In Chancery (Chapters 1–6)

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards.

And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. A little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, Miss Flite, who is always in court, expects a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment. Today the Lord Chancellor is to see two young wards in the case, who are to go to live with their cousin, Mr. John Jarndyce of Bleak House, and a young lady companion for one of them.

In the town house of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, in Lincolnshire mud and London fog alike, his wife, my Lady Dedlock, is bored to death. Sir Leicester is twenty years at least her senior, a gentleman of an old family, who believes that the world might get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks; and he worships his wife. She has no family; she married him for her beauty; she has conquered the fashionable world, and she is cold and proud and tired. The family lawyer, Mr. Tulkinghorn, an elderly, rusty, close-mouthed man, who keeps the secrets of half the great families of England and tells nothing, is reading her some papers in the case — for she has an interest in it, by inheritance. She glances at the papers on the table, and suddenly asks who copied that affidavit; the handwriting. She grows faint. Mr. Tulkinghorn notices.

Esther's narrative.

I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, "Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!"

I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance, by my godmother, Miss Barbary, a good, good woman, who went to church three times every Sunday and never smiled. I had no mother; I knew nothing of her; and on my birthday, when I asked my godmother about her, she said: "Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. Pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head. You are set apart." I buried my doll in the garden. When my godmother died, a gentleman named Mr. Kenge, a lawyer, came and told me that a gentleman named Mr. Jarndyce, who knew my sad situation, would pay for my schooling. For six happy years I was at school at Reading, and then a letter came: I was to go to London as companion to Mr. Jarndyce's young cousin, a ward in Chancery.

In London I met her: Ada Clare, seventeen, with golden hair and soft blue eyes, so beautiful and so frank and so affectionate that I loved her from the first moment; and her cousin, Richard Carstone, a handsome young man of nineteen, cheerful and careless, full of hope. We were to spend the night at the house of a Mrs. Jellyby, a lady devoted to a mission to Africa — to the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger — who sat among piles of letters with eyes that seemed to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa, while her house was filthy and her children fell downstairs and her eldest daughter, Caddy, ink-stained and miserable, wrote letters for her all day. In the night, Caddy came to my room and laid her head in my lap, and said she wished Africa were dead.

In the morning, with Miss Flite, we visited the rag-and-bottle shop of Mr. Krook, near Chancery Lane, an old man covered in hair and dirt, who bought old papers and never sold them, and whom the neighbourhood called the Lord Chancellor; his shop was the Court of Chancery. Miss Flite lived upstairs, and kept birds in cages, which she would set free, she said, on the day of judgment: Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

Then we went to Bleak House, in Hertfordshire. It was a delightfully irregular house, full of passages and little steps and unexpected rooms, and Mr. Jarndyce was the kindest of men. He could not bear to be thanked; whenever anything troubled him he said the wind was in the east, and went into a little room he called the Growlery. And that evening he gave me the keys of the house. I was to be the housekeeper. Ada and Richard and Mr. Jarndyce gave me so many names — Old Woman, and Little Old Woman, and Cobweb, and Mrs. Shipton, and Mother Hubbard, and Dame Durden — that my own name soon became quite lost among them.

Mr. Jarndyce had a friend staying with him, Mr. Harold Skimpole, a light, charming man who said he was a mere child, with no idea of time or money, and who accepted everything from everyone as his right; and he was arrested for debt in the house that very evening, and Richard and I paid it with our own little money, and Mr. Skimpole was delighted with us.