Bleak House character list below for the supposed inspiration of individual characters). Although not a character, the "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" case is a vital part of the novel. It is believed to have been inspired by a number of real-life Chancery cases involving wills, including those of Charles Day and William Jennens, and of Charlotte Smith's father-in-law Richard Smith. Much criticism of "Bleak House" focuses on its unique narrative structure: it is told both by a third-person omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator (Esther Summerson). The omniscient narrator speaks in the present tense and is a dispassionate observer. Esther Summerson tells her
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