Bleak House (Penguin Classics)

by Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Terry Eagleton (Preface), Nicola Bradbury (Introduction), Nicola Bradbury (Editor)

• Used

  Illustrated
  2003

  $4.18

  Bleak House is Charles Dickens' masterful assault on the injustices of the British legal system. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Nicola Bradbury, as well as a preface by Terry Eagleton. As the interminable case of 'Jarndyce and Jarndyce' grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums. This edition follows the first book edition of 1853, and includes all the original illustrations by 'Phiz', as well as appendices on the Chancery and spontaneous combustion. In his preface, Terry Eagleton examines characterisation and considers Bleak House as an early work of detective fiction. Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist , Great Expectations , A Tale of Two Cities , David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers , have been adapted for stage and screen and read by millions. If you enjoyed Bleak House , you might like Dickens' Our Mutual Friend , also available in Penguin Classics . Perhaps his best novel...when he wrote Bleak House he had grown up . (G.K. Chesterton). One of the finest of all English satires . (Terry Eagleton).

• Used

  Paperback
  1976

  $3.24

• Used

  Hardcover
  1987

  $4.77

  Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket. And it is a fable about redemption, in which a bleak house is transformed by the resilience of human love.

• New

  Hardcover
  1991

  $18.40

  The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it.