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
Hogg (novel) intentions to spend the next few months with the narrator and expresses his happiness that they are reunited. However, the narrator is formulating a plan to leave Hogg and the next opportune moment. Hogg finally asks him "What's the matter?" to which he responds, "Nothin,"—his only spoken line of dialog in the novel. Michael Hemmingson wrote in the journal "The Review of Contemporary Fiction" that Hogg, Despite the book's pornographic surface, respected authors have given it their endorsement. Norman Mailer, for instance, said "There is no question that "Hogg" by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."