(3) Esther Summerson begins the story of her life by telling of her lonely and oppressed childhood, raised by Miss Barbary, a “godmother” who tells her that she is her mother’s “disgrace” and that it would have been far better had she never been born.

When he shows them some inconsequential documents pertaining to the Jarndyce case, she asks who copied them, faints, and is taken to her room. (2) Lady Dedlock is bored to death during the rainy season at Chesney Wold, her place in Lincolnshire, so she and her husband, Sir Leicester Dedlock, a baronet 20 years her senior, come up to London. At the heart of the fog, the Court of Chancery is entangled in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, a dispute over a will that has dragged on for several generations. Her situation encapsulates that of the larger society, in which traditions of aristocratic privilege deny human needs and desires and patriarchal institutions like the courts make orphans of society’s children, enable slums and disease to flourish, and suppress individual autonomy by a “philanthropy” that makes dependents of its recipients. Abandoned in infancy and raised by an abusive aunt, Esther is a self-denying, unassertive young woman, grateful for any recognition she receives from the patriarchal society around her. Esther’s narrative traces her discovery of her identity as the illegitimate child of Lady Dedlock. By this double narration, he is able to connect and contrast Esther’s domestic story with broad public concerns. Dickens uses two narrators, a thirdperson narrator who reports on the public life in the worlds of law and fashion and a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, a young woman who tells her personal history. Often characterized as the first of the late novels, Bleak House describes England as a bleak house, devastated by an irresponsible and self-serving legal system, symbolically represented by the Lord Chancellor ensconced in foggy glory in the Court of Chancery. Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak Houseīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Januĭickens’s ninth novel, published in monthly parts in 1852–53, with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, issued in one volume in 1853.

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