Charles Dickens is the most prolific and popular novelist of Victorian England, and it would be impossible to conceive a list of the great English language novels without considering his contribution. But oh my, what a plethora of choices! One could simply yield to the temptation of picking a novel that everybody already loves—to pick, for example, A Christmas Carol, that perennial yuletide favorite that has made “Scrooge” a part of our vocabulary and that helped make Christmas the popular holiday it has become. Or one could choose Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, still regarded (with an estimated 200 million copies sold) as one of the two or three best- selling novels of all time, with one of the most famous openings (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”) and most famous endings (“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done…”) in all literature. But neither of those novels has garnered the kind of critical acclaim that some of Dickens’ more mature novels have. For that, one must look among the quartet of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and my own choice for book #24 on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” Bleak House—a novel that also appears on the BBC list of the 100 Greatest British Novels, and on Penguin’s list of its readers’ favorite books.
Some scholars have seen Bleak House as something of a turning point in Dickens’ career. Begun in the autumn of 1851, it was his first work written after the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace of London. Championed by Prince Albert himself, the full name of this prototypical World’s Fair was “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” and its two chief goals were, first, to extol technology as the key to human progress toward a brighter future, and, second, to demonstrate the superiority of British industrial technology. Perhaps it was this exhibition that inspired a skeptical Dickens to turn less to sentimentalism and more to social criticism in his post-1850 novels. In any case Bleak House is a heavier and less sentimental (and so, one might say, less optimistic) book even than, say, 1838’s Oliver Twist.
Bleak House was published, as were all of Dickens’ novels, in serialized form in 1852-53, then in a single volume in 1853. The novel, at more than 1000 pages, strenuously resists a simple synopsis, but essentially the story takes this direction: The lawsuit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, concerning the contesting of at least two conflicting wills left by a Jarndyce family patriarch, has dragged on for decades in the High Court of Chancery and left different branches of the Jarndyce family waiting in vain for an inheritance that convoluted legal manipulations threaten to blockade indefinitely. One of the beneficiaries of one of the wills is Lady Honoria Dedlock, who one day, listening to her solicitor Mr. Tulkinghorn go over the case, recognizes the handwriting on one of his documents, and nearly swoons. Noting her reaction, Tulkinghorn looks into the identity of the copyist—a poor London clerk named Nemo, who has recently died.
John Jarndyce, another of the proposed beneficiaries of the lawsuit, becomes the legal guardian of Esther Summerson, a girl whose cruel godmother has died. Jarndyce pays for Esther’s schooling for six years, then brings her into his household at Bleak House as his ward. He has just assumed custody of two other wards of the court—his distant cousins Richard Carstone and Ada Clare—who also happen to be beneficiaries in one of the contested Jarndyce wills. Jarndyce wants Esther to be a companion for Ada.
In the course of the novel, Richard and Ada fall in love, and Richard cavalierly tries several different occupations, but won’t settle seriously on one, unrealistically believing that when the lawsuit over the wills is settled, he will inherit a great deal of money and be self-sufficient. Meanwhile Tulkinghorn has tracked down the identity of Nemo, who turns out to be a Captain Hawdon, and finds a connection between Hawdon and Lady Dedlock. He threatens to reveal her secret to Lady Dedlock’s husband, Sir Leicester. Esther also finds out the secret of her parentage, which she reveals to Mr. Jarndyce, who after a short time asks Esther to marry him. Tulkinghorn is murdered before revealing Lady Dedlock’s secret, but she confesses to Sir Leicester in a letter anyway, after which she disappears. Esther tracks her down after Leicester forgives her, but in the course of her search contracts smallpox.
This is just a taste of the novel’s complex plot. Who actually were Esther’s parents? And does she survive her illness? Who killed Tulkinghorn and why? Does Lady Dedlock come back from her disgrace (what exactly is that disgrace?)? Do Ada and Richard find happiness? Does Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce ever reach a conclusion? I hope if you’ve not read Bleak House I’ve at least piqued your interest in the novel. The convoluted multi-level plot is likely enough in itself to make this novel a must-read: The Byzantine bureaucracy of the Chancery court system has a Kafkaesque appeal of its own, and the mystery surrounding Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon, investigated by a fellow named Inspector Bucket, puts the novel among the earliest works of detective fiction in British literature, in line with what Dickens’ friend Wilkie Collins was doing with books like The Woman in White.
But beyond the plot, there are other things to recommend the novel. One of them is Dickens’ unusual use of point of view in the novel. Much of it is narrated in the third person omniscient point of view common in nineteenth century novels, speaking dispassionately about events as they unfold. The other half of the novel is narrated by Esther Summerson herself, speaking in the past tense, and her personal narrative reveals more about her inner thoughts and character—essentially her modesty, her self-deprecation, but also her nurturing instincts. It is the only double-narration in any of Dickens’ works, and his only use of a female narrator (some critics have suggested that he was influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s employment of a female protagonist as narrator in Jane Eyre four years earlier. Readers have been divided about the success of this experiment. Vladimir Nabokov called Esther’s narration in Dickens’ novel his “main mistake,” but other critics have called it a triumph. You can decide for yourself.
Thematically, the novel touches on a number of social themes. Of course, perhaps foremost, it satirizes the corrupt and archaic English Chancery Court system with its long delays and questionable chances for justice. It also criticizes the traditional English class structure and demonstrates how in the modern world someone like Esther Summerson might have a path into the upper class. Perhaps more importantly, the novel deals with the Victorian vogue for philanthropy, particularly for showy philanthropy, and suggests such acts are more for the sake of public display than for the good of their objects. One of the minor characters of Bleak House, for instance, a Mrs. Pardiggle, likes to visit the houses of the poor and read the Bible to them, on the assumption that the poor are immoral and need Christian instruction, but never truly knows those she purports to help—nor is she interested in doing so, or in dealing with their actual needs. Esther, by contrast, who accompanies Mrs. Pardiggle on her mission of mercy, has no delusions that she knows better than the family what they need, and instead shows genuine kindness in comforting the wife of the family over the loss of her child. Dickens stresses the importance of true kindness in human relations over histrionic demonstrations of philanthropy.
Bleak House is a major novel, a hugely significant achievement. It has been the object of several adaptations, most notably the fifteen-episode 2005 series that starred Anna Maxwell Martin (Good Omens) as Esther, Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) as Lady Dedlock, and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) as Tulkinghorn. It’s an excellent adaptation, and I highly recommend that you watch it. But only after you actually read the book.