There are many curses that people place upon themselves and their descendants, some are the rest of their actions and others by their indecisions complicated by bureaucratic failures then sometimes it’s both. Charles Dickens shows the effects of both in his 1853 novel Bleak House not only on his main characters but also on secondary characters who are just unlucky to interaction with the afflicted persons.

Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife Honoria live on his estate at Chesney Wold. Unknown to Sir Leicester, before she married, Lady Dedlock had a lover, Captain Hawdon, and had a daughter by him. Lady Dedlock believes her daughter is dead. The daughter, Esther Summerson, is in fact alive and is raised by Miss Barbary, Lady Dedlock's sister, who does not acknowledge their relationship. After Miss Barbary dies, John Jarndyce becomes Esther's guardian and assigns the Chancery lawyer "Conversation" Kenge to take charge of her future. After attending school for six years, Esther moves in with him at Bleak House. Jarndyce simultaneously assumes custody of two other wards, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare (who are both his and one another's distant cousins). They are beneficiaries in one of the wills at issue in Jarndyce and Jarndyce; their guardian is a beneficiary under another will, and the two wills conflict. Richard and Ada soon fall in love, but though Mr. Jarndyce does not oppose the match, he stipulates that Richard must first choose a profession. Richard first tries a career in medicine, and Esther meets Allan Woodcourt, a physician, at the house of Richard's tutor. When Richard mentions the prospect of gaining from the resolution of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Jarndyce beseeches him never to put faith in what he calls ‘the family curse’. Richard disregards this advice and his subsequent career endeavors fails as a result of his growing obsession while his personal relationship with Jarndyce deteriorates. Lady Dedlock is also a beneficiary under one of the wills and while looking at an affidavit by the family solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, she recognizes the handwriting on the copy and almost faints, which Tulkinghorn notices and investigates. He traces the copyist, a pauper known only as "Nemo", in London. Nemo has recently died, and the only person to identify him is a street-sweeper, a poor homeless boy named Jo, who lives in a particularly grim and poverty-stricken part of the city known as Tom-All-Alone's. Lady Dedlock investigates while disguised as her maid, Mademoiselle Hortense. Lady Dedlock pays Jo to take her to Nemo's grave. Meanwhile, Tulkinghorn is concerned Lady Dedlock's secret could threaten the interests of Sir Leicester and watches her constantly, even enlisting her maid to spy on her. He also enlists Inspector Bucket to run Jo out of town, to eliminate any loose ends that might connect Nemo to the Dedlocks. Esther and Lady Dedlock see each other at church and talks at Chesney Wold without recognizing their connection. Later, Lady Dedlock does discover that Esther is her child. However, Esther has become sick (possibly with smallpox, since it severely disfigures her) after nursing the homeless boy Jo. Lady Dedlock waits until Esther has recovered before telling her the truth. Though Esther and Lady Dedlock are happy to be reunited, Lady Dedlock tells Esther they must never acknowledge their connection again. Meanwhile Richard and Ada have secretly married, and Ada is pregnant. Esther has her own romance when Woodcourt returns to England, having survived a shipwreck, and continues to seek her company despite her disfigurement. Unfortunately, Esther has already agreed to marry her guardian, John Jarndyce, who sees Woodcourt is a better match for her and sets not only Woodcourt with good professional prospects and sets the two of them up for an engagement. Hortense and Tulkinghorn discover the truth about Lady Dedlock's past. After a confrontation with Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock flees her home, leaving a note apologizing for her conduct. Tulkinghorn dismisses Hortense, who is no longer of any use to him. Feeling abandoned and betrayed, Hortense kills Tulkinghorn and seeks to frame Lady Dedlock for his murder. Sir Leicester, discovering his lawyer's death and his wife's flight, suffers a catastrophic stroke, but he manages to communicate that he forgives his wife and wants her to return. Inspector Bucket, who has previously investigated several matters related to Jarndyce and Jarndyce, accepts Sir Leicester's commission to find first Tulkinghorn’s murderer and then Lady Dedlock. He quickly arrests Hortense but fails to find Lady Dedlock before she dies of exposure at the cemetery of her former lover, Captain Hawdon. A new will is found for Jarndyce and Jarndyce that benefits Richard and Ada, but the costs of litigation have entirely consumed the estate bring the case to an end. Richard collapses and Woodcourt diagnoses him as being in the last stages of tuberculosis and he dies before the birth of his namesake son. John Jarndyce takes in Ada and her child, a boy whom she names Richard. Esther and Woodcourt marry and live in a Yorkshire house which Jarndyce gives to them. The couple later raise two daughters.

