Critical assessments of Bleak House have been remarkable in their variety. In 1853, a review in the Spectator (included in the Criticism section of the present volume) treated the novel as if it were a kind of clumsy bungle. More than a hundred years later, in his 1964 edition of Bleak House, Geoffrey Tillotson described it as "the finest literary work the nineteenth century produced in England."And in 1970, not quite so hyperbolically, Mrs. Q. D. Leavis concluded her chapter in Dickens the Novelist by contending that Bleak House is certainly "the most impressive and rewarding of all Dickens's novels." Dickens himself ranked it only a little below the novel which preceded it, David Copperfield.

This authoritative text of Bleak House is the first to be established by a comparative study of all surviving versions of Dickens's novel, incorporating evidence from the original manuscript and corrected proofs. Study of the genesis of the novel is facilitated by the reproduction of Dickens's working plans and, for the first time, by thousands of meticulous textual notes.

Among the background readings, this Norton Critical Edition offers all of Dickens's correspondence about the novel. Other background materials, from newspapers and magazines as well as from ,writings by Dickens and Carlyle, document the Victorian controversy over pollution, a central theme of the novel,and offer contemporary attitudes toward the government, the courts, and the police, to enhance the setting of the story. Also featured are several hundred annotations which fully elucidate for today's readers the allusions and topical references in this remarkably allusive Victorian masterpiece. Especially helpful is a clear exposition of the nature of law procedures in the Court of Chancery, which is crucial to an understanding of the central action of the story.

Critical essays reprinted here include interpretations by G. K. Chesterton, J.Hillis Miller, George Ford, A. O. J. Cockshut, W. J. Harvey, H. M. Daleski, and Ian Ousby.

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Introductory Note on Law Courts and Colleges

The Text of Bleak House

 Contents of Bleak House

 Preface

A Note on the Text

 Dickens' Working Plans

 The Running Headlines

 Textual History

Textual Notes

The Genesis and Composition of Bleak House

Chronology

Dickens' Letters on the Composition of Bleak House

A Dictionary of Bleak House Originals: Persons and Places

Backgrounds

 Pollution

Thomas Miller·A London Fog (Illustrated London News, 1849)

Henry Mayhew·Of the Horse-Dung of the Streets of London (1851)

The Spa-Fields Burial Ground (The Times, 1845)

W. H. Wills and George Hogarth·Heathen and Christian Burial (Household Words, 1850)

R. H. Home·[A Visit with the River-God, Father Thames] (Household Words, 1851)

Thomas Carlyle·[Typhus-Fever in Edinburgh] (from Past and Present, 1843)

Hector Gavin - [Sanitation in a London Suburb] (from Sanitary Ramblings, 1848)

[Report ... on Cholera] (Lancet, 1849)

Charles Dickens·[Speech to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association] (1851 )

 Government

Thomas Carlyle·Downing Street (Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850)

[On the Opening of Parliament] (Illustrated London News, 1852)

[Speech from the Throne] (Annual Register, 1853 )

 Law Courts, Inquests, and Police

Sutton Sharpe·[Testimony... Concerning Chancery] (1840)

A Chancery Bone of Contention (Punch, 1852)

[A Review of Bleak House] (Eclectic Review, 1853)

[Cross-Examination of a Witness] (Examiner, 1850)

Charles Dickens·[A Police-Conducted Tour of a Slum] (Household Words, 1851)

Criticism

 George Brimley·[A Review of Bleak House in the Spectator]

[Anonymous Review of Bleak House in the Examiner]

 G. K. Chesterton·[Characters in Bleak House]

George Ford·[A Note on Bleak House and Kafka]

J. Hillis Miller·[The World of Bleak House]

A. O. J. Cockshut·[Order and Madness in Bleak House]

W. J. Harvey·[The Double Narrative of Bleak House]

H. M. Daleski·[Transformation in a Sick Society]

Ian Ousby·The Broken Glass: Vision and Comprehension in Bleak House

Bibliography