Word: summerson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...might just squeak through as something called Lady Dedlock's Secret, though even the book's main plot gets misted over, besides being by now almost too stagy for the stage. And though the drastic cutting at times has its points-it largely silences sweet, virtuous-Esther Summerson, that English cousin of Elsie Dinsmore-it far oftener has its penalties. All but vanished are the things that really make Bleak House notable-its satire on the Court of Chancery, its vast, varied, odd-lighted picture of London. An imposing novel and a great portrait gallery have become...
...which often dragged its lawsuits throughout several generations. Modeled on an actual twenty-year case, his suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is so old it has become "the death of many, but a joke in the legal profession." Caught in this slow judicial mill is a dewy orphan, Esther Summerson, and a bushelful of broadly caricatured eccentrics. Dickens loses his lightly ironic tone only when he drenches little Jo, the street sweeper, in compassion. Even here Williams is superb; he thunders the author's tearful commentary with a gusto as energetic as the Victorian's prose...