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
Elizabeth Dickens to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it." In her last years she became increasingly like Charles' portrait of her as Nicholas Nickelby's mother. Charles hired Alfred's widow to mind and take care of his mother. Elizabeth Dickens died on 13 September 1863. At that time she was described as "hopelessly senile". She is buried with her husband in Highgate Cemetery. For her gravestone her son Charles Dickens wrote the dispassionate epitaph "HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF ELIZABETH DICKENS