Bleak House

Perhaps his best novel ... when Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up G. K. ChestertonAs the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada Clare and Richard Carstone whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson a ward of court; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo a destitute crossing-sweeper. A savage indictment of a society that is rotten to the core Bleak House is one of Dickenss most ambitious novels with a range that extends from the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy to the London slums.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Nicola Bradbury with a Preface by Terry Eagleton Review “PerhapsBleak House is his best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” -G. K. Chesterton About the Author Charles Dickens (1812-70) is one of the most recognized celebrities of English literature. His many books includeOliver Twist Great Expectations andA Christmas Carol. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneIn ChanceryLondon. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincolns Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurusforty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning one might imagine for the death of the sun. Dogs undistinguishable in mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers jostling one anothers umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper and losing their foot-hold at street corners where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke) adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement and accumulating at compound interest.Fog everywhere. 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. Fog on the Essex marshes fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwalesof barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog with fog all round them as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets much as the sun may from the spongey fields be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time-as the gas seems to know for it has a haggard and unwilling look.The raw afternoon is rawest and the dense fog is densest and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar in Lincolns Inn Hall at the very heart of the fog sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.Never can there come fog too thick never can there come mud and mire too deep to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery most pestilent of hoary sinners h