Bleak House is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon.

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. The story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by a mostly omniscient narrator.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812–9 June 1874) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity, and by the twentieth century he was widely seen as a literary genius by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.