Bleak House: Book I

Charles John Huffham, DICKENS (1812-1870), son of a clerk in the Navy pays office. His father was imprisoned for debt and this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him. When he was 12 year old worked in a blacking warehouse. This painful period inspired much of his fiction. Then he worked as an office boy, studied shorthand and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the “Morning Chronicle”, collaborating later with other newspapers. These attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in twenty monthly numbers of “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”. Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and was admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high spirited humour and genius for caricature. “Bleak House” (1853). The tale centres in the fortunes of a couple, Richard Carstone and his cousin Ada Clare. They are wards of the court in case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, concerned with the distribution of an estate, who has gone on so long as to become a subject of heartless joking as well as a source of great profit to those professionally engaged in it. The book contains a vigorous satire on the abuses of the old court of Chancery, the delays and costs of which brought misery and ruin on its suitors.