This ideal of womanhood - saintly, winsome and prone to faint - limits Esther and Ada to prescribed roles as selfless servers of men.
Dickens' treatment of his female characters has drawn special criticism, and it is undeniable that Ada and Esther are totally unrealistic "types" of women, capturing the Victorian virtues of sisterly affection, loyalty, willingness to serve, kindness, gentleness, modesty, and gratitude. Inevitably, Bleak House has had its detractors as well as its admirers. In general, Dickens rejects beaurocratic, system-based, corrupt processes of law and social change in favor of quiet personal charity, captured when Esther Summerson says ".it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted." His chief target in the book is the convoluted, spirit-sapping process of English civil law known as Chancery, though Dickens targets several other social ills - incuding "fashionable" society, institutionalized philanthropy and the London slums. Among its many qualities, Bleak House survives perhaps most vividly as an impassioned denunciation of hypocrisy, neglect, and selfishness, both institutional and personal. Chesterton and, much later, Vladimir Nabokov, consider the book to be Dickens' best, the one in which the classic traits and concerns of a Dickens novel - likable characters, gripping storylines, social activism, humor, panache, grotesquerie and theatricality - come together with the greatest force. Bleak House continued Dickens' successful string of fiction, following David Copperfield and preceding Hard Times, and went through several printings.īeyond the popular success of its own day, Bleak House has developed a reputation as one of Dickens' most impressive achievements as a novelist. It was published as a book later that year. It was originally published in nineteen monthly parts, the last of which was double the size of the preceding eighteen, from March 1852 to September 1853. Bleak House was begun at Tavistock House, Dickens' London home, in November 1851, continued at Dover, and completed at Boulogne in August 1853.
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