Hooked: Bleak House
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.
Charles Dickens
the opening of Bleak House
The High Court of Chancery and its surroundings become the physical representations of one of Dickens’ primary themes in Bleak House. Everything, from the fog to the mud to the Lord High Chancellor himself, suggests corruption and decay. Dickens wisely contrasts the world-weary omniscience of this section’s narrator with sections of first-person narrative from Esther Summerson, an innocent who reports from the personal perspective on the fates of those entangled in the Chancery’s most infamous suit, Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce.