Bleak House

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Bleak House
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Charles Dickens
Introduction by Michael Slater
Afterword by Elizabeth McCracken
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:960
Dimensions(mm): Height 171,Width 108
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Historical adventure
ISBN/Barcode 9780451531902
ClassificationsDewey:FIC
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
Imprint Signet
Publication Date 5 April 2011
Publication Country United States

Description

In the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. A sterling example of Dickens's genius for character, dramatic construction, and social satire, this novel was hailed by Edmund Wilson as a "masterpiece".

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors' prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney's clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work. Michael Slater is an emeritus professor at Birkbeck College, London, and past president of the Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society of America.

Reviews

"Perhaps Bleak House is his best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up." -G. K. Chesterton