Bleak House

Fog everywhere, and at its heart the Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a dispute over a will, has dragged on for generations, enriching lawyers and ruining everyone else. Esther Summerson, a modest orphan who tells half the story herself, goes to live at Bleak House with its kindly owner John Jarndyce and his young wards Ada and Richard, who hopes, fatally, to win the case. Meanwhile the proud Lady Dedlock hides a secret that the cold lawyer Tulkinghorn is determined to uncover, and the poor crossing-sweeper Jo is 'moved on' through the streets of London.

Published in monthly parts in 1852 and 1853, the novel alternates Esther's first-person account with a sweeping third-person narrator, and its Inspector Bucket is one of the first detectives in English fiction. Many critics consider it Dickens's masterpiece. If you enjoy its mystery, read Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; for more of Dickens's anger at institutions, read Little Dorrit.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.