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  • Many consider this to be Dickens best, and though I definitely haven't read enough of his works to put a superlative on this book, it was quite good. The book presents an excellent cross-section of societal Victorian characters, from the high to the low to the middle. These caricatures are what ma ... Continue

    Many consider this to be Dickens best, and though I definitely haven't read enough of his works to put a superlative on this book, it was quite good. The book presents an excellent cross-section of societal Victorian characters, from the high to the low to the middle. These caricatures are what makes the work great more so than the story itself. Though I would never recommend Bleak House as a first Dickens book for anyone to read, it is excellent for anyone who has previously tasted, and enjoyed, his style.

    

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• ― Bossdog said on Aug 1, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I hated Esther Summerson. She was a horrible narrator. Completely ruined my enjoyment of this novel which, otherwise, had interesting characterizations and the extraordinary invention of the Circumlocution office.

    

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• ― guaddess said on May 30, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Widely regarded as Dickens’s masterpiece, Bleak House centers on the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, through which “whole families have inherited legendary hatreds.” Focusing on Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel traces Esther’s romantic coming-of-age and, in classic Dickensian style, the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets, all set against the foggy backdrop of the Court of Chancery. Mixing romance, mystery, comedy, and satire, Bleak House limns the suffering caused by the intricate inefficiency of the law.

The text of this Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the first single-volume edition, published by Bradbury & Evans in 1853, and reproduces thirty-nine of H. K. Browne’s original illustrations for the book.

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