Bleak House

Author: Dickens, Charles, Dickens, Charles

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 25 January 2003 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom.

'Perhaps his best novel ... when Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up' G. K. ChestertonAs the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, a destitute crossing-sweeper. A savage indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy to the London slums.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Nicola Bradbury with a Preface by Terry Eagleton