#134 in Classics
Bleak House
- 824
- Pages
- about 15 h
- Reading time
- Series 2005 +4
- On screen
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Our view
“Bleak House” is Dickens on the grand scale: a lawsuit without end, a murder mystery and a crowd of interlinked characters. Esther Summerson’s voice alternates with an all-seeing narrator, and some readers single out the brooding atmosphere and the memorable minor figures. Others find the long road to the final stretch meandering, and some need background on the Court of Chancery. At over eight hundred pages it is a book to settle into.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Bleak House is a novel by the English author Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between 12 March 1852 and 12 September 1853. 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. 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. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens said there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably Thellusson v Woodford, in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. 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.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 5 times — from 1901 to 2005.
- Short filmThe Death of Poor JoeIMDb
- SeriesBleak HouseIMDb
- FilmBleak HouseIMDb
- SeriesBleak HouseIMDb
- SeriesBleak HouseIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 157 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 51% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 7.9 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 18 | 12% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 139 | 89% |
Frequently asked
How long is Bleak House?
It has 824 pages — longer than 97% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 7.8 and 7.9, closest to this book.
