Jarndyce resolved!

As I delved into the pages of Bleak House, I began to fear that it would take me just as long to read the book as it would take the Chancery to resolve Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. Fortunately, after struggling through the first 300 pages, the pace picked up and I thoroughly enjoyed the last 500.

The fog that blankets London in the opening paragraph of the book symbolizes the fog of the court case in the Chancery.

It is a fog that envelops and destroys Richard Carstone. Carstone is a charming, if careless lad, in love with Esther's (the heroine and part time narrator's) best friend Ada. He studies to be a doctor, then a soldier. However, he has some chance of inheriting money from the disputed will in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and throws all his efforts into the case. The case is hopeless, and he begins a descent into illness and monomania. As obsessed and delusional as he becomes, he retains his love for Ada, even if his ability to treat her well has vanished. His is a subtle and profound portrait.

Caddy Jellybelly is my other favorite. Her mother is obsessed with charity work in Africa -- work which, in the end, will do nobody any good (the same as the Chancery case). Meanwhile, her own family is badly cared for due to her negligence. Caddy inherits some of her mother's energy, but more common sense, and more love.

Richard Carstone is an example of how a good man, with many advantages, goes wrong. Caddy is an example of how a good woman, with many disadvantages, goes right.

Harold Skimpole is an interesting character -- I've known men like him, some of whom have mooched off of me for years (not that I objected, except occasionally). He is charming -- like Richard -- but lacks Richard's essential goodness, which, although hidden by his obsessions, never vanishes completely.

Esther Summerson -- the part-time narrator -- is a fine lady, but not so interesting as some of the minor figures. John Jarndyce, of course, is practically a saint.

The fog of the Chancery, however, envelops all. Only the vision of the very best -- like John Jarndyce -- can see through it.

I think I enjoyed it a bit more than you as I liked it all the way through. I thought the dual narrator technique worked very well. I think it is the best written of the Dickens books that I gave read so far. My favourite character was William Guppy.

As always, I have read this book long ago, so I don´t even remember all characters.

But I want to share with you the opening of the book which I think one of Dickens´best, specially if you think of his mastery in setting the atmosphere of his stories:

"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 snowflakes—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 this 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.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm