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.
Read free book «Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: Charles Dickens
Read book online «Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕». Author - Charles Dickens
“Oh Lord!” gasps Mr. Smallweed. “That’ll do. Thank you, my dear friend, that’ll do. Oh, dear me, I’m out of breath. Oh Lord!” And Mr. Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.
The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the philosophical reflection, “The name of your friend in the city begins with a D, comrade, and you’re about right respecting the bond.”
“Did you speak, Mr. George?” inquires the old man.
The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr. Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.
“I take it,” he says, making just as much and as little change in his position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a round, full action, “that I am the only man alive (or dead either) that gets the value of a pipe out of you?”
“Well,” returns the old man, “it’s true that I don’t see company, Mr. George, and that I don’t treat. I can’t afford to it. But as you, in your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition—”
“Why, it’s not for the value of it; that’s no great thing. It was a fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money.”
“Ha! You’re prudent, prudent, sir!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, rubbing his legs.
“Very. I always was.” Puff. “It’s a sure sign of my prudence that I ever found the way here.” Puff. “Also, that I am what I am.” Puff. “I am well known to be prudent,” says Mr. George, composedly smoking. “I rose in life that way.”
“Don’t be downhearted, sir. You may rise yet.”
Mr. George laughs and drinks.
“Ha’n’t you no relations, now,” asks Grandfather Smallweed with a twinkle in his eyes, “who would pay off this little principal or who would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha’n’t you no such relations, Mr. George?”
Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, “If I had, I shouldn’t trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day. It may be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to and live upon them, but it’s not my sort. The best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in my opinion.”
“But natural affection, Mr. George,” hints Grandfather Smallweed.
“For two good names, hey?” says Mr. George, shaking his head and still composedly smoking. “No. That’s not my sort either.”
Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in the usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him. For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating his late attentions.
“Ha!” he observes when he is in trim again. “If you could have traced out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the newspapers—when I say ‘our,’ I’m alluding to the advertisements of my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give me a lift with my little pittance—if at that time you could have helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you.”
“I was willing enough to be ‘made,’ as you call it,” says Mr. George, smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by her grandfather’s chair, “but on the whole, I am glad I wasn’t now.”
“Why, Mr. George? In the name of—of brimstone, why?” says Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation. (Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed in her slumber.)
“For two reasons, comrade.”
“And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the—”
“Of our friend in the city?” suggests Mr. George, composedly drinking.
“Aye, if you like. What two reasons?”
“In the first place,” returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent which of the two he addresses, “you gentlemen took me in. You advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying ‘Once a captain, always a captain’) was to hear of something to his advantage.”
“Well?” returns the old man shrilly and sharply.
“Well!” says Mr. George, smoking on. “It wouldn’t have been much to his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and judgment trade of London.”
“How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his debts or compounded for ’em. Besides, he had taken us in. He owed us immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no return. If I sit here thinking of him,” snarls the old man, holding up his impotent ten fingers, “I want to strangle him now.” And in a sudden access
Comments (0)