Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Victorian novel · 1853

Bleak House

By Charles Dickens · (Published 1853) · All Charles Dickens books

Word Count ~351,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 19.5 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #1023

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #1023

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London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

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Further Reading

More Dickens and the Victorian novel

Free edition

David Copperfield

By Charles Dickens · the first-person life story Dickens wrote just before this one

Free edition

Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens · his later novel of inheritance, guilt and a marsh at dusk

Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Summary, Characters & Themes

This summary and analysis of Bleak House follows the novel from the Chancery sitting that opens it to the moment the case collapses under its own costs. Dickens gives the story two narrators. One is an unnamed voice in the present tense, ranging from the Lord Chancellor’s court to a Lincolnshire park and knowing more than any single character can; the other is Esther Summerson, writing in the past tense from the quiet of a later life. The double narration keeps the architecture of the book before the reader, letting us understand in advance what the people inside it cannot, while Esther’s modest little voice becomes the moral centre of a very large machine. It also lets Dickens be funny in one chapter and merciless in the next without breaking the tone, and it lets the two voices between them carry sixty-seven chapters, a murder, a lawsuit and two generations of one family.

The author is Charles Dickens, and by 1852 he was famous enough for each new serial to be treated as a public event. Bleak House was the ninth of his novels and the first in which he set two narrators side by side, and it was written during a period in which his household, his marriage and his editorial work at Household Words were all under strain. Monthly publication gave him an audience that waited a month between numbers, argued about the characters in letters and sermons, and expected a great set piece at the end of every part; the fog-and-mud opening was written for readers who had seen the real thing in their own streets. He had been a solicitor’s clerk and a parliamentary reporter, which is why his lawyers talk like lawyers and his clerks complain about the copying.

Dickens knew Chancery at first hand. He had worked as a law clerk and as a parliamentary reporter before he was a novelist, and the case that eats the Jarndyce fortune is built from the slower sort of legal fact rather than from invention: the preface of 1853 names a friendly suit that ran for decades and left its costs behind it. In the novel the point is not the wickedness of the law but its inertia. Nothing is ever decided, so nothing can be mended, and the men who profit from the delay are not conspirators but professional men with rent to pay and an aged father in the Vale of Taunton to support. Even the house has a legal history: it was called the Peaks before a Jarndyce in despair renamed it Bleak House.

There is more here than legal satire. Dickens uses the suit to show how damage is handed down through generations: Esther inherits her mother’s secret, Richard inherits the expectation of a fortune, and Jo inherits a fever. Out of that soil the book’s tenderness grows, surprising readers who came for the satire – the brickmaker’s wife, the maid Charley, Mr George the trooper, and the old housekeeper at Chesney Wold who has served one family for fifty years. The comedy is placed just as carefully, from Boythorn’s feud with Sir Leicester over a right of way to Mr Turveydrop and his deportment. Everything is measured against the same question: what a person does with what has been handed to them, and whether they can bear to look at it. Dickens is kinder to his failures than to his successes.

For most readers the pleasure of the book is the language rather than the puzzle: fog, soot, wet grass, the clatter of Chancery, and the flatly stated cruelties that the narrator turns aside from. This page uses the plain text of the 1853 edition held at Project Gutenberg, so the chapter divisions and the words are the ones Dickens sent to his publisher, with nothing inserted between the reader and the text. If you came here from a shelf of Victorian fiction, two natural neighbours are David Copperfield, the novel Dickens had just finished, and Great Expectations, where he returns to fog, guilt and inherited money. Readers who want the same London atmosphere in a shorter book can try Oliver Twist, which attacks the workhouse in the same pitiless comic voice.

Historical Context

The Court of Chancery was the equity court that handled trusts, wills and settled property, and by the 1840s it was the standing example of a system that could not finish what it began. Cases were argued in Lincoln’s Inn Hall before the Lord Chancellor, then referred to masters and registrars whose fees came out of the estate, so that a suit could cost more than the property it was deciding. Reform came in bursts: in 1852 the Chancery Procedure Act and the Masters in Chancery Abolition Act cut at the worst delays, and Dickens, finishing his book in 1853, could watch reform happening while he wrote about the long years before it.

