Bleak House - there be spoilers.

Well, there's fog in London, fog in Chancery, and this sets the scene for mayhem, murder and mystery. Will Richard get his inheritance? Will Esther and Ada get it together? Who will call in the NSPPC (oh, it didn't exist then, unlike the RSPCA) to rescue the orphans and the Jelliby babies? And spontaneous combustion? What the Dickens!

This book doesn't exactly race along. You can't race in the fog. Just enjoy the beautiful language and all the little sub-stories about all the little sub-characters.
Most of the children are abused in this story. Even the lovely Bagnets call their children Woolwich, Quebec and Malta. I suppose the Nightingales did the same with Florence and Parthenope. And just look at the Beckhams.

The children

Esther is psychologically damaged (not sure if Dickens thinks so) as she's had no love in the early life and told

Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.

She spends the rest of her life trying to be worthy of living, by becoming a little Dame Durden. Thank goodness she gets to have a romp on the carpet with the love of her life, Allan Ada. I mustn't be too cynical though.There's a fairy tale ending, (for her at least) and she continues doing what she wants to do, caring for all around her in her new Bleak House. Pity she doesn't name her children, but maybe one would have been Bleak and the other would have been House.

Caddy - tea caddy? golf caddy? When was golf invented? - is just a tool to her atrocious mother, Mrs Jelliby. Her dad's useless, and she escapes to her Prince Charming Turveydrop, where she seems happy only she is lumbered with the worst father-in-law in literature, and her baby is born deaf and blind. I think her husband goes lame too! I just love Caddy.

Charley. I love her even more. Little mother to her brother and sister she locks them in their room to keep them safe while she goes out to earn some pennies. Is that why she has a masculine name? Because she's the bread winner? She has big round eyes, and I could eat her.

The award for best death bed scene in literature (not that I've read them all) goes to Jo. Toughie 'knows nothink' and is moved on and on and on. (Naughty Bucket. Black mark for this, but I'll forgive you as you are so entertaining). Jo doesn't even know the Our Father, but is happy to go along with the words when he is dying as they are 'wery good'.

And just as I am crying my eyes out over the death of one of the kindest and most innocent characters in the book Dickens turns on me and all of his hundreds of shilling-a-month readers thus:

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.

Well that's enough for today, as I feel the tears a-coming on again. More to follow.