Penguin Random House Secondary Education
Elementary Secondary Higher Ed

Secondary Education Inspire Teaching and Learning with Outstanding Books


Guides

Collections

News
(0)
Wish List
(0)
Wish List
  • Secondary Education

    Inspire Teaching and Learning with Outstanding Books

    • English Language Arts
        • English Language Arts
        • Genre: Fiction
        • Genre: Nonfiction
        • Genre: Drama
        • Genre: Poetry
        • Genre: Literary Criticism
        •  
        • Literature: American
        • Literature: British & Commonwealth
        • Literature: Comparative & World
        •  
        • Communication
        • Writing & Composition
        • ESL / ELL

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Social Studies & History
        • Social Studies
        • Anthropology
        • Civics & Government
        • Economics, Business, and Finance
        • Geography
        • Philosophy & Ethics
        • Psychology
        • Sociology
        • History
        • European History
        • Historiography
        • Topical History
        • United States History
        • Wars, Conflicts, and Events
        • World History

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • STEAM / STEM
        • Science
        • Applied Sciences
        • Astronomy
        • Biology & Life Sciences
        • Earth Science
        • Engineering
        • Environmental Science & Issues
        • Essays
        • Experiments, Projects, and Makerspace
        • History of Science
        • Physical Science
        • References
        • Research & Methodology
        • Scientists, Inventors, & Discoveries
        • The Arts
        • Architecture
        • Art
        • Fashion
        • Media Studies
        • Music
        • Performing Arts
        • Math
        • Algebra
        • Arithmetic
        • Calculus
        • Geometry
        • Precalculus
        • Probability & Statistics
        • Quantitative Reasoning
        • More Math…
        • Computer & IT
        • Artificial Intelligence
        • Coding & Programming
        • Computer Education
        • Computer Science Principles
        • Cyber Security
        • Design & User Experience (UX)
        • Entertainment & Games
        • Ethics
        • History of IT
        • Internet / The Web
        • Networking
        • Operating Systems
        • Software Manuals
        • More Computers & IT…

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Books in Spanish & World Languages
        • Books in Spanish & World Languages
        • Books in Spanish
        • World Languages

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Study Aids & Exam Prep
        • Study Aids & Exam Prep
        • College Entrance Exams
        • High School Exams

        • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • More Disciplines
        • Health, Sports, Games, and Crafts
        • Cooking & Nutrition
        • Crafts & Makerspace
        • Games & Activities
        • Health & Wellness
        • Physical Education
        • Religious Studies & Spirituality
        • Agnostic & Atheist
        • Buddhism
        • Christianity
        • Comparative Religion
        • Confucianism
        • Hindu
        • Islam
        • Judaism
        • Notable People in Religious Studies & Spirituality
        • Taoism
        • Visionary & Metaphysical
        • Education & Professional Learning
        • Child and Adolescent Development
        • Classroom Management
        • Counseling
        • Pedagogy & Methodology
        • Schools and Education
        • Special Education
        • References
        • Almanacs
        • Atlases, Gazetteers, and Maps
        • Bibliographies & Indexes
        • Dictionaries
        • Encyclopedias
        • Research Materials
        • Style Manuals
        • Thesauruses
        • Word Lists
        • Writing Skills

          • Browse All Subjects and Topics
    • Guides
    • Collections
    • News
    • Other Penguin Random House Education Sites
    • Elementary Ed
    • Higher Ed
Are you still there?
If not, we’ll close this session in:
Download high-resolution image Look inside

Bleak House

Part of Vintage Classics

Author Charles Dickens
Look inside
Paperback
$13.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.4"W x 7.95"H x 1.75"D  
On sale Jan 03, 2012 | 880 Pages | 978-0-307-94719-2
| Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Mystery, Crime, and Suspense > Law & Crime
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Social Themes > Coming of Age
  • English Language Arts > Literature: British & Commonwealth > Pre-20th Century
  • About
  • Author
  • Excerpt
  • Praise
One of Charles Dickens’s most critically admired novels, this story of a monumental and life-consuming court case features one of his most vast and varied casts of colorful characters.

