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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“Unlucky old soul!” says Mr. George, turning his head in that direction. “Don’t scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up, ma’am. That’s better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr. Smallweed,” says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting her, “if your wife an’t enough.”
“I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?” the old man hints with a leer.
The colour of Mr. George’s face rather deepens as he replies, “Why no. I wasn’t.”
“I am astonished at it.”
“So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to have been one. But I wasn’t. I was a thundering bad son, that’s the long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody.”
“Surprising!” cries the old man.
“However,” Mr. George resumes, “the less said about it, the better now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two months’ interest! (Bosh! It’s all correct. You needn’t be afraid to order the pipe. Here’s the new bill, and here’s the two months’ interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it together in my business.)”
Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the document he has just received, and from the other takes another similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every upstroke and downstroke of both documents before he releases them from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice, and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to be, this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and fingers from it and answers Mr. George’s last remark by saying, “Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir. Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water for Mr. George.”
The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller to the parental bear.
“And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?” says Mr. George with folded arms.
“Just so, just so,” the old man nods.
“And don’t you occupy yourself at all?”
“I watch the fire—and the boiling and the roasting—”
“When there is any,” says Mr. George with great expression.
“Just so. When there is any.”
“Don’t you read or get read to?”
The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. “No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don’t pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!”
“There’s not much to choose between your two states,” says the visitor in a key too low for the old man’s dull hearing as he looks from him to the old woman and back again. “I say!” in a louder voice.
“I hear you.”
“You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear.”
“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—he might!”
“Oh! You can’t answer for him?” says Mr. George, finishing the inquiry in his lower key with the words “You lying old rascal!”
“My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn’t trust him. He will have his bond, my dear friend.”
“Devil doubt him,” says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, “How do you come here! You haven’t got the family face.”
“I goes out to work, sir,” returns Charley.
The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. “You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air.” Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed’s friend in the city—the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman’s imagination.
“So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?”
“I think he might—I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,” says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, “twenty times.”
Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers “Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty percent, twenty—” and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner.
“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”
Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him into his grave. Resisting the
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