Bleak House

Bleak House is a novel by the English writer Charles Dickens, first published as a twenty-part serial that ran between 12 March 1852 and 12 September 1853.

The book has a large cast and several subplots, and it is told partly by its heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At its centre is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a long-running case in the Court of Chancery that exists because a testator left several conflicting wills; the case consumes the inheritance it is about and draws the people attached to it into years of waiting. Around it are Ada and Richard Clare, whose prospects the case is devouring, Esther Summerson, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery, the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn, the determined investigator Inspector Bucket, and Jo, a crossing sweeper who knows more than anyone expects. In a preface to the first volume edition, Dickens said there were many real precedents for the fictional case, and one of them was probably Thellusson v Woodford, a will read in 1797 that was not settled until 1859.

Dickens wrote the novel as an attack on the delays and the costs of the Chancery court, and while lawyers criticised the satire as exaggerated, the book supported a movement for judicial reform that ended in legislation in the 1870s.