I must admit, it was with some trepidation I that approached Bleak House, my second Great Books Adventure for Blogcritics.  Trepidation and embarrassment.  I've taught a British Literature class for six years now, professed myself to love the subject, and yet never picked up a Dickens book.  Two Christmases ago, I read A Christmas Carol for the first time and loved it, but never ventured into any of his longer works.  Next to Shakespeare, I think Dickens is the one name in British lit people readily recognize.  More, he is almost universally identified with the modern novel.  His inclusion in this project was pretty much a given, but would he live up to the hype?  Is Charles Dickens the paramount novelist I've been led to expect?

Umm, yeah.  He's pretty freakin' amazing.

When I pick up a book for the first time, trying to decide whether or not to read it, I always do the same thing.  I stand in the aisle and read the first page.  If I turn the page, I'll take the book.  It doesn't always pay off, but is usually a good measure.  Going off the recommendation of some responders to The Preamble to this adventure, I pulled Bleak House from the library shelf.  I was four pages deep before I remembered where I was.  Interest is one thing, entrancement is altogether different.

Dickens' language is positively luxurious.  There is something unaccountably mesmerizing about his descriptions which just pulled me head over heels into the novel.  In the first chapter, he paints a muddy, foggy, dirty London and his sentence structure creates that picture just as much as his word choice.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.  Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

The description is vivid and vague at the same time.  As a reader, you can almost touch the dirty snowflakes, but the dogs and horses are left to wallow in the ambiguous filth.  Likewise, the sentences, long and short, spotted with punctuation, make for a bumpy read.  It's like you're slipping along the muddy streets just by reading.  There are even sentence fragments!  Who knew Dickens used fragments?  I think, given the period during which he wrote, and the constant superlative of 'greatest English novelist', I always imagined a Dickens novel to be painfully precise.  I am finding that anything but true, and it makes me love him all the more.