Bleak House is Dickens's most enigmatic and masterly novel; a savage, blackly comic indictment of a legal system that devours the innocent and a society that is rotten to the core, from upper-class drawing rooms to foggy London slums.

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the courts, it threatens to destroy everyone in tis wake, from Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, whose inheritance is gradually consumed by costs, to Esther Summerson, whose parentage is a deepening and scandalous mystery.