ANALYSIS CHAPTER 1 “BLEAK HOUSE”

The extract of chapter I from “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens was written in 1853 the period of industrialization in England.

The text is organized into 5 paragraphs: the first is about “mud”, the second is about “fog”, the third is about “gas”, the forth about the afternoon and the last is a summery of the first four sequences.

The extract is a description of a city, the intelligent reader could notice in the first two line some information about the setting: London and November weather.

The intelligent reader could also understand that the city described is an industrialized one thanks to the use of the words: “smoke from chimney-pots”, “mud”, “black” and “gas”, all these words are referring to a city with factories and for this reason it is characterized by smoke, mud and gas.

The intelligent reader could also notice that the most important words are “mud” and “fog” because these words are repeated a lot of times during the text and also because they are the word which characterize an industrialized city.

The reader could imagine thanks the particular description the city and also he could understand that it is not a beautiful city because the fog is everywhere and the fog could be refer to something that prevents you to see the city and the nature.

The narrator is a third person, omniscient and intrusive narrator because he knows all about the city and describes it in all its particulars and the narrative technique used is telling because the extract is a description.

The ideal reader is the massified population of the industrialized cities because the narrator makes clear his point of view of one industrialized city, London, and so the reader could understand how the narrator feels with this new situation.