Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕
Description
Bleak House, completed by Dickens in 1853, tells several interlocking story-lines and features a host of colorful characters. Though very difficult to summarise, the novel centers around the decades-long legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving the fair distribution of assets of a valuable estate. The case is mired in the legal quagmire of the Court of Chancery, whose byzantine and sluggish workings Dickens spares no effort to expose and condemn. Dickens also exposes the miserable condition of the poor, living in squalid, pestilential circumstances.
The novel’s heroine is Esther Summerson, whose parentage is unclear and who has been brought up by a cold and strict godmother, who tells her only: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.” On the death of her godmother, she is given an education through the unexpected intervention of a Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House, whom she has never met. When she comes of age, she is appointed as a companion to Ada, one of two young people who are “wards of Chancery,” whose fates depend on the outcome of the legal struggle and who are taken into guardianship by Mr. Jarndyce. The other ward Richard, despite Mr. Jarndyce’s frequent warnings, eventually goes astray by pinning all his hopes on a successful outcome of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
We are also introduced to Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, and to their cunning and suspicious lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn. He uncovers evidence that Lady Dedlock is not all she seems and determines to remorselessly pursue every lead to expose her secrets.
The novel has a curious construction in that the first-person narrative of Esther, written in the past tense, is interleaved with many chapters written from the omniscient viewpoint and in the present tense.
Several prominent critics such as G. K. Chesterton consider Bleak House to be Dickens’ finest novel, and it is often ranked among the best English-language novels of all time.
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- Author: Charles Dickens
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Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.
Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment, Mr. Guppy says, “You are a man again, Tony!”
“Well, not quite yet,” says Mr. Jobling. “Say, just born.”
“Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?”
“Thank you, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling. “I really don’t know but what I will take summer cabbage.”
Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of “Without slugs, Polly!” And cabbage produced.
“I am growing up, Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork with a relishing steadiness.
“Glad to hear it.”
“In fact, I have just turned into my teens,” says Mr. Jobling.
He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a veal and ham and a cabbage.
“Now, Small,” says Mr. Guppy, “what would you recommend about pastry?”
“Marrow puddings,” says Mr. Smallweed instantly.
“Aye, aye!” cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. “You’re there, are you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don’t know but what I will take a marrow pudding.”
Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of Mr. Smallweed, “three Cheshires,” and to those “three small rums.” This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to himself), leans against the wall, and says, “I am grown up now, Guppy. I have arrived at maturity.”
“What do you think, now,” says Mr. Guppy, “about—you don’t mind Smallweed?”
“Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good health.”
“Sir, to you!” says Mr. Smallweed.
“I was saying, what do you think now,” pursues Mr. Guppy, “of enlisting?”
“Why, what I may think after dinner,” returns Mr. Jobling, “is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know,” says Mr. Jobling, pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an English stable. “Ill fo manger. That’s the French saying, and mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so.”
Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion “much more so.”
“If any man had told me,” pursues Jobling, “even so lately as when you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over to see that house at Castle Wold—”
Mr. Smallweed corrects him—Chesney Wold.
“Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the present time as I literally find myself, I should have—well, I should have pitched into him,” says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water with an air of desperate resignation; “I should have let fly at his head.”
“Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,” remonstrates Mr. Guppy. “You were talking about nothing else in the gig.”
“Guppy,” says Mr. Jobling, “I will not deny it. I was on the wrong side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round.”
That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their “coming” round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world’s “coming” triangular!
“I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square,” says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and perhaps of meaning too. “But I was disappointed. They never did. And when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to people that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of borrowed money, why there was an end of that connection. And of any new professional connection too, for if I was to give a reference tomorrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then what’s a fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living cheap down about the market-gardens, but what’s the use of living cheap when you have got no money? You might as well live dear.”
“Better,” Mr. Smallweed thinks.
“Certainly. It’s the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have been my weaknesses, and I don’t care who knows it,” says Mr. Jobling. “They are great weaknesses—Damme, sir, they are great. Well,” proceeds Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water, “what can a fellow do, I ask you, but enlist?”
Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what, in his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise than as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.
“Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy, “myself and our mutual friend Smallweed—”
Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, “Gentlemen both!” and drinks.
“—Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once since you—”
“Say, got the sack!” cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. “Say it, Guppy. You mean it.”
“No-o-o! Left the Inn,” Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.
“Since you left the Inn, Jobling,” says Mr. Guppy; “and I have mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?”
“I know there is such a stationer,” returns Mr. Jobling. “He was not ours, and I am not acquainted with him.”
“He is ours, Jobling, and I am acquainted with him,” Mr. Guppy retorts. “Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of his in private life. Those
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