In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance—complicated by murder—have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant refers to as “the family curse.” The insidious London fog that rises from the river Thames and seeps into the very bones of the characters symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society that supports it, targets of Dickens’s satirical wrath. Displaying Dickens’s familiar panoramic sweep and brilliant characters—including the mysterious orphan Esther Summerson, her gentle guardian John Jarndyce, the haughty Lady Dedlock, and the scheming lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn—the novel is also a bold experimental narrative that unforgettably dramatizes our most basic human conflicts.

“His best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” —G. K. Chesterton
Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter, and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836–37) he achieved immediate fame. In a few years he was easily the most popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) was less so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57), which reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860–61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) complete his major works. View titles by Charles Dickens
Chapter One

In Chancery

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 snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

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 drooping on the gunwales

of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time-as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. 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.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here-as here he is-with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be-as here they are-mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be-as are they not?-ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their color, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give-who does not often give-the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy-purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning; for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers, invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favor. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows for certain, because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reti-cule which she calls her documents; principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time, to make a personal application "to purge himself of his contempt;" which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out "My lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal weather a little.

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; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. 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. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery-lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers, in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers;"-a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying clerk in the Six Clerks' Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading; no man's nature has been made the better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise, was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother, and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise, have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be done for Drizzle-who was not well used-when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“His best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” —G. K. Chesterton

About

One of Charles Dickens’s most critically admired novels, this story of a monumental and life-consuming court case features one of his most vast and varied casts of colorful characters.

In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance—complicated by murder—have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant refers to as “the family curse.” The insidious London fog that rises from the river Thames and seeps into the very bones of the characters symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society that supports it, targets of Dickens’s satirical wrath. Displaying Dickens’s familiar panoramic sweep and brilliant characters—including the mysterious orphan Esther Summerson, her gentle guardian John Jarndyce, the haughty Lady Dedlock, and the scheming lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn—the novel is also a bold experimental narrative that unforgettably dramatizes our most basic human conflicts.

“His best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” —G. K. Chesterton

Author

Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. When the family fortunes improved, Charles went back to school, after which he became an office boy, a freelance reporter, and finally an author. With Pickwick Papers (1836–37) he achieved immediate fame. In a few years he was easily the most popular and respected writer of his time. It has been estimated that one out of every ten persons in Victorian England was a Dickens reader. Oliver Twist (1837), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) were huge successes. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) was less so, but Dickens followed it with his unforgettable, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1855–57), which reveal his deepening concern for the injustices of British society. A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860–61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) complete his major works. View titles by Charles Dickens

Excerpt

Chapter One

In Chancery

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 snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

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 drooping on the gunwales

of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time-as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. 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.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here-as here he is-with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be-as here they are-mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be-as are they not?-ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their color, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give-who does not often give-the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy-purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning; for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers, invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favor. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit; but no one knows for certain, because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reti-cule which she calls her documents; principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time, to make a personal application "to purge himself of his contempt;" which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire, and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day's business, and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the Judge, ready to call out "My lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint, on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by sight, linger, on the chance of his furnishing some fun, and enlivening the dismal weather a little.

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; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. 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. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery-lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers, in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers;"-a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

How many people out of the suit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt, would be a very wide question. From the master, upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes; down to the copying clerk in the Six Clerks' Office, who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery-folio-pages under that eternal heading; no man's nature has been made the better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise, was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it, but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother, and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise, have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter, and see what can be done for Drizzle-who was not well used-when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

“His best novel. . . . When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” —G. K. Chesterton

