Bleak House was written by Charles Dickens and first appeared in twenty monthly parts from Mar. 1852 to Sept. 1853. Dickens (1812-1870) is arguably the most important and popular British writer of all time. Bleak House is a vastly entertaining work which has been called by at least one critic the greatest British novel of the nineteenth century.¹

Bleak House is about two things: “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” a never-ending lawsuit of several generations’ standing, and Esther Summerson, a poor woman who endures a loveless childhood. When Esther is fourteen her cruel godmother dies, and Esther is taken into the care of John Jarndyce, a descendant of the original Jarndyces. Mr. Jarndyce brings Esther to his country mansion, Bleak House, to be the companion of his cousins Ada and Richard, who are Esther’s age. All three become fast friends.

Meanwhile Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, a well-to-do couple in Lincolnshire, become involved in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case when their lawyer, the formidable Mr. Tulkinghorn, shows Lady Dedlock a document whose handwriting causes Lady Dedlock to faint. Tulkinghorn is intrigued and traces the document, which reveals that Lady Dedlock had, years before, had a child out of wedlock: Esther herself.

Esther’s friend Richard, who is part of the Jarndyce case, becomes obsessed with the suit. He abandons all efforts to establish a career and devotes himself to solving the case. Richard’s obsession leads to a separation, but Ada marries Richard so that Richard can use her money to pay off the debts he incurs. Esther falls badly ill with smallpox, and when she recovers Lady Dedlock reveals herself to Esther as her mother. Mr. Jarndyce proposes marriage to Esther, and she happily accepts. Tulkinghorn, who is subtly blackmailing Lady Dedlock, is murdered, and the indomitable policeman Inspector Bucket begins pursuing his murderer, eventually catching her.

Finally Jarndyce’s will is found. Richard and Ada are declared the heirs, but the suit has gone on so long that the entire fortune has been eaten up by the court costs. This shock destroys Richard’s health, and he dies soon after the declaration, so that Mr. Jarndyce is left to take care of Ada and her son. Jarndyce realizes that Esther feels gratitude and great affection for him, not love, and that her true love is Allan Woodcourt, a doctor who had testified in the suit, and Jarndyce releases her from their agreement. She marries Allan, and they live happily ever after.

There are angry novels that are single-minded in their anger: Emile Zola’s Nana (1879-1880), for example, is angry at French society, and returns to that anger, over and over. But Dickens, in Bleak House, wanted to do something more. He wanted to panoramically create in fiction the world of Britain, circa 1852, from top to bottom, and then condemn it wholesale. And he succeeded, in a novel of sustained fury.

During the 1840s English philosophers and legislators were forced to deal with the byproducts of the eighteenth century’s economic growth. These problems, which included gross urban overpopulation, insufficient housing, bad sanitation, and high levels of unemployment, were described by the writer Thomas Carlyle as “the Condition of England.”² Writers from Benjamin Disraeli (in Coningsby [1844]) to Mrs. Gaskell (in Mary Barton [1848] and North and South [1854-1855]) wrote novels, variously called “Condition of England novels,” “industrial fiction,” and “social problem novels,” which examined the changes in the social classes and social structure and the current state of England. Bleak House is a Condition of England novel in which the Condition of England is stagnant, diseased, and infuriating. 1851 was year of the Great Exhibition in London, an international exhibition meant to show the world that England was the world leader in industrial and social achievement. Dickens wrote Bleak House as a rebuke to the Great Exhibition–in the words of Daniel Burt, the novel is “a dissenting vision in which Dickens portrayed not an age of progress but a stagnated society, ruled by a crippling selfishness that refused to acknowledge social obligations or the inextricable link between the haves and the have-nots.”³

One of Dickens’ specific intents in writing Bleak House was to savage the British legal system for its backwardness, its almost malicious slowness, and its horrible, self-serving maze of laws which served the lawyers and their bank accounts far more than it served those unfortunate enough to become involved in a suit. Dickens succeeded; no modern reader of Bleak House can read its portrayal of Jarndyce and Jarndyce without feeling contempt for the legal system and some small measure of satisfaction that, even with their flaws, modern, civilized legal systems are not nearly so ghastly:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless....

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle who was not well used when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off hand manner never meant to go right.⁴

Secondarily, Dickens shows his fury at the state of the poor of London, whose plight is empathetically and at times harrowingly shown. Oscar Wilde (see: The Picture of Dorian Gray) reportedly said of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”⁵ Of Bleak House, only those readers without a heart altogether will read the death of Jo, a poor street sweeper boy, without feeling pity and sadness. (As Vladimir Nabokov points out, miserable children are one of the themes of Bleak House⁶). One of the usual criticisms of Dickens is that he is emotionally manipulative and too sentimental–that, as Aldous Huxley wrote, “whenever in writing he becomes emotional, he ceases instantly to use his intelligence.”⁷ There are certainly moments in Bleak House when Dickens’ gush of almost saccharine sweetness can be too much. But far more often he is “emotional” in writing about the desperation and crushingly difficult lives of his poor characters, of the hopelessness of the victims of the British legal system and the wasted lives of those entangled in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, of the damage done to children whose activist parents care far more about those who live far away than about their own families. The longer death scenes in Bleak House are blatantly manipulative attempts to wring tears from the reader, but there are many more moments when Dickens writes about those done wrong by society, and in those moments Dickens is more economical, much less didactic, extremely effective, and not at all lacking intelligence.

