Status Updates From Bleak House

The last hundred pages have been dominated by four plot events: everyone catching pneumonia, a lady of the nobility doing Scooby Doo villain tactics to hide her family secrets, a disgusting, evil old guy bursting into flames and dying at random, and an unrelated evil old guy doing some sort of elaborate scam whose details I frankly don't care about. London and its environs in the 1830s must have been rough areas.