Bleak House appeared at the opening of the sanitary decade. London’s water, drains and crowded burial grounds were being mapped by reformers, and in 1854 John Snow would trace a cholera outbreak to a single Soho pump; the foul churchyard where Nemo is buried and the feverish court of Tom-all-Alone’s belong to that public argument rather than to pure invention. Dickens had used disease as a moral before, but here it moves the plot: a crossing-sweeper carries infection into a country house, and the consequences reach people who never go near him. Monthly serial publication, at a shilling a number, kept the story tied to the newspapers of the day. The parts were reviewed as they appeared, and the reviews argued about the slum.

By 1852 Dickens was editing Household Words and had learned to think of a serial as a number of readers reached at once. The double narration had a practical advantage: an omniscient voice could move between the law courts, a baronet’s park and a slum, while Esther’s first-person chapters kept a single conscience at the centre. He also knew the parts would be read aloud, and the great rhetorical passages – the fog, the brick kilns, the death of the boy who never knew what it was all about – were written to be spoken in a room. The book came out in numbers and then in volume, and was in every circulating library by the end of the year.

Key Characters & Literary Archetypes

• Esther Summerson: The narrator of her own chapters and the heart of the book. Brought up by a godmother who told her that her birth was a disgrace, she becomes housekeeper at Bleak House and ends by keeping house for a whole neighbourhood: her guardian, Ada, Richard, and the sick of a country practice. Dickens gives her small vanity and large courage, and the loss of her looks is the making of the novel’s quiet argument about what a woman is worth. Her two proposals tell you most of what the book believes about love.
• Lady Dedlock: Sir Leicester Dedlock’s wife, beautiful, bored and closely watched. As Honoria she loved a captain named Hawdon, and was told that the child born of that love had died. One lawyer knows the truth, and her long attempt to keep it is the tragic spine of the story. Dickens lets her look into the fog she can never enter, and permits her only a single meeting with the daughter she was never allowed to name. Her pride is the last thing she owns, and it is also what kills her.
• John Jarndyce: Esther’s guardian and the owner of the house at St Albans, a man who distrusts the suit that carries his name and cannot quite break from it. He is generous and a little evasive, gives money away and refuses to argue, and calls the wind east when he would rather not speak. He takes the wards, employs Esther, forgives Richard, and in the end does the hardest and least thanked thing in the novel. His kindness is real, and so is the evasiveness that goes with it.
• Richard Carstone: A ward of Chancery and Ada’s cousin: agreeable, easily discouraged, and privately certain that prudence is a rule for other people. He drifts from medicine to law to the army and back to law, always waiting for the case to settle. Dickens makes his ruin a matter of small daily choices, so that he learns the truth about his own life late, and is allowed to learn it kindly. He is not stupid; he is hopeful in the way the court has taught him to be.
• Mr Tulkinghorn: The Dedlocks’ solicitor, an old man in rusty black who collects other people’s secrets and spends the book deciding which of them to use. He is not a villain of appetite but a professional with a habit of stating the worst as a fact, and the confidence he is trusted with becomes the rope around his own neck. Dickens gives him a dry, terrible politeness and no last word at all. He believes a family secret is a form of property, to be held until it is useful.
• Inspector Bucket: A detective from a branch of policing that was still new, cheerful, methodical and everywhere at once. He follows a lady in an unfashionable mantle, sits up at night with a sick crossing-sweeper, and takes a murderer out of a drawing-room without raising his voice. Dickens built him from a real policeman of the day, and made of him a figure of ordinary competence: patient, watchful, and quite unmoved by rank. He is the only character who can move between a slum and a drawing room without changing his manner.

