![]() ![]() But this was a subject way beyond the pale of the Victorian publishing industry.ĭickens couldn’t describe these things, but I can. The second was a book about Lady Dedlock’s illicit pre-marital affair. ![]() The first book he couldn’t write was about the workings of the law, which proved just too technical for a page-turner. In John Carey’s wonderful book about Dickens he says that there are two novels Dickens wanted to write in Bleak House, but he couldn’t write either of them, so he ended up writing a detective mystery instead, almost by default. My ‘re-building’ of Bleak House attempts to distil all Dicken’s generic richness into the one genre he pioneered in this novel – the detective story. As a writer, you can’t compete with that, and in writing The Man in Black I didn’t even try. ![]() You can say something similar of most of his novels, of course, but in Bleak House Dickens is at the height of his powers, giving us some of his most compelling storytelling, his funniest comedy, and his most telling satire. I’ve always thought that Bleak House is Dickens’ masterpiece – not just a vast panorama of contemporary London, from the highest to the lowest, but a rich compilation of literary genres from social commentary, to psychological drama, to mystery thriller. ![]()
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