After Miss Barbary dies, John Jarndyce becomes Esther's guardian and assigns the Chancery lawyer 'Conversation' Kenge to take charge of her future. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is an interminable law case in the Court of Chancery, concerning two or more wills and their beneficiaries.Įsther Summerson is raised by the harsh Miss Barbary, who tells her 'Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers'. The English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth sets the action in 1827 however, reference to preparation for the building of a railway in Chapter LV suggests the 1830s.

Some scholars debate when Bleak House is set. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, Bleak House helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s. One such was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens said there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. The novel has many characters and several subplots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson and partly by an omniscient narrator. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.Illustration from the New York Public Library Berg Collectionīleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs.'Īs the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. The Penguin English Library Edition of Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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