Bleak House: No. 3 (New Oxford Illustrated Dickens)

by Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Charles Dickens (Author), Sir Osbert Sitwell (Introduction)

• 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.

• Used

  Paperback
  1976

  $3.24

• 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.