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Bleak House
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Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these a
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Paperback, 989 pages
Published
March 27th 2003
by Penguin Classics
(first published 1853)
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This is a very clever book because the main issue with it is exactly the point Dickens is making: it is so long and dragged out.
Bleak House is quite the achievement. It's a 900+ page monster made up a thousand different subplots with a large cast of characters. It also fanned the flames that led to a huge overhaul of the legal system in England. Buried beneath and entwined with the many subplots is the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce - Dickens's parody of the Chancery Court system (because the cas ...more
Bleak House is quite the achievement. It's a 900+ page monster made up a thousand different subplots with a large cast of characters. It also fanned the flames that led to a huge overhaul of the legal system in England. Buried beneath and entwined with the many subplots is the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce - Dickens's parody of the Chancery Court system (because the cas ...more

Okay, so this is the 1853 version of The Wire. But with less gay sex. And no swearing. And very few mentions of drugs. And only one black person, I think, maybe not even one. And of course it's in London, not Baltimore. But other than that, it's the same.
Pound for pound, this is Dickens' best novel, and of course, that is saying a great deal. I've nearly read all of them so you may take my word. Have I ever written a review which was anything less than 101% reliable, honest and straightforward? ...more
Pound for pound, this is Dickens' best novel, and of course, that is saying a great deal. I've nearly read all of them so you may take my word. Have I ever written a review which was anything less than 101% reliable, honest and straightforward? ...more

Nov 23, 2007
Jessica
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
fresh young people who have not yet ruined their eyesight
Shelves:
social-work-or-relevant,
crazy-ladies
Shivering in unheated gaslit quarters (Mrs. Winklebottom, my plump and inquisitive landlady, treats the heat as very dear, and my radiator, which clanks and hisses like the chained ghost of a boa constrictor when it is active, had not yet commenced this stern and snowy morning), I threw down the volume I had been endeavoring to study; certainly I am not clever, neither am I intrepid nor duly digligent, as after several pages I found the cramped and tiny print an intolerable strain on my strabism
...more

Is a lawsuit justice, when it goes on and on ....and on, seemingly in perpetuity ? In Bleak House located in the countryside outside of London, that is the center of the story, years pass too many to count, the lawyers are happy the employed judges likewise ; the litigants not... money is sucked dry from their bodies...like vampires whose fangs are biting hard, the flesh weakens and the victims blood flows , ( cash ) evaporates and soon nothing is left but the corpses... the gorged lawyers are f
...more

Jan 07, 2012
B0nnie
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
you
Shelves:
favourite-books
Bleak House. How can it be over? I hold this incredible book in my hand and can’t believe I have finished it. The 965 page, 2 inch thick, tiny-typed tome may seem a bit intimidating. Relax, you can read it in a day - that is, if you read one page per minute for 16 hours. And you might just find yourself doing that.
Bleak House is more Twilight Zone than Masterpiece Theatre. However there is enough spirit of both to satisfy everyone. And indeed it should - it has it all - unforgettable charact ...more
Bleak House is more Twilight Zone than Masterpiece Theatre. However there is enough spirit of both to satisfy everyone. And indeed it should - it has it all - unforgettable charact ...more

Jan 20, 2016
Bionic Jean
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
19th-century-ish,
charles-dickens,
classics,
read-authors-c-d,
favourites,
kindle,
mystery-crime
Which house in Charles Dickens's novel is "Bleak House"?
It surely cannot be the house which bears its name; a large airy house, which we first visit in the company of the young wards of Jarndyce, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, and their companion Esther. Ironically, this "Bleak House" is anything but bleak. It is a pleasant place of light and laughter. Mr. Jarndyce imprints his positive outlook on life, never allowing the lawsuit to have any negative influence. Indeed, when he first took on the ...more
It surely cannot be the house which bears its name; a large airy house, which we first visit in the company of the young wards of Jarndyce, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, and their companion Esther. Ironically, this "Bleak House" is anything but bleak. It is a pleasant place of light and laughter. Mr. Jarndyce imprints his positive outlook on life, never allowing the lawsuit to have any negative influence. Indeed, when he first took on the ...more

