Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there: well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and admit no light

CHAPTER 1In ChanceryLondon. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.eImplacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired

CHARACTERSMR. BAYHAM BADGER,a medical practitioner in London.MATTHEW BAGNET (‘Lignum Vitae’),an ex-artilleryman and bassoon-player.WOOLWICH BAGNET,his son.LAWRENCE BOYTHORN,the impetuous, hearty friend

DEDICATED,AS A REMEMBRANCE OF OUR FRIENDLY UNION,TO MY COMPANIONS IN THE GUILD OF LITERATURE AND ART 1PREFACEA chancery Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and

in Bleak House,he also dwelled on what was: because “no part of [Tom-all-Alone‘s] left to the imagination is at all likely to be made so bad as the reality,” he transformed “these hours of darkness” to

Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a “ ‘dark-looking case’ ” (p. 522), says Richard, who enters Chancery “from the outermost circle of … evil” (p. 21), plunges into “ ’the mysteries’ ” (p. 650) of the impenetrable

There, the condition-of-England question has a clear answer: “Fog everywhere.” If anything is obscure about the country as represented in Bleak House,it is how it came to be in such a dire state. Referring

But it can be enabling, too, for when we learn that Jo, ”who is of no order and no place“ (p. 602), had been befriended by Nemo, whose name, we are so helpfully reminded, means ”no one“ in Latin, we not

In Bleak House,he appears to have been determined to inculcate this “infirmity” in his readers: “What connexion can there be … ?” is a question directed at us.In a novel that is extraordinary for its vast

according to her own “ ’little orderly system’ ” (p. 503), hardly seems an adequate antidote to a system as extensively and devastatingly circuitous as Chancery.Inasmuch as Esther’s persistently cheery

Indeed, while John Ruskin argued that the number of deaths in Bleak House(nine, by his miscount; there are more) answered “a craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement” and that such a novel

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