Some scholars debate when Bleak House is set. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens's satire as exaggerated, Bleak House helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s. One such was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens said there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. The novel has many characters and several subplots, and is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson and partly by an omniscient narrator. Illustration from the New York Public Library Berg Collectionīleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853.
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