Bleak House Study Guide
“Bleak House” by Charles Dickens isn’t the most famous of his novels, but it is a brilliant satire on the English judicial system. The main plot drive is the two contradictory wills and the following Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case. The tangled family story with unexpected turns and suddenly revealed relationships, marriages, lost children and enamored cousins makes this imaginary court case a nightmare for any lawyer. Every new dozen of pages presents us some new information that adds a new layer to the already existing situation and urges the lawyers (and the readers) revise every single bit of what they have already figured out in these tangled family relationships.
The narrative style of the story is quite interesting: the same events are described by the omniscient narrator, detached and cold, and also there is another point of view presented to the readers - the one of the main heroine of the novel, the young, modest, kind-hearted and severely traumatized lady named Esther Summerson. Her style of narrative is much more emotional, though she is constantly reminding us that she is unable to write, too shy, not too clever - but when her actions are presented by the second narrator, we see that Esther is a true heroine, just with some self-esteem issues caused by her family story and strict Victorian upbringing.
Some critics consider that Bleak House is the best novel written by Dickens, and it even entered the The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time book by Daniel Burt as number 12. Nevertheless, the law society of England was so deeply offended by that novel that they criticized it openly - though it was still a fictionary case - for being exaggerated and impossible. Still, it is considered that “Bleak House” played its role in hastening the legal reform. It means a lot for just a written story, isn’t it?
Author: Frank Frazier
New Essays
Backward looking at the offenses from the earliest clip to modern clip, sensing and constabularies would be considered as an evolutionary procedure at the same clip. In the earliest clip, due to the outgrowth of faiths and the prevalent account of supernatural, slayings and offenses would normally...
Bleak House: Public and Private Worlds In discussing Charles Dickens' mature novels, James M. Brown writes, "His social criticism is embodied in a vision of social experience in its generality-the essential quality of everyday social relations throughout the system, and the general possiblities...
Having been referred to as one of Dickens’s best novel, “Bleak House” is a novel which stands out, not only through its narrative technique, but also through the complex imagery the author conveys, managing somehow to relate this imagery to the real world, namely the XIXth...
Our brains think in pictures, the brain is therefore greatly influenced by the use of vivid imagery,the principle of conveying msg thro images is universal in its effctivness. In any piece of literry work using imagery is a very skillfull technique with it’s a various significances. images...