Nomen Est Omen, in the world according to Dickens!
But don’t take it literally, especially not when reading the title of Bleak House. For Dickens also requires you to read between the lines, and letters, just like in an acrostic poem:
BLEAK HOUSE
Lovely characters
Elegant prose
Agonising cliffhangers
Knowledgeable descriptions
Humorous plot
Outrageous social conditions
Unusual dual narrative
Suits in Chancery
Everlasting favourite
Yes, Christmas is approaching, it’s Dickens time. I spent it in Chancery th ...more
But don’t take it literally, especially not when reading the title of Bleak House. For Dickens also requires you to read between the lines, and letters, just like in an acrostic poem:
BLEAK HOUSE
Lovely characters
Elegant prose
Agonising cliffhangers
Knowledgeable descriptions
Humorous plot
Outrageous social conditions
Unusual dual narrative
Suits in Chancery
Everlasting favourite
Yes, Christmas is approaching, it’s Dickens time. I spent it in Chancery th ...more

May 03, 2012
Kalliope
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction-english,
literary-classics
Reading Bleak House has had a redeeming effect for me. Before this marvel took place Dickens evoked for me either depressing black and white films in a small and boxy TV watched during oppressive times, or reading what seemed endless pages in a still largely incomprehensible language. Dickens meant then a pain on both counts.
In this GR group read I have enjoyed Bleak House tremendously.
In the group discussion many issues have been brought up by the members. First and foremost the critique on the ...more

Incredible - blows away any other Dickens that I have read (although it has been a couple of years). Now, there are issues with it: it FEELS long in a way that some great long books don't, which I think is due to the varying narrative stakes of the subplots; Esther Summerson, though delightfully written, is perhaps the most consistently GOOD character in the history of literature - you root for her but it is the rooting of a manipulated reader; and the absurdity of the coincidences is just downr
...more

Not gonna lie – as I have struggled to read I am also struggling to find the words to write reviews. Sometimes I am having luck and writing some reviews I am pleased with, but mainly I am just delayed in finding the time and motivation to put my review on the page. For this I apologize as I love communicating with my Goodreads friend through reviews. I currently have three books I have finished – one over a week ago – that I have yet to write a review for. So, nothing like chipping away at them
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Here I am, after months I managed to finish this immense masterpiece, I say it immediately,it was very hard.... not for its length but for the complexity of the contents. I didn’t care to read the story lightly, just to understand the plot of this intricate narration... but within the limits of the possible and the time (little) available, I wanted to guess the thousand motivations that prompted Dickens to make talk and move his characters in this or other way.
The plot of the book revolves aroun ...more
The plot of the book revolves aroun ...more

Bleak House was Charles Dickens’ 1853 novel that documents the tragi-comic events surrounding the chancery court case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
Told with an unusual blend of shifting perspectives, the first being a first person narrative and the second an omniscient, present tense narrator, Dickens describes a London where justice is turned upside down and personal values are intertwined with the doleful legal system.
** - Many of you know that I am a Tennessee attorney and let me just say that 16 ...more
Told with an unusual blend of shifting perspectives, the first being a first person narrative and the second an omniscient, present tense narrator, Dickens describes a London where justice is turned upside down and personal values are intertwined with the doleful legal system.
** - Many of you know that I am a Tennessee attorney and let me just say that 16 ...more

I get why people dislike the legal system. It’s slow, complicated, and costly. And the only time you hear about it is when an apparently horrible decision is reached. (I shudder at how many people were ready to scrap the jury system after the Casey Anthony verdict).
As a lawyer, though, I see the legal system’s virtues (and as a public defender, its virtues, for me at least, do not include a hefty paycheck). For one, lawsuits are a better alternative than self-help justice. If your neighbor buil ...more
As a lawyer, though, I see the legal system’s virtues (and as a public defender, its virtues, for me at least, do not include a hefty paycheck). For one, lawsuits are a better alternative than self-help justice. If your neighbor buil ...more

Jan 25, 2019
Piyangie
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
brittish-lit,
my-library
What attracted me to Bleak House was the Chancery Court suit of Jarndyce V Jarndyce. Having always an interest in stories with a legal touch to it, it was natural for me to be drawn to the book. Besides having learned that this book inspired a judicial reform movement which led to some actual legal reforms in later years and knowing Dickens satire and being curious to learn what was truly said in the story that inspired such movement, I was most interested in reading it.
True to my understan ...more
True to my understan ...more

