#72
Title: Bleak House
Author: Charles Dickens
Read
by: David Case
Illustrations by: Phiz
Illustrations by: Phiz
Genre: Fiction
Rating: B
Published:
originally - 1852
Dates: 10/11/16 – 11/14/16
CDs/Hours:
31/39.5
Hailed
more for being his best novel, not his best book, Bleak House represents Dickens’
highest point of his intellectual maturity.
So says G. K. Chesterton in his introduction to the story from the
Everyman’s edition.
While
very long, drawn out and including characters and situations not germane to the
book, Dickens will delight readers who love tomes of this length. Before the story was complete, Dickens serialized
it over a period of 19 months from March 1852 to September 1853. Along with his readers who wanted to know
what came next, Dickens, too, wrote by the “seat of his pants” so to speak, as
he met each deadline!
The
story is brilliant when you consider it’s a love story, a murder mystery and a
comedy of sorts and very much about social criticism. The
subordinate characters are as outrageous as other main characters are sublime. Esther
Summerson, in part, narrates. We find
her as a young girl living with her aunt, though she doesn’t know at the time
it is her aunt. Before she’s very old
off to Bleak House she goes, along with Richard Carstone and Ada Clare – all wards
of Mr. Jarndyce. Despite its’ bleakness
it has a happy ending. And Bleak House
isn’t bleak at all but a haven for the three young people that Jarndyce enfolds
into his care.
The
pen and ink drawings by Phiz are delightful.
I also checked out both the Everyman’s Library publication and Penguin
Classics – each with their own notes and summaries of Dickens and his
masterpiece.
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