Bleak House

Bleak House

Greatest 19th century English novel? Possibly. It's the closest to Dostoevsky Dickens gets - the dark class-riven London of the 1850s with its desperate underclass, its fawning middle class, its remote aristocracy all yoked together under the vast impenetrable almost soviet bureaucracy of the Victorian legal system. In this world - which Dickens describes in over 1000 pages - characters flounder in the search for truth and love: it's a world of disguises, lies, secrets and shame, with a murder and a case of spontaneous combustion thrown in.