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
Gerald Charles Dickens to 1945, when he retired. In 1945 he was appointed Commander of the Legion of Merit (United States) and a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (France). Sir Gerald Dickens died of a heart attack in London aged 83 in 1962 and was buried at sea from off Chatham. He was the father of Captain Peter Dickens RN, the grandfather of actor Gerald Charles Dickens and great-grandfather of actor Harry Lloyd. Gerald Charles Dickens Admiral Sir Gerald Louis Charles Dickens (13 October 1879 – 19 November 1962) was a senior Royal Navy officer and the grandson of Victorian novelist Charles Dickens.