Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between 12 March 1852 and 12 September 1853.

The English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth sets the action in 1827;[4] however, reference to preparation for the building of a railway in Chapter LV suggests the 1830s.

While listening to the reading by Mr Tulkinghorn, the family solicitor, of an affidavit, Lady Dedlock recognises the handwriting on the copy.

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.

After Miss Barbary dies, John Jarndyce becomes Esther's guardian and assigns "Conversation" Kenge, a Chancery lawyer, to take charge of her future.

Richard decides to change his career to law, then later switches again and spends the remainder of his funds to buy a commission as a military officer.

Meanwhile, Mr Tulkinghorn is concerned Lady Dedlock has a secret which could threaten the interests of Sir Leicester and watches her constantly, even enlisting the real Hortense to spy on her.

Lady Dedlock discovers that Esther is her own child: unknown to Sir Leicester, before she married, Honoria had had a lover, Captain Hawdon (Nemo), and bore a daughter by him, who she had believed was dead.

Esther has her own romance when Mr Woodcourt returns to England, having survived a shipwreck, and he continues to seek her company despite her disfigurement.

After a confrontation with Mr Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock flees her home, leaving a note apologising to Sir Leicester for her conduct.

Lady Dedlock has no way to know of her husband's forgiveness or that she has been cleared of suspicion, and she wanders the country in cold weather before dying at the cemetery of her former lover, Captain Hawdon.

Nabokov felt that letting Esther tell part of the story was Dickens's "main mistake" in planning the novel.

For most readers and scholars, the central concern of Bleak House is its indictment of the English Chancery court system.

By the mid-nineteenth century, English law reformers had long criticised the delays of Chancery litigation, and Dickens found the subject a tempting target.

Dickens said in the preface to the book edition of Bleak House that he had "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things".

And some remarkable things do happen: One character, Krook, smells of brimstone and eventually dies of spontaneous human combustion.

Scientifically inclined writers, as well as physicians and scientists, rejected spontaneous human combustion as legend or superstition.

When the instalment of Bleak House containing Krook's demise appeared, the literary critic George Henry Lewes accused Dickens of "giving currency to a vulgar error".

[26] Dickens vigorously defended the reality of spontaneous human combustion and cited many documented cases, as well as his own memories of coroners' inquests that he had attended when he had been a reporter.

In the preface of the book edition of Bleak House, Dickens wrote: "I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received."

George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton are among those literary critics and writers who consider Bleak House to be the best novel that Dickens wrote.

[28] In the late nineteenth century, actress Fanny Janauschek acted in a stage version of Bleak House in which she played both Lady Dedlock and her maid Hortense.

[32] In 1928, a short film made in the UK in the Phonofilm sound-on-film process starred Bransby Williams as Grandfather Smallweed.

[36] In 2005, the third Bleak House was broadcast in fifteen episodes starring Anna Maxwell Martin, Gillian Anderson, Denis Lawson, Charles Dance, and Carey Mulligan.

[37] It won a Peabody Award that same year because it "created 'appointment viewing,' soap-style, for a series that greatly rewarded its many extra viewers.