Bleak House

Bleak House by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written 20 years after Nicholas Nickleby (the last Dickens I read), Dickens has improved enormously, and I get why he is a classic writer. Although inundated with a huge cast of characters, and revolving around a court case that no one understands, it still manages to be an intriguing tale. There is a lot you could dissect here, economics, law, feminism, social classes, love, power, family--it is 600 pages. But there are also mysteries, love letters, generous benefactors, eccentric characters, death (including the obligatory death of the urchin boy) and of course, spontaneous combustion. I don't know that I will ever love Dickens, but I have a healthy respect for him now.

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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.

His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of snow.

The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress;

She regards a ghost as one of the privileges of the upper classes, a genteel distinction to which the common people have no claim.

“Nemo is Latin for no one.”

It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life! To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!

The blinded oxen, over-goaded, over-driven, never guided, run into wrong places and are beaten out, and plunge red-eyed and foaming at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent, and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order; very, very like!

that ghostly stories shall be told of the stain upon the floor, so easy to be covered,

There was a folding-window to the carriage-head, but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope.