Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens' boldest experiment in telling a complex plot, The House of Gloom, forces the reader to make connections between the fashionable and the excluded, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful, and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens' later novels is his assault on a careless society metaphorically embodied, but nowhere has his mixture of comedy and angry satire been so skillfully controlled. A gloomy house does not lend itself to a single explanation. This is a mysterious story in which Esther Summerson reveals the truth about her birth and the tragic life of her unknown mother. This is a murder story that culminates in a fascinating chase led by Inspector Bucket, one of the oldest detectives in British fiction. And this is a tale about salvation, in which a gloomy house is transformed at the insistence of human love.
