Bleak House

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement.

Dual plotlines—Esther's discovery arc and the Jarndyce suit—converge through Lady Dedlock's secret, Tulkinghorn's murder, and Richard's consumption by hope; the Chancery fog metaphor pays off structurally, so plot scores 93.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth.

Esther, Lady Dedlock, Skimpole, Jo, Bucket, Vholes, and Mr. Jarndyce form Dickens's most socially panoramic ensemble; the opening mud-and-fog tableau introduces the institutional cast before individuals speak, so cast scores 95.

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.

Sixty-seven chapters with deliberate fog—Tom-all-Alone's and third-person satire dilate while Esther's narrative provides warmth; the opening's atmospheric dilation typifies the middle's patience test, so pace scores 80.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Present-tense third-person satire alternating with Esther's modest first person—"Implacable November weather" and the soot snowflakes rank among Dickens's most formally ambitious and verbally brilliant passages, so prose scores 94.

Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke.

Lincoln's Inn Hall, Tom-all-Alone's, Chesney Wold, and Bleak House itself—Victorian England as interconnected system of law, class, and disease; the mud is moral atmosphere not backdrop, so world scores 96.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

Ch.I establishes institutional paralysis before a single character speaks—the Lord Chancellor in mud-locked London is one of Dickens's great atmospheric openings, so hook scores 90.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.

Dual narration (satirical present / Esther's retrospective), the legal system as antagonist, and Inspector Bucket's detective elements template institutional critique from Trollope to Kafka analogues, so innov scores 92.

Full seven happy years I have been the mistress of Bleak House. I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name.

Esther's seven happy years—the scar transformed to "diviner quality," the wind departed from the east—closes both personal and atmospheric arcs with earned domestic peace, so ending scores 91.