One of the pleasures of reading a few books of an author's work is to see the parallels and changing style. Here in this huge late Dickens slice of life social commentary is combined with comic grotesques. Political commentary is given depth with sentimentality. The Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, a gigantic legal cog wheel whose teeth catch up one smaller wheel after another. All of society seems to be caught up from the street sweeper to the noble Baronet in a single huge mechanism driven by avari
...more

I feel like the weather today in Belgium (it's dark and cold and snowy). I thought all Charles Dickens books where like this weather. I thought it met my feelings. But after reading I see this is not at all a dark and ' bleak' book. It's a book about human feelings, their interactions, about hope and tenderness, friendship, love. Of course there are some bleak components: people die, there's murder, poverty ... but there's a light of humanity beyond this all.
The underlying factor that binds all ...more
The underlying factor that binds all ...more

Apr 07, 2016
Melissa ♥ Dog/Wolf Lover ♥ Martin
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
own
I have to say that Goodreads has opened me up to many books that I probably never would have read. Through groups and friends I keep finding books old and new to read and enjoy. Some more so than others.
When I started Bleak House in one of my groups reads I had a feeling that I wouldn't understand a lot of what was going on in the book. And I found out through the same group that there was a mini series about the book. I rushed right onto Amazon Prime and watched the whole thing. Let me tell you ...more
When I started Bleak House in one of my groups reads I had a feeling that I wouldn't understand a lot of what was going on in the book. And I found out through the same group that there was a mini series about the book. I rushed right onto Amazon Prime and watched the whole thing. Let me tell you ...more

I know, something about a 900 page book with bleak in the title doesn’t exactly scream “summer fun”. Nevertheless, this was a page-turner with more laugh-out-loud moments than any book I've read in recent memory. Who could have seen that coming?? And it's gripping enough that I can understand why it was a bestseller, in spite of Dickens’ harsh social criticism and his rather daring innovation of dual narratives. But the story is a winner largely because of the dual narratives, which bob and weav
...more

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas my reading pace ground to a halt. Thanks a lot Dick...........ens!
This is a long book, but I've read longer ones that didn't seem half as long as Bleak House. Saharan-esque stretches of plodding plot didn't help. But more than that, this book suffers from having too much character, and characters with character, characterful characters with character to spare and well, you get the point.
By the time Dickens had written Bleak House he'd experienced almost every ...more
This is a long book, but I've read longer ones that didn't seem half as long as Bleak House. Saharan-esque stretches of plodding plot didn't help. But more than that, this book suffers from having too much character, and characters with character, characterful characters with character to spare and well, you get the point.
By the time Dickens had written Bleak House he'd experienced almost every ...more

Jan 23, 2015
Sara
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
classics,
catching-up-classics
It always feels a bit presumptive when I am trying to review the masters of the novel, a Dickens, Hardy, or Eliot. What can someone like myself contribute, that might matter, to the appreciation of a masterpiece like Bleak House. And yet, I want to effuse about it, I want to praise it, I want to say how completely effective it is and how strangely relevant to our society if you merely put the characters in cars instead of horse-drawn conveyances. I want to tell everyone that within its pages you
...more

"Crust upon crust of mud..." and "Fog everywhere"
Though made a bit uneven by Dickens' use of two narrators, I think this is his best novel (with David Copperfield his best book). Esther Summerson, a sweet and modest orphan, tells her tale in the first person present, as Dickens used for David in Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations; and, the other narrator is an omniscient, largely dispassionate third person.
The novel has mystery, romance, comic elements, an intriguing cast of characters a ...more
Though made a bit uneven by Dickens' use of two narrators, I think this is his best novel (with David Copperfield his best book). Esther Summerson, a sweet and modest orphan, tells her tale in the first person present, as Dickens used for David in Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations; and, the other narrator is an omniscient, largely dispassionate third person.
The novel has mystery, romance, comic elements, an intriguing cast of characters a ...more

May 08, 2015
shakespeareandspice
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
own-in-print,
classics
At the center of ‘Bleak House’ we have the Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case and supposedly, Dickens wrote this novel as a part commentary of the English justice system. I do not know, nor do I care a bit, about what he intended to achieve in terms of discussing the law and the government’s failure to deliver justice. What I was most engrossed with was the story. Because…wow.
What most amazes me is the detailing of the novel and how masterfully it is written. I am not a writer so I don’t know how ...more
What most amazes me is the detailing of the novel and how masterfully it is written. I am not a writer so I don’t know how ...more

