Bleak House

Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) is the most ambitious and, for many readers and critics, the greatest of his novels — a vast panorama of Victorian England organised around a single, ruinous lawsuit. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in the Court of Chancery over a disputed will, has dragged on so long that no one alive understands it, the lawyers have forgotten what it is about, and the costs are quietly devouring the very estate the case was meant to distribute. The fog that fills the unforgettable opening chapter is the law itself, settling over the whole of London.

Around that suit moves one of the largest casts in English fiction: the cold and beautiful Lady Dedlock, who guards a secret from before her marriage; the watchful lawyer Tulkinghorn, who hunts it; the kindly John Jarndyce of Bleak House; Esther Summerson, the illegitimate orphan whose own origins are bound up with Lady Dedlock's; the destitute crossing-sweeper Jo, who knows nothing and is moved on and on until he dies; and Inspector Bucket, among the first detectives in the English novel, who unravels the secret at the book's heart.

Its boldest stroke is its narration. Bleak House is told by two voices in alternation — an anonymous, all-seeing present-tense narrator who sees the whole web of the plot, and Esther Summerson's modest, past-tense first-person account from inside it. It is the only novel Dickens wrote in the present tense, and Esther is the only female narrator he ever created. The result is a book that sees both from above and from within, fusing furious social argument with intimate feeling.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1853 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.