Bleak House

A chancery suit has been grinding through the courts for so long that no one alive remembers what it was about, and the fog that opens the novel never really lifts from it. Dickens gave the book two narrators — one distant, one intimate — and built the first detective in English fiction into the machinery. It is his most controlled performance and his angriest. Twenty-three plates by painters including John Sell Cotman and Philip Richard Morris follow the novel's themes of law, poverty and inheritance from 1772 to 1894.