CHARLES DICKENS - BLEAK HOUSE

Charles Dickens is one of the greatest writers of the XIXth in England. He wrote several novels, such as: Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, etc. In his works, he criticizes the hypocrisy of his contemporary society, the injustice of the social system of his time and sympathizes with its victims.
“In Chancery” is the opening chapter of the novel “Bleak House”, where Dickens’s criticism of the political and social system is at its best. The protagonist of the fragment is the High Court of Chancery, the law Court of Justice in England at that time. The fragment can be divided into two parts: the description of a typical raw autumn day in the London of Dickens’s time and the description of the High Court of Chancery. The two parts are related by the metaphorical use of the word “fog”, which characterizes both London and the High Court of Justice.
It was Dickens’s declared intention to dwell in this opening chapter of “Bleak House” on the destructive influence on people’s lives exercised by the English legal system of his time, as a part of the larger social wrong done to the low and the poor, symbolized here by the grim presence of the building of the High Court of Chancery on an apocalyptic foggy day in London, reminding one of both the Biblical Flood and of the Judgement Day, as if man’s life were but a long continuous suffering dictated by his predestined fate. The author’s omniscient eye surveys the scene like the lens of a film camera in its mobility, now encompassing a large panoramic view, now swooping down to a close scrutiny of some individual detail, in a constant expansion and contraction of the narrative, symbolic of the foul breathing of some monstrous malevolent being.
From the very beginning, the narrative of “Bleak House” presupposes a Shakespearean correspondence between the external appearance of things and their inner condition. The presentation of the physical degradation of the environment,