Product Description

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1433 in Books
• Published on: 1993-12-07
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 800 pages

Synopsis
With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury and illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), "Bleak House" is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience. But it is his symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic farce, and tragic ruin. In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.

About the Author
Stephen Gill is Reader in English Literature at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor at Lincoln College.

Customer Reviews

unbeatable
pretty unbeatable, touching, heart breaking, wickedly funny and extremely evocative of Dicken's London...if you just read one classic novel then make it this one. A masterpiece

One of the six truly great Dickens novels
Superb panorama of Victorian life, exposing the state, the legal system, the poverty of riches and the hypcrisy of liberalism (Horace Skimpole). Inspiring - the TV series brought it home to millions of people that Dickens really is our finest novelist.

the Wonder of Bleak House !
'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river...fog down the river...chance people on the bridges...with fog all round them.'


Repetition breeds a delicious sensory pleasure. This is Dickens's incantatory requiem to visual perception. Indeed our perceptions of the real are under review. This marked investment in temporary blindness is a metaphor for the secrecy and moral misjudgement that contaminates the novel on all levels. For Bleak House is a labyrinthine novel which attempts to conceal as much as to reveal; a novel peopled by isolated, lost individuals, clinging to their secrets and stories buried deep beneath the complex narrative web that is Bleak House.

Everything stands for something else in Bleak House, nothing is ever just itself. Dickens's use of the dual narrative, with the seeming transcendence of the third person narrator set against the apologetic observations of Dickens's only female narrator, Esther Summerson, engenders displacement at every turn. For this split responsibility for disclosure serves to protect the innocence of Esther as mid-Victorian heroine, whilst also tantalising the reader with hints at erotic passions that lie way beyond the permitted script of the upstanding Victorian novel.

Every reader will have their favourite moments in Bleak House for it is a truly gorgeous novel. My personal favourite was revealed to me years ago in a letter from Steve Newman my most inspiring tutor at Liverpool University , and it has never been supplanted in my affections:

'For I don't,' says Jo,'I don't know nothink.'
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language-to be every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!'

This must be one of the most Romantic moments in fiction. The sense of wonder grants the street boy Jo a temporary human story that his abject inhuman poverty precludes elsewhere. Not knowing is rescued from ignorance and becomes a creative 'other' experience, where the narrator revisits the known and retranslates it from Jo's point of view.
The lostness of Jo in terms of his illiteracy becomes a metaphor for the novel's own search for significance. For everyone is lonely in Bleak House. Everyone in Bleak House is lost. Everyone is attempting to decipher something, or someone, or somewhere, and these imperatives destroy as much as heal.

Dickens repeatedly employs the infinitive in this passage and in doing so creates an overriding sense of separation and even suspension. Seeing is not believing, it is bewildered incomprehension. Like Pip in Great Expectations when he gazes at Miss Havisham still dressed in her ancient wedding gown, Jo's encounter with the world involves stasis and fear. Jo's impotence in the world is represented through this deployment of the infinitive, rendering the finite a place way beyond the scope of Jo's destiny.

Wonderful!