Bleak House

Around the endless Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Dickens draws a whole society, from the fog-bound law courts to the rotting slum of Tom-all-Alone's, from a Lincolnshire great house to the good house in Hertfordshire where Esther Summerson makes a home. The novel maps a real geography: the Court of Chancery and Lincoln's Inn, the slum whose fever spreads to rich and poor alike, and the country estates on which its secrets turn.

John Jarndyce

The Court of Chancery

Jarndyce and Jarndyce

At the heart of the fog sits the Court of Chancery, where the great suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has dragged on so long that no one alive quite understands it, and generations are ruined waiting for its end. Dickens opens on the law's murderous delay as the book's controlling symbol, a machine that consumes the very fortunes it claims to protect.

The opening chapters

explicit The Court of Chancery, sitting at Lincoln's Inn Hall in real London, is where the interminable suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds on; sited there.

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