Registration has concluded. A Newberry Library Adult Education Class. Eight virtual sessions, February 8 to March 28, 2024. Registration begins January 17.
It may look like a novel, but Bleak House is really a serious variety show with a plot, and serial reading invites us to fully experience the many layers of this fascinating work. This course presents Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House in manageable weekly serial installments—with no spoilers. Our discussions of each week’s installment explore Dickens’s humor, social commentary, psychological depth, and dazzling assortment of narrative styles. Sessions are supplemented with slides and film clips. Eight sessions.
Materials List
– Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. Penguin Classics Edition. ISBN: 978-014143-9723.
– Other materials will be made available online and brought to the seminar sessions.
– For the first session, please read only chapters 1-3. Please do not read the book’s introduction or preface.
Seminar Description
Bleak House was originally published in twenty monthly serial installments beginning in March of 1852. Our class sessions are structured around the original installment breaks, which not only allows us to appreciate Dickens’s influential strategies of serialization, but invites us to explore hundreds of scenes in-depth as we read them. The course begins with two sessions of shorter readings, then expands to ask participants to read approximately 100 pages each week thereafter.
The novel’s main story recounts young Esther Summerson’s strange path to self-awareness, her involvement in an interminable legal case, and her encounters with various people who would help her, harm her, teach her, and learn from her. The novel depicts events in the lives of dozens of characters, weaving together a meditation on the legal process, personal and social responsibility, economic inequality, the subtleties of human communication, gender roles and expectations, and the nature of financial and moral debt. Reflecting Victorian realities as well as our current world, Bleak House also describes an outbreak of infectious disease, the moral and economic consequences of contagion, and the effects of self-isolation.
Each session features discussion of the thematic and formal dimensions of the installment at hand. I have always found that, compared to traditional book discussions, serial reading prompts a deeper and increasingly evolving commentary on specific issues, as well as a heightened sense of recurring images, a reader’s own opinions, and even a reader’s favorite lines. All good novels actually teach readers how to read them, and serial assignments allow readers to progressively benefit from the novel’s own lessons early, identifying aspects of technique and form that significantly contribute to an active experience of the rest of the novel.
Sessions also include spoiler-free excerpts from critical materials and tips on what to look for in subsequent installments. Each session also features examples of significant works of art and music mentioned in the novel, as well as brief spoiler-free film clips from adaptations of Bleak House. And, of course, PowerPoint slides highlight some of the historical, artistic, and literary references in the novel, offering a kind of “annotated novel” experience that nevertheless stays focused on the art of the novel itself. This course also features images and discussion of the Newberry Library’s copies of the twenty original Bleak House serial installments, complete with their wrappers, illustrations, and advertisements.
Reading Schedule
To be read ahead of time: Only chapters 1-3.
Please do not read the introduction or the preface.
Session 1 (2/8/24) : Chapters 1-3
Session 2 (2/15/24): Chapters 4-7
Session 3 (2/22/24): Chapters 8-16
Session 4 (2/29/24): Chapters 17-25
Session 5 (3/7/24): Chapters 26-35
Session 6 (3/14/24): Chapters 36-46
Session 7 (3/21/24): Chapters 47-56
Session 8 (3/28/24): Chapters 57-67 (end)
Image: “Consecrated Ground” (detail). Illustration by Hablot K. Brown for the fifth installment of Bleak House, July 1852.