Bleak House Bleak House Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and the story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of "Bleak House" is a long-running legal case, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce", which came about because someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens uses this case to satirise the English judicial system. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens' satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement, which
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