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Annelies's Reviews > Bleak House
Bleak House
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I feel like the weather today in Belgium (it's dark and cold and snowy). I thought all Charles Dickens books where like this weather. I thought it met my feelings. But after reading I see this is not at all a dark and ' bleak' book. It's a book about human feelings, their interactions, about hope and tenderness, friendship, love. Of course there are some bleak components: people die, there's murder, poverty ... but there's a light of humanity beyond this all.
The underlying factor that binds all in the book is the neverending court case about the Jarndyce versus Jarndyce legacy. A whole story is woven around it. It's a complicated story that appears everywhere and rules the whole story. All peoples handlings are directed by it. And the story it reveals is a masterpiece.
So when the wheater or your feelings are bleak, there will always be this masterpiece.
The underlying factor that binds all in the book is the neverending court case about the Jarndyce versus Jarndyce legacy. A whole story is woven around it. It's a complicated story that appears everywhere and rules the whole story. All peoples handlings are directed by it. And the story it reveals is a masterpiece.
So when the wheater or your feelings are bleak, there will always be this masterpiece.
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“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, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. 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 (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
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. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”
― Bleak House
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. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”
― Bleak House
Reading Progress
September 21, 2013
– Shelved as:
to-read
September 21, 2013
– Shelved
January 6, 2017
–
Started Reading
January 12, 2017
–
Finished Reading
August 13, 2018
– Shelved as:
classics
August 13, 2018
– Shelved as:
favorites
August 13, 2018
– Shelved as:
non-contemporary-uk
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it had never occurred to me like that, but it does seem true, 'Dickensian' isn't used as a positive, yet, eventually this a liberating story, offering renewal (at least for those who survive the novel)!
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125....