Inside Bleak House: A Guide for the Modern Dickensian - Tapa blanda

INSIDE BLEAK HOUSE is the perfect companion to the BBC's autumn blockbuster Bleak House was, for the Victorians, one of the great serial novels. It will also be a great serial novel for their descendants in 2005, when Andrew Davies's adaptation of Dickens's story of legal delay, murder, and the slum-world of London comes to the nation's TV screens. The Victorians had a great advantage. Their Bleak House came out monthly, over a year and a half. They had time to absorb its massive bulk gradually, to discuss the latest events as every installment came to its monthly conclusion. Who 'were' Esther's parents? Who 'did' commit the murder? What 'is' the connection between Lady Dedlock and Nemo? And who, exactly, 'is' Nemo ('no-one')? Those watching the serial in 2005, over a few weeks, will have no such leisure. And, of course, much that Dickens did not have to explain to his contemporaries, is lost to us - separated as we are from Bleak House by 153 years. INSIDE BLEAK HOUSE will fill in the gaps which, over time, have separated us from the Dickensian World and will draw out the tantalising puzzles the novel provokes. What, for example, was the 'mud' that Dickens is so eloquent about in the first paragraph? Can a drunkard really explode from the spontaneous combustion of the 'firewater' he has imbibed? (Dickens thought so). Was Victorian law really that much worse than ours? It is the mark of a great novel (and none are greater than those Dickens wrote) that, as you read it, the narrative raises many more questions in the reader's mind than it answers. INSIDE BLEAK HOUSE sets out to explore some of those questions and to enhance the pleasure of the Bleak House experience.

John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern Literature at University College London, and the author of many books on Victorian Fiction.