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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“Rick,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “I am glad to have won your confidence. I hope to preserve it. When I contemplated these relations between us four which have so brightened my life and so invested it with new interests and pleasures, I certainly did contemplate, afar off, the possibility of you and your pretty cousin here (don’t be shy, Ada, don’t be shy, my dear!) being in a mind to go through life together. I saw, and do see, many reasons to make it desirable. But that was afar off, Rick, afar off!”
“We look afar off, sir,” returned Richard.
“Well!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “That’s rational. Now, hear me, my dears! I might tell you that you don’t know your own minds yet, that a thousand things may happen to divert you from one another, that it is well this chain of flowers you have taken up is very easily broken, or it might become a chain of lead. But I will not do that. Such wisdom will come soon enough, I dare say, if it is to come at all. I will assume that a few years hence you will be in your hearts to one another what you are today. All I say before speaking to you according to that assumption is, if you do change—if you do come to find that you are more commonplace cousins to each other as man and woman than you were as boy and girl (your manhood will excuse me, Rick!)—don’t be ashamed still to confide in me, for there will be nothing monstrous or uncommon in it. I am only your friend and distant kinsman. I have no power over you whatever. But I wish and hope to retain your confidence if I do nothing to forfeit it.”
“I am very sure, sir,” returned Richard, “that I speak for Ada too when I say that you have the strongest power over us both—rooted in respect, gratitude, and affection—strengthening every day.”
“Dear cousin John,” said Ada, on his shoulder, “my father’s place can never be empty again. All the love and duty I could ever have rendered to him is transferred to you.”
“Come!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “Now for our assumption. Now we lift our eyes up and look hopefully at the distance! Rick, the world is before you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen wagoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here.”
“I will leave it here, sir,” replied Richard smiling, “if I brought it here just now (but I hope I did not), and will work my way on to my cousin Ada in the hopeful distance.”
“Right!” said Mr. Jarndyce. “If you are not to make her happy, why should you pursue her?”
“I wouldn’t make her unhappy—no, not even for her love,” retorted Richard proudly.
“Well said!” cried Mr. Jarndyce. “That’s well said! She remains here, in her home with me. Love her, Rick, in your active life, no less than in her home when you revisit it, and all will go well. Otherwise, all will go ill. That’s the end of my preaching. I think you and Ada had better take a walk.”
Ada tenderly embraced him, and Richard heartily shook hands with him, and then the cousins went out of the room, looking back again directly, though, to say that they would wait for me.
The door stood open, and we both followed them with our eyes as they passed down the adjoining room, on which the sun was shining, and out at its farther end. Richard with his head bent, and her hand drawn through his arm, was talking to her very earnestly; and she looked up in his face, listening, and seemed to see nothing else. So young, so beautiful, so full of hope and promise, they went on lightly through the sunlight as their own happy thoughts might then be traversing the years to come and making them all years of brightness. So they passed away into the shadow and were gone. It was only a burst of light that had been so radiant. The room darkened as they went out, and the sun was clouded over.
“Am I right, Esther?” said my guardian when they were gone.
He was so good and wise to ask me whether he was right!
“Rick may gain, out of this, the quality he wants. Wants, at the core of so much that is good!” said Mr. Jarndyce, shaking his head. “I have said nothing to Ada, Esther. She has her friend and counsellor always near.” And he laid his hand lovingly upon my head.
I could not help showing that I was a little moved, though I did all I could to conceal it.
“Tut tut!” said he. “But we must take care, too, that our little woman’s life is not all consumed in care for others.”
“Care? My dear guardian, I believe I am the happiest creature in the world!”
“I believe so, too,” said he. “But someone may find out what Esther never will—that the little woman is to be held in remembrance above all other people!”
I have omitted to mention in its place that there was someone else at the family dinner party. It was not a lady. It was a gentleman. It was a gentleman of a dark complexion—a young surgeon. He was rather reserved, but I thought him very sensible and agreeable. At least, Ada asked me if I
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