"Bleak House opens in a London shrouded by and all pervading fog - a fog that swirls about the Count of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce lies lost in endlesslitigation. This drawn-out lawsuit over an inheritance stands at the center of a scathing portrayal of a moribund legal system and of a society permeated with greed, deception, delusion, and guilt. In no other work are the many faces of Dickens´genius-his powers of characterication, dramatic construction, social satire, and peotic evocation - so memorably combined. Peopled by an immense gallery of vivid characters, major and minor comic and trgic, in settings which ragen from the mansion of a fear-haunted noblewoman to the squalor of the London slums, this superb example of narrative art has been ranked by Edmund Wilson as "The masterpiece of (Dickens´) middle period" contraportada.