Charles Dickens – Bleak House

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 at Lamport, Portsmouth, being the second of the eight children of John Dickens, a clerk in the Naval Pay Office.
John Dickens’ work took him from place to place, so that Charles spent his childhood in Portsmouth, London and Chatham. In 1823 the family moved to London, faced with financial disaster. To help his family, Charles began to work before he was twelve.
His first work, “Sketches by Boz”, appeared in magazines soon after he was twenty-one, and in a volume after three years. In 1834 Dickens joined the reporting staff of the “Morning Chronicle”.
All the years between 1837 (“The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”) and 1865 (“Our Mutual Friend”) were intensely creative for the author of twelve of the best known novels in English literature: “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”(1837), ”Oliver Twist”(1838), “Nicholas Nickleby”(1838-1839), “Martin Chuzzlewit”(1843-1844), “Dombey and Son”(1846-1848), “David Copperfield”(1849-1850), “Bleak House”(1852-1853), “Hard Times”(1854), “Little Dorrit”(1855-1857), “Great Expectation”(1860-1861), and “Our Mutual Friend”(1864-1865).
Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870, after he had suffered a stroke at the end of a full day’s work.
Most of Charles Dickens’ novels are centered around a character, seen from his childhood to his maturity. “Bleak House” is different because, although it has a great number of characters, it centers around an institution, the High Court of Chancery, the delays and costs of which bring misery and ruin to its suitors.
The novel opens with a description of London in November. Fog appears both actual in the London streets and symbolic in the bleak building which houses the Court of Chancery, an institution which is the very opposite of a real court, where order and justice are the key words. Instead, the words used by Dickens with reference to the city and the court are “fog” and “mud”.
London is covered with fog and