Bleak House

by Charles Dickens

Overview

First published in monthly parts from March, 1852, to September, 1853, this novel follows the fortunes of three pedestrian charactersEsther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. The story they tell embodies Dickens’ merciless indictment of the Court of Chancery and its bungling, morally corrupt handling of the endless case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, giving the novel its scope and meaning. Starting with Esther’s account of her lonely, unhappy childhood, her role as protégée of the worthy John Jarndyce, Richard and Ada’s guardian, the tale develops the relations between the three young people in the Jarndyce household. Numerous other characters contribute to the complex portrait of society which emerges from the novel. They include the romantic, effusive and unworldly Harold Skimpole (based on Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist, and critic, who published The Examiner in which he introduced the public to Keats and Shelley); the boisterous, short-tempered Boythorn (based on Walter Savage Landor, poet and essayist, mentor to Robert Browning); Krook, the rag-and-bottle shopkeeper who dies a hideous death by spontaneous combustion; Gridley and the crazed Miss Flite, both ruined by Chancery; Mrs. Jellyby, neglectful of domestic responsibilities in favor of telescopic philanthropy; the greasy Mr. Chadband, a parson of no particular denomination; and Conversation Kenge and Mr. Vholes, lawyers both.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780004488
Publisher:	Copyright Group
Publication date:	10/11/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	631
File size:	802 KB
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic who is widely regarded as the greatest male novelist of the Victorian era. His best-known works include Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Pickwick Papers.  

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

Many would say that if you could read only one author then the choice would have to be a book by Charles Dickens. Bleak House might also be that book - regarded by many as his very best work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Charles Dickens: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Bleak House

Appendix A: Dickens’s Working Notes for Bleak House

Appendix B: The Reception of Bleak House

1. From The Spectator (September 1853)
2. From The Illustrated London News (24 September 1853)
3. From The Athenaeum (17 September 1853)
4. From The Eclectic Review (December 1853)
5. From Bentley’s Miscellany (8 October 1853)
6. From The Examiner (8 October 1853)
7. From The Rambler (January 1854)
8. From Charlotte Brontë, Letter to George Smith (11 March 1852)
9. From J.S. Mill, Letter to Harriet Taylor (20 March 1854)
10. From G.H. Lewes, Letters to Dickens (1852)

Appendix C: The Role and Status of Women

1. Marriage and the Law: From William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69)
2. Support for Conventional Views
1. From Charles Dickens, “Sucking Pigs,” Household Words (November 1851)
2. From “The Laws Concerning Women,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (April 1856)
3. From Margaret Oliphant, “The Condition of Women,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1858)
3. Opposition to Conventional Views
1. From the Review in Foreign Quarterly Review of The Education of Mothers of Families (1842)
2. From Harriet Taylor, “The Enfranchisement of Women,” The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review (1851)
3. From Jessie Boucherett, Endowed Schools (1862)
4. Personal Testimonies from Women
1. From Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letter to John Forster (c. February 1844)
2. From Elizabeth Gaskell, Letter to Eliza Fox (12 February 1850)
3. From Mary Taylor, Letter to Charlotte Brontë (April 1850)
4. From Charlotte Brontë, Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (20 September 1851)
5. From Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (1860)
5. Women in Contemporary Fiction
1. From Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1848)
2. From Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters (1848)
3. From Frances Trollope, The Young Countess or Love and Jealousy (1848)

Appendix D: The Court of Chancery

1. From “Reform in the Court of Chancery,” The Times (1 April 1850)
2. From “Delays in Chancery,” The Times (8 August 1850)
3. From “Court of Chancery,” The Times (25 December 1850)
4. Leading Article, The Times (1 January 1851)
5. From Alfred Cole and W.H. Wills, “The Martyrs of Chancery,” Household Words
1. December 1850
2. February 1851
6. From Edward B. Sugden, “Prisoners for Contempt of the Court of Chancery,” The Times (7 January 1851)
7. From “A Chancery Bone of Contention,” Punch (June 1852)

Appendix E: Attitudes to Religious and Other Proselytizing

1. From Charles Dickens, “Whole Hogs,” Household Words (August 1851)
2. From Clare Lucas Balfour, “Stopping Half Way,” The Temperance Offering (1852)
3. Charles Dickens, Letter to the Reverend H. Christopherson (9 July 1852)
4. From R.W. Vanderkiste, Notes and Narratives of a Six Years’ Mission Principally among the Dens of London (1852)
5. From the London Quarterly Review (January 1871)

Appendix F: Contemporary Attitudes to Class Inequality

1. From Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (1839)
2. From Arthur Helps, The Claims of Labour (1844)
3. From Jessie Boucherett, “Endowed Schools” (1852)
4. From J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1859)

