Casa desolada

"What connection can there be between the many people in the countless stories of this world, who, from the opposite extremes that separate them, end up coming together?" What can unite the young litigants in a probate case that has dragged on for so many generations "that no one alive knows what it means" with a lady devoted to the affairs of an African community called Borriobula-Gha? How do Baronet Sir Leicester Dedlock and his haughty wife, Lady Dedlock, relate to a boy who sweeps street corners and ekes out a living in one of the most wretched slums of London? How can Mr. Jarndyce, an upright gentleman whose moods depend on the east wind, be friends with Mr. Skimpole, one of the most impressive scoundrels in the history of literature? Add to that a vast gallery of characters—sinister or angelic, proud or humiliated, cowardly or magnanimous—and we get a glimpse of the overall picture of Bleak House (1852-1853), where everything is indeed connected. Dickens takes an even greater risk by entrusting his story to two narrators: on the one hand, one who seems to view the world from a lofty perspective, capable of entering all its hidden corners and judging them, as prone to sarcasm as to pathos, and also to phantasmagoria; and on the other, a first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, a young woman of obscure origins who sees things only from a human perspective and recounts her initiation into life believing herself barely authorized to do so. The combination of both points of view creates a genuine coexistence, which rises to an ethical plane in keeping with the ideals of the novel. It is no wonder that this is considered one of Dickens's masterpieces.