Core Literary Themes

• The law that cannot finish: Jarndyce and Jarndyce is not an evil plot but a machine that runs on delay. Every hearing produces another hearing, every document another document, and the costs that feed the lawyers eat the estate they were meant to restore. Dickens shows how a system can absorb the lives of suitors without anyone in it intending harm: the Chancellor means well, the solicitors are respectable, and a ruined farmer from Shropshire still dies in a shooting gallery. The suit ends only when there is nothing left to spend. Dickens’s target is not a villain but a habit of mind that treats a case as a career.
• Secrets, birth and respectability: The book’s engine is a hidden birth. Esther is told her mother is her disgrace, Lady Dedlock is trapped by a love that predates her marriage, and the respectable world of Chesney Wold is held together by what is not said. Dickens is careful about the cost: the secret does not merely embarrass, it isolates each person who keeps it, so that mother and daughter can meet only in a church, a wood, and finally a burial ground at the edge of the city. The novel is hard on the world that makes such secrecy necessary, and gentle with the people trapped inside it.
• Contagion and neglect: Tom-all-Alone’s is a slum with a court case as its landlord, and its fever travels. Dickens treats infection as a form of bookkeeping: the city cannot seal itself off from the misery that supplies its labour, and a single boy with a broom can carry the debt from a ruined court into a baronet’s household. The narrator steps out of the story at the grave of Jo to address the reader directly, because argument has failed and only reproach remains. The point is not that the poor are dangerous but that the rich have decided not to notice what they pay for.
• Philanthropy as avoidance: Mrs Jellyby’s eyes cannot see nearer than Africa, Mrs Pardiggle arrives with good intentions and a constable’s manner, and Harold Skimpole is charming so that other people will pay. Each is a version of a serious Victorian question about duty, and each is comic until money or illness has to be handed over. Dickens’s target is not generosity but the sort of generosity that costs the giver nothing and lets the neglected child at home go barefoot and unfed. Charity, in this book, is usually what people do instead of the obvious thing in front of them. The joke always has a bill attached.
• Narration and modest virtue: Two voices carry the novel, one that knows everything and one that claims to know almost nothing. The gap between them is the book’s real subject: how much a decent person can see, and how much she will admit to seeing. Esther’s comedy about being a tiresome little creature writing about herself turns out to be moral evidence, and the happy ending is measured not by money recovered but by work done and people nursed. By the last page the reader has learned to read two kinds of silence at once. That is the book’s final judgement on its own cleverness.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Bleak House?

Bleak House is long, and length is where badly made ebooks fail. This edition keeps the novel’s sixty-seven chapters as Dickens set them, with headings that survive in the text rather than being flattened into one running mass, so you can stop at the end of a chapter and find your place again. The files are built for reading devices rather than for a browser window: the paragraphs are properly spaced, the italic emphases the narrator uses for irony are preserved, and no line of the original has been cut to make a shorter book.

The text follows the Project Gutenberg transcription made from the 1853 edition by Donald Lainson and later checked by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein. That matters for a novel in which Dickens revised as he serialised and in which some early printings differ: you get the chapters as they stood when the parts were gathered into a volume, including the preface in which he defends the truth of Gridley’s case and the reality of the death by spontaneous combustion. It is the reading text, not a retelling, and the punctuation of the dialogue is left where he put it.

Three formats are offered because readers differ. The EPUB suits most tablets and phones and reflows if you raise the type; the AZW3 is for Kindle devices and keeps the chapter marks in the device’s own table of contents; the KEPUB is built for Kobo readers, which handle pagination and bookmarks better with that container. All three are DRM-free and unabridged, so they can be copied between the devices you already own, and none of them will stop working when a shop closes. Download once and keep the file. None of them needs an account to open.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1023 — the complete text, unabridged, with the chapter headings the author set.
• Complete and unmodernised Sixty-seven chapters and the 1853 preface, in the order Dickens published them, with nothing abridged and nothing summarised.
• Chapter marks that work Every chapter heading survives as a real division of the book, so the table of contents on your device can find it.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB Three DRM-free files, one download: the same book on a phone, a Kindle or a Kobo.

Part of: Victorian Novels · Classic Fiction