Word: summerson
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...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...