The above synopsis only covers the main plot, but expertly woven throughout are two subplots surrounding Caddy Jellyby and Mr. George Rouncewell who interact with the main characters at various times throughout the novel. Dickens masterfully crafts the cast of characters and the plot in an engaging and intriguing serious of plots that make the book a complete whole thus showing why his work is considered among the greatest of literature. Yet Dickens is also a bit too wordy resulting in scenes taking longer than they should and making some readers like myself, to start skimming through places in the later half of the book when a character that likes to spout off begins having a soliloquy of some indeterminable length at the expense of missing something connected to the slowly culminating climax.

Bleak House turns out to show Charles Dickens at his best as well as showing off what might be his one little flaw. The interesting characters and multilayered narrative keep the reader engaged throughout the book even as they must sometimes endure Dickens wordiness that might drown them in unnecessary prose. Though over 900 pages, a reader should not feel intimidated given that many Dickens books are an extraordinary length and the reader keeps on being engaged throughout their reading experience so that length does not matter.

With the Festive Tasks in full swing, Halloween reads behind me, and the end of the year in sight, I'm turning to seasonal reads. 

While Bleak Expectations is obviously a spoof on Dickensian works and themes, and while I am not a fan of Dickens (tho I still want to read A Tale of Two Cities), the programme is brilliant and has had me laughing out loud all morning. There is a stellar cast here who bring out the silly while still keeping the tone in line with what I expect from a Dickensian tragedy.

Oh, and Anthony Head - already a firm favourite - playing the arch nemesis is priceless.

Whew - I have finished this 813 page book after a couple of false starts.

It's classic Dickens. I've heard it called his masterpiece, but I don't have enough experience with Dickens to weigh in on that subject. I did like it a whole lot better than Dombey and Son, but I didn't like it so well as either Great Expectations or Oliver Twist.

The last 20% was a bit of a bloodbath, though, with a murder, an attempted frame-up, and then one of those Victorian deaths where a character just up and dies of despair. I think my favorite character was poor Caddy Jellyby Turveydrop, although I liked all of the women in this one (Ada was kind of meh, but only because she had a whiff of Dora about her). Mrs. Jellyby is a hoot and I can certainly understand why she has become the stuff of Dickensian legend.

Anyway, Dickens is always just Dickens. His books are teeming with life, like when you're in 5th grade science class and the teacher puts a drop of pond water under a microscope so all of the kids can see all of the little amoebas and bacterium and other bits of life wriggling about. I know that he is melodramatic and that his characters more often resemble caricatures, but once I fall into a Dickens, I feel like I'm in Victorian, England, which is a place I dearly love to visit in the literary sense (don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about how awful and smelly it would've been to actually live in it).

I have to share the second paragraph in the book, because it is so fabulously Dickensian and atmospheric:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows, fog down the river where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Progress!

Lots has happened - let's be honest, Dickens was the OG when it comes to soap operas. Long before Susan Lucci as Erica Kane threw her first temper tantrum on television, Lady Dedlock was fretting over the exposure of her deep, dark secret, unscrupulous lawyers were being murdered, and lovely young women were being struck down by plagues carried by starving homeless boys.

A couple of people have recommended the recent BBC adaptation! I have been waiting to watch the adaptation until I read the book, and am excited to watch it.

I actually started the book a few months ago, and got pretty far into it, but I was only reading a chapter or so a day on my e-reader, and there are three things that have become clear to me:

1. My kindle is fine for modern fiction read purely for leisure, where I don't care about retention, but in order to really engage with a book, especially a classic, I should always opt for print because my pace is slower, my focus is greater, and my retention is miles better. This may just be a me thing, but it's definitely a thing for me. Does anyone else have this weird quirk?

2. I am no good at paced reading. I need to just climb into the book and stay there until I'm done. I think I am going to abandon reading multiple books because it's always just too easy to put the harder one off, and then I lose the thread of it and end up DNF'ing. I restarted Saturday, and have already read to Chapter 22. I expect it will take me the better part of the week to finish!

3. Dickens is a struggle for me, far more than any other Victorian writer. I think it is the outrageousness of his characters/plots. I am always glad to have read one of his books when I finish it, but the process is a bit of a battle. 

So far, I would say that I'm enjoying it, with the reservation that I always hold for Dickens. I just like reading Trollope and Gaskell, and even Wilkie Collins, more.

I like Esther a lot, and am fascinated by "my Lady Dedlock." I don't get the elder Mr. Turveydrop and his "Deportment," at all, which seems to be an excuse to force other people to service his needs. I like poor Caddy, and Mrs. Jellyby needs an arse kicking, but she is quite a creation. And Dickens silly little paragraph about Boodle and Coodle and Doodle and Foodle pretty much exemplifies everything that I love, and hate, about Dickens with it's arch pointlessness.

I really should have waited until I could fit this into BLopoly, because I'm not even going to get the $10.00 it would be worth for finishing it, and now I'm not going to be able to roll for several days!