Jan 01, 2010
Lawyer
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Anyone
Recommended to Lawyer by:
Kindred Spirits Group Read
Bleak House: Charles Dickens on Fog and Fossils
Issue One, Bleak House, March, 1852
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of this review or whether that station shall be held by another will depend upon the lines on this page. For, you see, although I was not born a lawyer I became one.
I would beg the reader's attention to hold a moment. For, as Charles Lamb has told us, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." I was--an inno ...more
"The wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

Issue One, Bleak House, March, 1852
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of this review or whether that station shall be held by another will depend upon the lines on this page. For, you see, although I was not born a lawyer I became one.
I would beg the reader's attention to hold a moment. For, as Charles Lamb has told us, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." I was--an inno ...more

Finally finished it and it only took me four months [pats self on back, does a little victory dance and then weeps,] but I'm so glad I read it. This is a book--like The Brothers Karamozov--that makes the subsequent books the author wrote seem superfluous. It contains multitudes. All of humanity is represented here (well, all of Victorian English humanity at any rate.) The truest--and shortest--sentence of the book is the first one: "London."
The organizing metaphor of the book is the Chancery Co ...more
The organizing metaphor of the book is the Chancery Co ...more

My Dickens binge carries on relentlessly. It's like I'm stuck in the Victorian era... and am loving it! An absorbing tale that harshly, but fairly satirises the Law; alongside the lives, the times and the adventures of the Wards of Jarndyce; yet again a myriad cast of fully realised characters across the classes. 8 out of 12.
...more


Call it by any name Your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.
For better or for worse, I read this novel through the lens of two critics: Harold Bloom and George Orwell.
In The Western Canon, Bloom calls Bleak House Dickens’s finest achi ...more

As ever my review is going to be about the thoughts and feelings this book evoked in me and very little about the plot etc.
Having spent the first 28 days of the year thouroughly immersed in the world of Charles Dickens I want it to be known that I think he was, is and always will be the best teller of stories that ever lived. As well as creating some of the best characters, comical moments and intertwined narratives.
This story is told by 2 separate points of view. The first is an omniscient th ...more
Having spent the first 28 days of the year thouroughly immersed in the world of Charles Dickens I want it to be known that I think he was, is and always will be the best teller of stories that ever lived. As well as creating some of the best characters, comical moments and intertwined narratives.
This story is told by 2 separate points of view. The first is an omniscient th ...more

Roll back to 1986—I was touring with Loudon Wainwright III upon the release of his More Love Songs album (which includes the famous ‘Your Mother & I’) when Loud strikes up a confab about Dickens. “Nicholls,” he begins, bunk-loafing in his usual roguish manner. “I do declay-ah that Bleak House is the greatest novel of the century, yessir-ee.” I was strumming a zither at the time, co-writing a song that would later appear on History. “Loud, you must be out of your mind. Everyone knows now that Uly
...more

I can't say that this is my favourite Dickens, and I found the first two hundred pages or so rocky going, with a few misunderstandings on my part that served to baffle rather than inform. But as the novel started to come together, and the disparate characters started to interact more strongly, I ended up very much liking it.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, ...more
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, ...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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The Old Curiosity...: Reading Schedule and General Discussion | 52 | 34 | Jan 04, 2021 04:25AM | |
Kindle Book Club ...: Discussion, Bleak House, Reading In Progress | 7 | 15 | Nov 28, 2020 09:31AM | |
James Mustich's 1...: Bleak House - September 2020 | 11 | 22 | Nov 24, 2020 04:15PM | |
Goodreads Italia: GdXL ottobre-dicembre 2019: Casa desolata | 43 | 195 | Oct 05, 2020 05:49AM | |
[Spoilers] Plot Hole related to Captain Hawdon? | 3 | 7 | Jul 24, 2020 08:40PM | |
Inspector Bucket | 4 | 23 | May 29, 2020 07:00AM | |
Reading List Comp...: Review - Bleak House | 4 | 8 | May 03, 2020 06:18AM |
Charles John Huffam Dickens was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
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