Bleak House filmed in 1920 and 1922. The latter version featured Sybil Thorndike as Lady Dedlock. In 1928, a short film made in the UK in the Phonofilm sound-on-film process starred Bransby Williams as Grandfather Smallweed. In 1998, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio adaptation of five hour-long episodes, starring Michael Kitchen as John Jarndyce. The BBC has produced three television adaptations of "Bleak House". The first serial, "Bleak House", was broadcast in 1959 in eleven half-hour episodes. The second "Bleak House", starring Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott, aired in 1985 as an eight-part series. In 2005, the third "Bleak House" was
Bleak House taken a shot at law-courts and that side of the legal profession in his 1837 novel "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" or "The Pickwick Papers"). Scholars – such as the English legal historian Sir William Searle Holdsworth, in his 1928 series of lectures "Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian" published by Yale University Press – have made a plausible case for treating Dickens's novels, and "Bleak House" in particular, as primary sources illuminating the history of English law. Dickens claimed in the preface to the book edition of "Bleak House" that he had "purposely dwelt upon the romantic