Bleak House

With An Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Bleak House is one of Dickens's finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. İt 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 af a great city's dark underworld, and of the law's corurption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience. But it is this symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic faree, and tragic ruin.

In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrutive between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.