquaintance.'"[2] G. K. Chesterton suggested that Dickens "may never once have had the unfriendly thought, 'Suppose Hunt behaved like a rascal!'; he may have only had the fanciful thought, 'Suppose a rascal behaved like Hunt!'". Mr Jarndyce's friend Mr Boythorn is based on the writer Walter Savage Landor.

The novel also includes one of the first detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket. This character is probably based on Inspector Charles Frederick Field of the then recently formed Detective Department at Scotland Yard. Dickens wrote several journalistic pieces about the Inspector and the work of the detectives in Household Words, his weekly periodical in which he also published articles attacking the Chancery system. The Jarndyce and Jarndyce case itself has reminded many readers of the thirty-year Chancery case over Charlotte Smith's father-in-law's will.

Major characters:

Esther Summerson – the heroine of the story, and one of its two narrators (Dickens's only female narrator), raised as an orphan because the identity of her parents is unknown. At first, it seems probable that her guardian, John Jarndyce, is her father because he provides for her. This, however, he disavows shortly after she comes to live under his roof.



  1. Oliver Twist

    Charles Dickens

    audiobookbook
  2. Oliver Twist

    Charles Dickens, Tiny Fisscher

    audiobookbook
  3. De strijd van het leven

    Charles Dickens

    audiobook
  4. David Copperfield

    Charles Dickens

    audiobookbook
  5. David Copperfield

    Charles Dickens

    audiobookbook
  6. 50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die vol: 1 (2020 Edition) : Included: Little Women, The Richest Man in Babylon Emma, The Call Of The Wild ....

    Louisa May Alcott, Dante Alighieri, Marcus Aurelius, Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Miguel de Cervantes, Agatha Christie, George S. Clason, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, Zane Grey, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Napoleon Hill, Homer, Victor Hugo, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Washington Irving, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Leo Tolstoy, H.P. Lovecraft, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Joseph Murphy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Publius, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Sun Tzu, Lew Wallace, Wallace D. Wattles, H.G. Wells

    book
  7. Oliver Twist

    Charles Dickens

    audiobookbook
  8. 50 Timeless Masterpieces (Volume 1) : Essential Classics for a Rich Literary Journey

    Homer, Sun Tzu, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, L. M. Montgomery, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, George Orwell

    book
  9. 90 Masterpieces You Must Read (Vol.1) : Novels, Poetry, Plays, Short Stories, Essays, Psychology & Philosophy: The Madman, Moby-Dick, Siddhartha, Crime and Punishment, Hamlet, Great Expectations, Little Women, Meditations, The Einstein Theory, Heart of Darkness, The Red Badge of Courage

    Walt Whitman, Herman Hesse, George Eliot, Kahlil Gibran, Anton Chekhov, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Leo Tolstoy, Benito Pérez Galdós, William Makepeace Thackeray, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, R.D. Blackmore, Alexandre Dumas, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Princess Der Ling, Victor Hugo, Juan Valera, Anthony Trollope, Stephen Crane, E. M. Forster, Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Cavendish, Upton Sinclair, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu, Voltaire, Miguel de Cervantes, Giovanni Boccaccio, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, H. A. Lorentz, Wallace D. Wattles, James Allen, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. P. Lovecraft, Washington Irving, Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Selma Lagerlöf, Jack London, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Soseki Natsume, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen

    book
  10. A Christmas Carol : Een kerstverhaal van Charles Dickens, gelezen door meesterverteller Rein Edzard

    Charles Dickens

    audiobook
  11. Spectres, Spooks & Spirits : A Ghostly Anthology

    Algernon Blackwood, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Bob Holland, James, Leonora Lang, E. Nesbit, Elizabeth Semple

    audiobook
  12. 50 Masterpieces You Must Read Before You Die: Volume 2 : Timeless Classics That Will Enrich Your Mind and Soul

    Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Miguel de Cervantes, E. E. Cummings, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Daniel Defoe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Victor Hugo, The griffin classics

    book