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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 | 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

Often considered Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, Bleak House blends together several literary genres—detective fiction, romance, melodrama, and satire—to create an unforgettable portrait of the decay and corruption at the heart of English law and society in the Victorian era.

Opening in the swirling mists of London, the novel revolves around a court case that has dragged on for decades—the infamous Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs. As Dickens takes us through the case’s history, he presents a cast of characters as idiosyncratic and memorable as any he ever created, including the beautiful Lady Dedlock, who hides a shocking secret about an illegitimate child and a long-lost love; Mr. Bucket, one of the first detectives to appear in English fiction; and the hilarious Mrs. Jellyby, whose endless philanthropy has left her utterly unconcerned about her own family.

As a question of inheritance becomes a question of murder, the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, struggles to discover the truth about her birth and her unknown mother’s tragic life. Can the resilience of her love transform a bleak house? And—more devastatingly—will justice prevail?