Bleak House - Charles Dickens

'Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it'. As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.