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
Letters of Charles Dickens Pilgrim volumes, and the fragmentary or routine business nature of many of the letters included, has encouraged the publication of selections of Dickens's letters, intended for the general reader rather than the scholar. In 1985 David Paroissien edited "The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens", taking his texts from the Nonesuch Edition, substantive textual variants from the first five volumes of the Pilgrim Edition (the only ones then published) being listed in the notes. The scholar John Espey wrote that this selection constitutes "a full review of almost all that we know of Dickens' activities as editor, public figure, father, husband,