Appendix G: Conditions of the Working Class

1. Living Conditions as Described in Dickens’s Household Words
1. From “A December Vision” (December 1850)
2. From “A Walk in a Workhouse” (May 1850)
3. From “A Nightly Scene in London” (January 1856)
2. Burial Grounds
1. From “Spa-Fields Burial Grounds,” The Times (5 March 1845)
2. From “Heathen and Christian Burial,” Household Words (April 1850)
3. Disease
1. From Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843)
2. From “How Cholera is Spread,” The Lancet (13 October 1849)
3. [Mortality Among the Working Classes], from The Times (4 September 1851)
4. Epidemics and Sanitation
1. From Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population (1842)
2. [Sanitary Conditions of the city], from The Times (2 January 1851)
3. From a Speech by Dickens to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association (10 May 1851)

Select Bibliography

Reading Group Guide

1. 1. Critics have long regarded Bleak House as Dickens’s most formally complex novel, since it blends together a number of different genres: detective fiction, romance, melodrama, satire. Compare the way the novel conforms to each of these genres. Do you consider Bleak House more a mystery than a satire, or vice versa? In what ways does the novel transcend these categories altogether?

2. 2. Examine Dickens’s use of irony in Bleak House. Which characters find themselves in ironic moments or situations? How might we read the Court of Chancery’s obstruction of justice as the supreme irony of the book?

3. 3. Consider the narrator’s remark in Chapter XXXIX that “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.” How, precisely, does Chancery “make business for itself”? What instruments, rituals, and/or actors does it employ to create a great chain of inefficiency?

4. 4. Discuss Dickens’s representation of charity in Bleak House. Are philanthropists generally portrayed in a favorable light? You might compare the work of Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Pardiggle, and Mr. Quale with the quieter charitable work of Esther. What type of charity do you think Dickens values?

5. 5. Do you think Bleak House is successful in its attempt to criticize the English legal system? If so, how do you reconcile the novel’s happy ending with Dickens’s critique?

6. 6. Examine Dickens’s use of mud and pollution imagery throughout Bleak House. What different meanings do images of mud, dirt, disease attach themselves to? Which characters become closely identified with pollution?

Editorial Reviews

Patricia Ingham’s edition of Bleak House is a model of clear thinking, scrupulous editing, and critical acumen. The contextual documents have been selected with a keen eye for what modern readers need to know if they are to appreciate this wonderful novel in all its complexity. The edition will be an invaluable resource for those studying or teaching Dickens, but in addition will stimulate new thinking even among established Dickens scholars. It is an excellent addition to the Broadview list.” — Penny Boumelha, Victoria University of Wellington

“In this splendid new edition of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Patricia Ingham brings her fine critical intelligence to bear on a novel that treats the city of London as a historical reality and as a haunting metaphor. Professor Ingham’s wide-ranging erudition—her expertise as a linguist, social historian, editor, and literary theorist—allows her to provide a framework that does full justice to Dickens’s multi-layered narrative. Her introduction contextualizes the novel in pertinent ways, the notes are helpful, and rich appendices provide a wide array of nineteenth-century documents necessary to grasp how the novel is both representative and highly original.” — Linda M. Shires, Yeshiva University

From the Publisher

In this splendid new edition of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Patricia Ingham brings her fine critical intelligence to bear on a novel that treats the city of London as a historical reality and as a haunting metaphor. Professor Ingham's wide-ranging erudition—her expertise as a linguist, social historian, editor, and literary theorist—allows her to provide a framework that does full justice to Dickens's multi-layered narrative. Her introduction contextualizes the novel in pertinent ways, the notes are helpful, and rich appendices provide a wide array of nineteenth-century documents necessary to grasp how the novel is both representative and highly original.

Linda M. Shires Yeshiva University

Patricia Ingham’s edition of Bleak House is a model of clear thinking, scrupulous editing, and critical acumen. The contextual documents have been selected with a keen eye for what modern readers need to know if they are to appreciate this wonderful novel in all its complexity. The edition will be an invaluable resource for those studying or teaching Dickens, but in addition will stimulate new thinking even among established Dickens scholars. It is an excellent addition to the Broadview list.

Penny Boumelha Victoria University of Wellington

This full-cast dramatization is stunningly good at reproducing the ambience of nineteenth-century London and the emotional texture of Charles Dickens's novel. The musical score enhances the claustrophobic tension of the story. The sound effects are both impressively layered and well chosen to create emotional impact, simulate the passage of time, and, most challenging, give the sense of changing relationships. However, the novel’s twisting plot and numerous characters make the production hard to follow at times, so much so that despite its superior quality, this production is recommended primarily to those who already know the novel well. G.T.B. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

APR/MAY 05 - AudioFile