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Bleak House.
Charles Dickens.
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Bleak House.
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About the author
Charles John Huffam Dickens
(February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870),
pen-name "Boz", was a British nov-
elist of the Victorian era. The popu-
larity of his books during his lifetime
and in present days is demonstrated
by the fact that none of his novels
has ever gone out of print.
early twenties he made a name for himself with his first novel The
Pickwick Papers.
On April 2, 1836 Charles married Catherine Hogarth with whom
he was to have ten children. In 1842 they traveled together to the
United States, the trip is described in the short travelog American
Notes and is also used as the basis of some of the episodes in David
Copperfield.
Charles was born in Portsmouth, England, to John Dickens, a na-
val pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow. When Charles was five,
the family moved to Chatham, Kent. When he was ten, the family
relocated to Camden Town in London.
He received some education at a private school but when his fa-
ther was imprisoned for debt, Charles wound up working 10-hours a
day in a London boot-blacking factory located near to the present day
Charing Cross railway station, when he was twelve. Resentment of his
situation and the conditions working-class people lived under became
major themes of his works. Dickens wrote, "No advice, no counsel, no
encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call
to mind, so help me God!"
Dickens became a journalist, reporting parliamentary debate and
travelling Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns. His jour-
nalism informed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz and he
continued to contribute to and edit journals for much of his life. In his
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Contents
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Chapter 55.
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1
Bleak House.
Preface
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring
under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the
“parsimony of the public,” which guilty public, it appeared, had been
until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means
enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed—I believe by
Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body
of this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated.
In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one
of Shakespeare’s sonnets:
NOTICE
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“My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!”
 2
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3
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know
what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention
here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley
is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by
a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the
whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present
moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was
commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty coun-
sel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been
incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A
FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termi-
nation now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit
in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close
of the last century and in which more than double the amount of
seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted
other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these
pages, to the shame of—a parsimonious public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark.
The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been
denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes
(quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been
abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me
at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous
combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do
not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote
that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about
thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess
Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described
by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distin-
guished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731,
which he afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond
all rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed
in Mr. Krook’s case. The next most famous instance happened at Rheims
six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most
renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject was a woman,
whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but
on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was
shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which this
name of spontaneous combustion is given. I do not think it necessary
to add to these notable facts, and that general reference to the authori-
ties which will be found at page 30, vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and
experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and
Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I
shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable
spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occur-
rences are usually received.
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of
familiar things.
1853
* Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at the
town of Columbus, in the United States of America, quite recently.
The subject was a German who kept a liquor-shop and was an invet-
erate drunkard.
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