Bleak House

I have decided that I am going to use this blog to record my reading experiences and the first entry will be Bleak House. I was looking at the packaging for the BBC DVD version of the text and I noticed how several blurbs mentioned Bleak House as a kind of soap opera. It is but but its melodrama is not entrenched in relying on quick reactions to good and evil because many characters are not so easily defined. Inspector Bucket for example completes some actions that are deemed praiseworthy in the eyes of Miss Esther Summerson and others which are damning. At the end I found myself moved by the principles that are conveyed by suggestion of love as a transcending factor in understanding the relationships and situations of the plot. There are large metaphors: Chancery as a metaphor for death; bilical allusions abound in Dicken's condemnation of showy charity.