In one regard Dickens is not sentimental at all. There is comedy and laughter to be had from Bleak House, but there is a lot of sadness, as well. Dickens shows no hesitation in killing off characters, from significant ones, like Richard Carstone and Lady Dedlock, to minor ones, like the death of the baby of the homeless woman Jenny and the deaths of the parents of Charley, who becomes Esther’s assistant. Dickens’ purpose may have been to arouse emotions and manipulate the reader, but he also shows a fitting hardness. The world of Bleak House is a harsh one, and Dickens does not soften the blows, from the painful unhappiness of the Jellyby family and the Jellyby marriage to the gruesome spontaneous combustion scene of the junk dealer Krook to Esther’s disfigurement. Some of the most damaging characters are, realistically, not villains but simply self-centered people, like the monstrously selfish Mr. Skimpole. And hypocritical and heartless activists like Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, and vain, empty evangelicals like Mr. Chadband, are given a well-deserved back-of-the-hand by Dickens.

Anger of course is not enough to create a great novel. To achieve greatness, enormous skill is required, and that Dickens has in abundance. The plot of Bleak House is intricate–the above summary does not do the plot justice in the slightest–and as a whole it is Dickens’ most ambitious novel.

He is enormously entertaining in his language–as the long passage quoted above shows. The use of the mot juste, the memorable image heaped on top of memorable image, the wisdom regarding human character, the sometimes dark humor–they are all there. As Nabokov says, “all we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over.”⁸ Dickens of course has a multitude of virtues as a novelist, so that it is clear, on reading Bleak House, why he is called the greatest of the Victorian novelists. His only fault, and this may not bother most readers, is that the book is very long, but the cast of Bleak House is large, and a great deal happens, and therefore Dickens needs the space to resolve all the many plots.

Dickens is splendid. He can make the modern reader laugh out loud, which is no small thing for a book a century and a half old. His descriptions are generally marvelous, so that places, like Chesney Wold and London, become characters. Dickens’ names—“Caddy Jellyby,” “Mrs. Pardiggle,” “Mr. Turveydrop”—are so wonderfully idiosyncratic and singular that his very name has been adopted for use as a descriptive: “Dickensian” says as much as any adjective. He splendidly succeeds in creating an entire society, with members of the highest and lowest classes, so that the entire world of Bleak House feels real in a way that few other fictional worlds do. Dickens has vivid, colorful characterization, although his people can be exaggerated and caricatures. Dickens is particularly good with portraying women in a realistic fashion, so that Esther is three-dimensional as few other female characters from Victorian fiction are.

Most of the characters in Bleak House are well-drawn and three-dimensional, but they are flawed as well, befitting the corrupt and unhappy society they live in. The two exceptions to this are Esther, narrator of much of the novel, and Mr. Jarndyce, Esther’s guardian. Some critics and readers have found Esther sweet to the point of being insipid or unrealistic–critics disagree on whether or not she represents the “feminine ideal” or is meant to show how oppressive society was toward women–but I think her realistic, and simply good and kind. She is attractive: sensible, self-sacrificing, wise and modest, gentle and good-hearted. She is not insipid, and she is not stupid. She merely keeps her wit and emotion to herself. Jarndyce is Esther’s match, the soul of generosity and kindness, although his romantic feelings for her–she is sixteen or seventeen to Jarndyce’s late fifties–are much more potentially offensive to an audience which considers people children until they are eighteen, which the Victorians did not. It is Esther’s attractiveness as a character that makes her half of the story more absorbing and compelling than the other half. Although the reader will be interested in how Bleak House turns out, what will be of greater concern is what happens to Esther, and if and how she lives happily ever after.

Although Esther is Bleak House’s protagonist, it is Inspector Bucket who is the most significant character in the novel. He is the first significant detective in English mystery fiction (see: Detectives). Poe’s Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries) preceded Bucket, but Dupin was created by the American Poe. There were detectives in English literature before Bucket, including the casebook characters. Nor did Dickens create the police detective character when he wrote Bleak House. But just as Balzac, through his stature as much as his literary talent, made Vautrin (see: Father Goriot) influential on later French detective characters, so too did Dickens, through his position as much as the innate quality of Bucket, make Bucket the prototype for the fictional police detective for many years. Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff (see: The Woman in White) was memorable, but the larger influence on English mystery literature was Bucket’s.

Similarly, Bleak House anticipates the sensation novel, and provides a model for it, in its complex plot and its portrayal of crime taking place in a realistic, contemporary setting, and helps to transform the Gothic novel in its use of a contemporary urban setting. As Allan Pritchard points out, “a major part of Dickens’ solution to the problem of depicting the modern city was to turn to the conventions devised for Gothic horror fiction, which characteristically had an isolated rural setting at opposite poles to his crowded urban setting...”⁹ Later authors would emulate Dickens in setting their Gothics in urban settings, what Pritchard rightfully notes is a “fundamental reshaping of the tradition.”¹⁰

Bleak House may not be, as Geoffrey Tillotson had it in 1946, the finest literary work the nineteenth century produced in England, but it’s definitely in the discussion of the great novels of the century.

Mary Gaitskill, “Introduction,” Bleak House. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Allan Pritchard, “The Urban Gothic of Bleak House,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, no. 4 (Mar. 1991): 432-452.

¹ It’s not. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) is. See Jess Nevins, The Victorian Bookshelf (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016) for more on why Eliot reigns supreme over the century and quite possibly the one after it as well. But Bleak House may well be in the top five novels of the Victorian era and certainly deserves its canonical status.

² Thomas Carlyle, The“Condition of England Question” (1839).

³ Daniel S. Burt, The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novels of All Time (New York: Checkmark Books, 2010).

⁴ Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: The University Society, 1908), 4-6.

⁵ Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson, 1862-1933 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963), 119.

⁶ Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 69.

⁷ Aldous Huxley, Vulgarity in Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), 56.

⁸ Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 64.

⁹ Allan Pritchard, “The Urban Gothic of Bleak House,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 45, no. 4 (Mar. 1991): 433.

¹⁰ Pritchard, “The Urban Gothic of Bleak House,” 435.