Bleak House being raised by Miss Barbary, Lady Dedlock's sister. Esther does not know Miss Barbary is her aunt. After Miss Barbary dies, John Jarndyce becomes Esther's guardian and assigns the Chancery lawyer "Conversation" Kenge to take charge of her future. After attending school for six years, Esther moves in with him at Bleak House. Jarndyce simultaneously assumes custody of two other wards, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare (who are both his and one another's distant cousins). They are beneficiaries in one of the wills at issue in "Jarndyce and Jarndyce"; their guardian is a beneficiary under another will, and the two
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