Other books in this series

  • The Awakening and Selected Stories
    The Awakening and Selected Stories
    Kate Chopin
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 21, 2023
  • God's Trombones
    God's Trombones
    Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    James Weldon Johnson
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 21, 2023
  • Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    The Complete Plays
    Alexander Pushkin
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 17, 2023
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Ernest Hemingway
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2023
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2023
  • The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    Ernest Hemingway
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Enough Rope
    Enough Rope
    A Book of Light Verse
    Dorothy Parker
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Sister Carrie
    Sister Carrie
    Theodore Dreiser
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 28, 2021
  • The Art of War
    The Art of War
    Sun Tzu
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 21, 2021
  • Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    Emily Bronte
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 07, 2021
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2021
  • An American Tragedy
    An American Tragedy
    Theodore Dreiser
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    May 25, 2021
  • The Waste Land and Other Poems
    The Waste Land and Other Poems
    T. S. Eliot
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    May 11, 2021
  • Fifty-Two Stories
    Fifty-Two Stories
    Anton Chekhov
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 19, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • In Our Time
    In Our Time
    Ernest Hemingway
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • Manhattan Transfer
    Manhattan Transfer
    John Dos Passos
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Wealth of Nations
    The Wealth of Nations
    Adam Smith
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    Alexandre Dumas
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Jules Verne
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2020
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 07, 2020
  • Little Women
    Little Women
    Louisa May Alcott
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 12, 2019
  • Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass
    Walt Whitman
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    May 28, 2019
  • Whose Body?
    Whose Body?
    The First Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery
    Dorothy L. Sayers
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 30, 2019
  • New Hampshire
    New Hampshire
    Robert Frost
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 22, 2019
  • My Antonia
    My Antonia
    Introduction by Jane Smiley
    Willa Cather
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 06, 2018
  • All Passion Spent
    All Passion Spent
    Vita Sackville-West
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Rights of Man
    The Rights of Man
    H. G. Wells
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 21, 2017
  • The Time Machine
    The Time Machine
    H. G. Wells
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 21, 2017
  • Poems
    Poems
    William Blake
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 13, 2016
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Thomas Hardy
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 08, 2016
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Thomas Hardy
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 03, 2015
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Henry David Thoreau
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    A Romance
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Red Badge of Courage
    The Red Badge of Courage
    Stephen Crane
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    Jack London
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence
    Edith Wharton
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The House of Mirth
    The House of Mirth
    Edith Wharton
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Ethan Frome
    Ethan Frome
    Edith Wharton
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The Custom of the Country
    The Custom of the Country
    Edith Wharton
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    And Other Christmas Books
    Charles Dickens
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 29, 2011
  • The Fifth Queen
    The Fifth Queen
    Ford Madox Ford
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • O Pioneers!
    O Pioneers!
    Introduction by Elaine Showalter
    Willa Cather
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Sep 06, 2011
  • The Canterbury Tales
    The Canterbury Tales
    A Prose Version in Modern English
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 12, 2011
  • Dracula
    Dracula
    Bram Stoker
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Original Frankenstein
    The Original Frankenstein
    Mary Shelley
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 01, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2009
  • Villette
    Villette
    Charlotte Bronte
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2009
  • The Shadow-Line
    The Shadow-Line
    A Confession
    Joseph Conrad
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 09, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Persuasion
    Persuasion
    Jane Austen
    $7.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Pride and Prejudice
    Pride and Prejudice
    Jane Austen
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Notes from Underground
    Notes from Underground
    Introduction by Richard Pevear
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    $26.00 US
    Hardcover
    Mar 23, 2004
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 09, 2001
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 10, 2001
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 13, 2001
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 28, 2000
  • The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
    The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
    Nikolai Gogol
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 29, 1999
  • The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
    The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
    Langston Hughes
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 31, 1995
  • Dubliners
    Dubliners
    James Joyce
