Bleak House

For three weeks I have toiled, worked, engaged my senses upon a reading task of mammoth proportions. My experience is that I am the richer for it. At a time when I am reacquainting myself with many classic works, Bleak House has been a task in itself. No faint heart had I in taking the challenge of reading this over a period of time when that very commodity was at a premium. And rewarded I found myself at each turn. Dickens' classic - argued my many to be his best - ostensibly tells the tale of the chancery case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a case once about a disputed will now taken over by the question of costs. Its beneficiaries, such as they are, frame the story as the case enters its very latest stages. The matter, it is made clear, was a great one of chancery. The opening chapter spells out most clearly just how murky the waters of the court have become. Nobody seems to know what is truly happening in the case. In true Dickens fashion, the case has descended to farce, with twenty-one barristers in court, some seeming to speak and to never speak again, melting into the wonderfully evocative mists of nineteenth century London. As a lawyer, Bleak House has long been recommended to me. I now see why. Daunted as I was at its prodigious length - running to almost 1,000 densely-printed pages in paperback - it has taken me some twelve years to finally read it since being recommended it as part of a law and literature unit at university. It is a book about law and about its more farcical elements. It is about reform. It is about wider society and Dickens' usual zeal for improvement. At once about nothing and everything, it is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. I can very much see why. But for that, it is a book of frustrations. Bound by its times while being a novel of social liberalism, we see women damned for children out of wedlock. We see the attitudes of the time both damned and accepted. We see the reformers forced to work within a stringent framework of a society out of touch with the needs of the most desperate. African reformers fail to see the world around them, obsessed as they are by their own projects. And all of this, running as a satirical seam throughout the substance of Bleak House, is what makes Bleak House a great book.