"Bleak House"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how in "Bleak House", Dickens' expressed opinion of the entire British legal system is bleak, at best. It looks at how Dickens' long-winded story, although interestingly woven with plot and characters, paints a portrait of a corrupt, confused and hopeless legal justice system. In particular, it examines how the case, Jarndyce & Jarndyce, which has been in litigation for so many years that no one alive, except one person knows what it is about, is the centerpiece for Dickens' portrait of a system gone to seed and how the local chancery, under whose jurisdiction Jarndyce & Jarndyce languishes, is a portrait of bureaucratic waste and greed.

From the Paper:

"Dickens treated the issue of poverty very seriously, and the appalling conditions that prevailed at Tom-all-Alone's reveal his great compassion and even anger over England's poor. One review points out that by describing areas such as Tom-all-Aloe's, Dickens " shows that, had the court used the money that was tied up in foolish legal issues on repairing and maintaining such areas as these, many citizens could have found some hope" (Lecki). In 1853 in a review of the story, Henry Chorley comments on Dickens' poor young character, Jo, saying that , "Perhaps among all the waifs and strays, the beggars and the outcasts, in behalf of whose humanity our author has again and again appealed to a world too apt to forget their existence, he has never produced anything more rueful, more pitiable....The dying scene with its terrible morals and impetuous protest, Mr. Dickens has nowhere in all his works excelled" (Jecki). "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 1853, The World Wide SchoolTM Seattle, Washington, November 1997
• Lecki, Carole "Bleak House" review; http://caxton.stockton.edu/reviewingdickens/stories/storyReader$15
• Literature Network "Bleak House" http://www.online literature.com/dickens/bleakhouse/
• Peters, Barbara "Bleak House" The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ 2007 www.azpbs.org/exclusive/peters_bleakhouse.html , Scottsdale, AZ 2007.
• Pittard, Victorian Detective Fiction University of Exeter, crimeculture.com, 2007.

More papers on "Bleak House":

• Book Review # 93620 : "Charles Dickens' "Bleak House"
• Analytical Essay # 68539 : "Bleak House"
• Analytical Essay # 8317 : "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens"

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