Bleak House by Charles Dickens

First published in the year 1853, the present novel ‘Bleak House’ is one of Charles Dickens’s major works. 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, and he makes use of his earlier experiences as a law clerk and as a litigant seeking to enforce copyright on his earlier books.