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 1993
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Introduction by Simon Schama
    Charles Dickens
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 23, 1993
  • Collected Stories of Willa Cather
    Collected Stories of Willa Cather
    Willa Cather
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 01, 1992
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Introduction by A. S. Byatt
    Willa Cather
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jun 30, 1992
  • The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    Introduction by Philip Hardie
    Virgil
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jun 30, 1992
  • The Panther & the Lash
    The Panther & the Lash
    Langston Hughes
    $13.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 04, 1992
  • One of Ours
    One of Ours
    Willa Cather
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 05, 1991
  • Bleak House
    Bleak House
    Introduction by Barbara Hardy
    Charles Dickens
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 15, 1991
  • Stories
    Stories
    Katherine Mansfield
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 07, 1991
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Robert Louis Stevenson
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    May 07, 1991
  • The Ink Dark Moon
    The Ink Dark Moon
    Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
    Izumi Shikibu, Ono no Komachi
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 03, 1990
  • The Ways of White Folks
    The Ways of White Folks
    Stories
    Langston Hughes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 1990
  • Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
    Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
    A Classic Collection of Poems by a Master of American Verse
    Langston Hughes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 1990
  • Three Classic African-American Novels
    Three Classic African-American Novels
    Clotel, Iola Leary, The Marrow of Tradition
    William W. Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 11, 1990
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 14, 1990
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Willa Cather
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 1990
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 1990
  • A Room with a View
    A Room with a View
    E.M. Forster
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 23, 1989
  • The Awakening and Selected Stories
    The Awakening and Selected Stories
    Kate Chopin
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 21, 2023
  • God's Trombones
    God's Trombones
    Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
    James Weldon Johnson
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 21, 2023
  • Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others
    The Complete Plays
    Alexander Pushkin
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 17, 2023
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
    Ernest Hemingway
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2023
  • To the Lighthouse
    To the Lighthouse
    Virginia Woolf
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2023
  • The Sun Also Rises
    The Sun Also Rises
    Ernest Hemingway
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Enough Rope
    Enough Rope
    A Book of Light Verse
    Dorothy Parker
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Sister Carrie
    Sister Carrie
    Theodore Dreiser
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 28, 2021
  • The Art of War
    The Art of War
    Sun Tzu
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 21, 2021
  • Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heights
    Emily Bronte
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 07, 2021
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2021
  • An American Tragedy
    An American Tragedy
    Theodore Dreiser
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    May 25, 2021
  • The Waste Land and Other Poems
    The Waste Land and Other Poems
    T. S. Eliot
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    May 11, 2021
  • Fifty-Two Stories
    Fifty-Two Stories
    Anton Chekhov
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 19, 2021
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • In Our Time
    In Our Time
    Ernest Hemingway
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Great Gatsby
    The Great Gatsby
    F. Scott Fitzgerald
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • Manhattan Transfer
    Manhattan Transfer
    John Dos Passos
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2021
  • The Prince
    The Prince
    Niccolo Machiavelli
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Wealth of Nations
    The Wealth of Nations
    Adam Smith
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2020
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    Alexandre Dumas
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
    Jules Verne
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2020
  • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II
    Arthur Conan Doyle
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2020
  • A Passage to India
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 07, 2020
  • Little Women
    Little Women
    Louisa May Alcott
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 12, 2019
  • Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass
    Walt Whitman
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    May 28, 2019
  • Whose Body?
    Whose Body?
    The First Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery
    Dorothy L. Sayers
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 30, 2019
  • New Hampshire
    New Hampshire
    Robert Frost
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 22, 2019
  • My Antonia
    My Antonia
    Introduction by Jane Smiley
    Willa Cather
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 06, 2018
  • All Passion Spent
    All Passion Spent
    Vita Sackville-West
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 11, 2017
  • The Rights of Man
    The Rights of Man
    H. G. Wells
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 21, 2017
  • The Time Machine
    The Time Machine
    H. G. Wells
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 21, 2017
  • Poems
    Poems
    William Blake
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 13, 2016
  • The Mayor of Casterbridge
    The Mayor of Casterbridge
    Thomas Hardy
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 08, 2016
  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    Thomas Hardy
