Hovering on the edge of Dickens' late, mature
works, "Bleak House" is not a novel for the casual reader or the
faint hearted. It is very long--over 800
pages--there are many, many characters, with multiple plot lines, most
intersecting, but not all. It is, among
other things, a murder mystery, but the murder takes place far into the book,
so far that a pure mystery fan would have long since fallen by the wayside
before he or she got there. Written in
monthly installments for a periodical that Dickens owned and managed, it was
very successful in its time and has since come to be judged critically as one
of his finest.
That said, I yearned for the earlier days of
"David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations," where
characters like young David and Pip were immensely accessible, and others, like
Miss Haversham and Aunt Betsy Trotwood, were towering in their
eccentricity. "Bleak House,"
of course, is not a coming-of-age novel.
It treats the legal, moral, and social conditions of its time with
powerful accuracy, and, as always with Dickens, addresses the poor and
downtrodden with empathy, sympathy and immense compassion.
The major thrust of the story involves a
legal entanglement of a will that has been tied up so long in the courts that
there seems little chance of its ever unraveling. But unravel it finally does, and to the
detriment of almost everyone involved, including the aristocratic Lady Dedlock,
whose early pregnancy out of wedlock later brings her to the brink of
ruin. The other side of that tragic
coin, Lady Dedlock's illegitimate daughter, Esther Summerson, manages not only
to survive her mother's disgrace, but ultimately to find happiness in marriage
to an upright Doctor and children of her own.
Set amidst the broad social panorama of mid-19th century London,
"Bleak House" brilliantly captures that time and place.
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