Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is somber and slow. This is the Dedlocks’ country estate of Chesney Wold left empty, when the couple has gone to town:Ĭhesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown Holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. At Chancery and with the Dedlocks, he lays on the pomp and circumstance as if taking the English language and gold-plating it. In no other novel is his ventriloquism so cleverly on display. With his dual narrative structure, Dickens stands above his action and within it. (MORE: See all of the entries in our Blogging the Dickens project.) They call it “the cause,” but there is no effect.

When the lawyers of Chancery speak in glowing terms of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which they are wont to do, as a “monument of Chancery practice,” they speak of its interminable procedures, its unending piles of paperwork. They are connected, as is everything in Bleak House, by the court case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a tangle of disputed wills and disrupted inheritance that has tied up the High Court of Chancery for decades, suspending the lives of its legatees and incurring costs of 60,000 to 70,000 pounds. The novel is divided into two strands: the story of rich, haughty, reserved Lady Dedlock, told by an omniscient narrator, and Esther’s story, told in her own words.

The first time I read the novel I was so shocked and upset by this turn of events that I wrote about it in my journal as if it had happened in real life, to someone I knew.īleak House is Dickens’ grandest, most virtuosic achievement, but with all that grandeur and virtuosity it still makes me cry for Esther Summerson. Follow the middle of Bleak House, the heroine, an orphan named Esther Summerson, gets smallpox and goes blind.

Bleak house story