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 03, 2015
  • The Prince and the Pauper
    The Prince and the Pauper
    Mark Twain
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Pudd'nhead Wilson
    Mark Twain
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 03, 2015
  • Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Walden & Civil Disobedience
    Henry David Thoreau
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    A Romance
    Nathaniel Hawthorne
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 26, 2014
  • The Red Badge of Courage
    The Red Badge of Courage
    Stephen Crane
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    The Call of the Wild & White Fang
    Jack London
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 25, 2014
  • The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence
    Edith Wharton
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The House of Mirth
    The House of Mirth
    Edith Wharton
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Ethan Frome
    Ethan Frome
    Edith Wharton
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • The Custom of the Country
    The Custom of the Country
    Edith Wharton
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 05, 2012
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $7.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 10, 2012
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    And Other Christmas Books
    Charles Dickens
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 29, 2011
  • The Fifth Queen
    The Fifth Queen
    Ford Madox Ford
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • O Pioneers!
    O Pioneers!
    Introduction by Elaine Showalter
    Willa Cather
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Sep 06, 2011
  • The Canterbury Tales
    The Canterbury Tales
    A Prose Version in Modern English
    Geoffrey Chaucer
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 12, 2011
  • Dracula
    Dracula
    Bram Stoker
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 14, 2011
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    A Novel
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    Mark Twain
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 2010
  • The Original Frankenstein
    The Original Frankenstein
    Mary Shelley
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 08, 2009
  • Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    Edgar Allan Poe
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 01, 2009
  • Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2009
  • Villette
    Villette
    Charlotte Bronte
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2009
  • The Shadow-Line
    The Shadow-Line
    A Confession
    Joseph Conrad
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 09, 2007
  • Emma
    Emma
    Jane Austen
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Persuasion
    Persuasion
    Jane Austen
    $7.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Pride and Prejudice
    Pride and Prejudice
    Jane Austen
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 04, 2007
  • Notes from Underground
    Notes from Underground
    Introduction by Richard Pevear
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    $26.00 US
    Hardcover
    Mar 23, 2004
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens, George Cruikshank
    $8.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 09, 2001
  • Hard Times
    Hard Times
    Charles Dickens
    $10.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 10, 2001
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 13, 2001
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $8.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 28, 2000
  • The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
    The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
    Nikolai Gogol
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 29, 1999
  • The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
    The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
    Langston Hughes
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 31, 1995
  • Dubliners
    Dubliners
    James Joyce
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 06, 1993
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Introduction by Simon Schama
    Charles Dickens
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 23, 1993
  • Collected Stories of Willa Cather
    Collected Stories of Willa Cather
    Willa Cather
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 01, 1992
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Introduction by A. S. Byatt
    Willa Cather
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jun 30, 1992
  • The Aeneid
    The Aeneid
    Introduction by Philip Hardie
    Virgil
    $28.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jun 30, 1992
  • The Panther & the Lash
    The Panther & the Lash
    Langston Hughes
    $13.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 04, 1992
  • One of Ours
    One of Ours
    Willa Cather
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 05, 1991
  • Bleak House
    Bleak House
    Introduction by Barbara Hardy
    Charles Dickens
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 15, 1991
  • Stories
    Stories
    Katherine Mansfield
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 07, 1991
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Robert Louis Stevenson
    $9.00 US
    Paperback
    May 07, 1991
  • The Ink Dark Moon
    The Ink Dark Moon
    Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
    Izumi Shikibu, Ono no Komachi
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 03, 1990
  • The Ways of White Folks
    The Ways of White Folks
    Stories
    Langston Hughes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 1990
  • Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
    Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
    A Classic Collection of Poems by a Master of American Verse
    Langston Hughes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 1990
  • Three Classic African-American Novels
    Three Classic African-American Novels
    Clotel, Iola Leary, The Marrow of Tradition
    William W. Brown, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 11, 1990
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 14, 1990
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Death Comes for the Archbishop
    Willa Cather
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 1990
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 16, 1990
  • A Room with a View
    A Room with a View
    E.M. Forster
    $11.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 23, 1989

