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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“If you please, miss,” pursued Charley in the same soft voice, “I’m your maid.”
“Charley?”
“If you please, miss, I’m a present to you, with Mr. Jarndyce’s love.”
I sat down with my hand on Charley’s neck and looked at Charley.
“And oh, miss,” says Charley, clapping her hands, with the tears starting down her dimpled cheeks, “Tom’s at school, if you please, and learning so good! And little Emma, she’s with Mrs. Blinder, miss, a-being took such care of! And Tom, he would have been at school—and Emma, she would have been left with Mrs. Blinder—and me, I should have been here—all a deal sooner, miss; only Mr. Jarndyce thought that Tom and Emma and me had better get a little used to parting first, we was so small. Don’t cry, if you please, miss!”
“I can’t help it, Charley.”
“No, miss, nor I can’t help it,” says Charley. “And if you please, miss, Mr. Jarndyce’s love, and he thinks you’ll like to teach me now and then. And if you please, Tom and Emma and me is to see each other once a month. And I’m so happy and so thankful, miss,” cried Charley with a heaving heart, “and I’ll try to be such a good maid!”
“Oh, Charley dear, never forget who did all this!”
“No, miss, I never will. Nor Tom won’t. Nor yet Emma. It was all you, miss.”
“I have known nothing of it. It was Mr. Jarndyce, Charley.”
“Yes, miss, but it was all done for the love of you and that you might be my mistress. If you please, miss, I am a little present with his love, and it was all done for the love of you. Me and Tom was to be sure to remember it.”
Charley dried her eyes and entered on her functions, going in her matronly little way about and about the room and folding up everything she could lay her hands upon. Presently Charley came creeping back to my side and said, “Oh, don’t cry, if you please, miss.”
And I said again, “I can’t help it, Charley.”
And Charley said again, “No, miss, nor I can’t help it.” And so, after all, I did cry for joy indeed, and so did she.
XXIV An Appeal CaseAs soon as Richard and I had held the conversation of which I have given an account, Richard communicated the state of his mind to Mr. Jarndyce. I doubt if my guardian were altogether taken by surprise when he received the representation, though it caused him much uneasiness and disappointment. He and Richard were often closeted together, late at night and early in the morning, and passed whole days in London, and had innumerable appointments with Mr. Kenge, and laboured through a quantity of disagreeable business. While they were thus employed, my guardian, though he underwent considerable inconvenience from the state of the wind and rubbed his head so constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right place, was as genial with Ada and me as at any other time, but maintained a steady reserve on these matters. And as our utmost endeavours could only elicit from Richard himself sweeping assurances that everything was going on capitally and that it really was all right at last, our anxiety was not much relieved by him.
We learnt, however, as the time went on, that a new application was made to the Lord Chancellor on Richard’s behalf as an infant and a ward, and I don’t know what, and that there was a quantity of talking, and that the Lord Chancellor described him in open court as a vexatious and capricious infant, and that the matter was adjourned and readjourned, and referred, and reported on, and petitioned about until Richard began to doubt (as he told us) whether, if he entered the army at all, it would not be as a veteran of seventy or eighty years of age. At last an appointment was made for him to see the Lord Chancellor again in his private room, and there the Lord Chancellor very seriously reproved him for trifling with time and not knowing his mind—“a pretty good joke, I think,” said Richard, “from that quarter!”—and at last it was settled that his application should be granted. His name was entered at the Horse Guards as an applicant for an ensign’s commission; the purchase-money was deposited at an agent’s; and Richard, in his usual characteristic way, plunged into a violent course of military study and got up at five o’clock every morning to practise the broadsword exercise.
Thus, vacation succeeded term, and term succeeded vacation. We sometimes heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce as being in the paper or out of the paper, or as being to be mentioned, or as being to be spoken to; and it came on, and it went off. Richard, who was now in a professor’s house in London, was able to be with us less frequently than before; my guardian still maintained the same reserve; and so time passed until the commission was obtained and Richard received directions with it to join a regiment in Ireland.
He arrived post-haste with the intelligence one evening, and had a long conference with my guardian. Upwards of an hour elapsed before my guardian put his head into the room where Ada and I were sitting and said, “Come in, my dears!” We went in and found Richard, whom we had last seen in high spirits, leaning on the chimneypiece looking mortified and angry.
“Rick and I, Ada,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “are not quite of one mind. Come, come, Rick, put a brighter face upon it!”
“You are very hard with me, sir,” said Richard. “The harder because you have been so considerate to me in all other respects and have done me kindnesses that I can never acknowledge. I never could have been set right without you, sir.”
“Well, well!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “I want to set you more right yet. I want to set you more right with yourself.”
“I hope you will excuse my saying,
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