Bleak House: Dickens’s Great Novel of the Fog

‘Fog everywhere.’ Bleak House opens with the most famous weather in English fiction, and the fog is not just weather — it is the novel’s whole vision of a society choking on its own institutions. At the centre sits the endless lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a case in Chancery so old that no one alive remembers what it is about, devouring fortunes and lives while the lawyers grow fat.

It is Dickens’s most ambitious book and, many think, his best. He does something audacious with the telling: half the novel is narrated coldly, in the present tense, by an all-seeing eye that sweeps from the Lord Chancellor to the crossing-sweeper; the other half is told in the warm, first-person voice of Esther Summerson, an orphan of mysterious birth. Between the two, Dickens binds a whole society together — showing that the disease at the top and the misery at the bottom are the same disease.

And it hides a detective story inside the social panorama: Inspector Bucket, one of the first police detectives in English fiction, tracking a secret through the fog. Murder, blackmail, a lady with a past, spontaneous combustion — Dickens withholds nothing.

Read it with Oliver Twist and Great Expectations to see the full range of the greatest Victorian.

Read Bleak House — the Erato Press edition →