Other Books by this Author

  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 17, 2016
  • A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories
    A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories
    Charles Dickens
    $3.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Dec 06, 2011
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Apr 26, 2011
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Charles Dickens, Tom Haugomat
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 28, 2010
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Sep 28, 2010
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 2009
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 03, 2009
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 06, 2007
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 07, 2006
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Apr 05, 2005
  • The Haunted House
    The Haunted House
    Charles Dickens
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 12, 2004
  • Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Charles Dickens
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 10, 2002
  • Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Charles Dickens, H. K. Browne
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 12, 2002
  • American Notes for General Circulation
    American Notes for General Circulation
    Revised Edition
    Charles Dickens
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 01, 2001
  • The Raven and the Monkey's Paw
    The Raven and the Monkey's Paw
    Classics of Horror and Suspense from the Modern Library
    Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Saki
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 29, 1998
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    Charles Dickens
    $3.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Nov 01, 1986
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 17, 2016
  • A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories
    A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Stories
    Charles Dickens
    $3.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Dec 06, 2011
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Apr 26, 2011
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
    Charles Dickens, Tom Haugomat
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 28, 2010
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens, Coralie Bickford-Smith
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Sep 28, 2010
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    The Mystery of Edwin Drood
    Charles Dickens
    $12.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 2009
  • Great Expectations
    Great Expectations
    Charles Dickens
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 03, 2009
  • A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Charles Dickens
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 06, 2007
  • David Copperfield
    David Copperfield
    Charles Dickens
    $6.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Feb 07, 2006
  • Oliver Twist
    Oliver Twist
    Charles Dickens
    $5.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Apr 05, 2005
  • The Haunted House
    The Haunted House
    Charles Dickens
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 12, 2004
  • Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Charles Dickens
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 10, 2002
  • Little Dorrit
    Little Dorrit
    Charles Dickens, H. K. Browne
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 12, 2002
  • American Notes for General Circulation
    American Notes for General Circulation
    Revised Edition
    Charles Dickens
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 01, 2001
  • The Raven and the Monkey's Paw
    The Raven and the Monkey's Paw
    Classics of Horror and Suspense from the Modern Library
    Charles Dickens, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Saki
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 29, 1998
  • A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol
    Charles Dickens
    $3.95 US
    Mass Market Paperback
    Nov 01, 1986
Related Articles
General Education & Professional Learning English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History High School Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Translanguaging Collections
April 19 2022

NEW! PRH Education Translanguaging Collections

Translanguaging is a communicative practice of bilinguals and multilinguals, that is, it is a practice whereby bilinguals and multilinguals use their entire linguistic repertoire to communicate and make meaning (García, 2009; García, Ibarra Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017)   It is through that lens that we have partnered with teacher educators and bilingual education experts, Drs.

Read more

NEW! PRH Education Translanguaging Collections

General Education & Professional Learning English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History High School Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Translanguaging Collections
April 19 2022
General English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Environmental Science
October 22 2020

PRH Education Classroom Libraries

“Books are a students’ passport to entering and actively participating in a global society with the empathy, compassion, and knowledge it takes to become the problem solvers the world needs.” –Laura Robb   Research shows that reading and literacy directly impacts students’ academic success and personal growth. To help promote the importance of daily independent

Read more

PRH Education Classroom Libraries

General English Language Arts Favorite Authors & Series References Science Social Studies The Arts History Middle School Graphic Novels Classroom Libraries Environmental Science
October 22 2020
Connect with Us!

Get the latest news on all things Secondary Education. Learn about our books, authors, teacher events, and more!

Friend us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Subscribe on YouTube

View us on Pinterest

Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire.

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House

About Secondary Education

  • About Us
  • FAQ
  • Conferences
  • Contact your PreK-12 Representative
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads

Penguin Random House

  • PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • global.PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

About Secondary Education

  • About Us
  • FAQ
  • Conferences

Penguin Random House Education

  • Elementary
  • Secondary
  • Higher Ed
  • Common Reads
  • Contact your PreK-12 Representative
  • Browse & subscribe to our newsletters

Penguin Random House

  • PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • global.PenguinRandomHouse.com
  • Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau

Privacy Policy   |   Terms of Use

© 2023 Penguin Random House
Back to Top

/