The present essay has the aim to provide the analysis of an extract drawn from the first chapter of Bleak house written by Charles Dickens. In doing so, I will take into consideration the title, the structure and the content of the extract, the narrative techniques employed, the overall effect and the ideal reader.

Let start from the title: Bleak house, it can suggest something related to mystery, melancholy and darkness. 

From the layout, the reader can observe that the extract is structured in five different paragraphs. The first one contains the essential information about time, place and reveals the appalling living condition of people at that time and it is dominated by mud. In the second paragraph, mud is substituted by the foggy weather condition: Fog everywhere. The last one is the most significant because Dickens denounces the government’s corruption with the expression most pestilent of hoary sinners.

Concerning narrative techniques adopted, Dickens exploited a third person narrator. Since the extract belongs to a Victorian novel, it presented a typical Victorian feature: the exaggeration (and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.). Similes are also used: smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. The use of the simile helps the reader to have a clear image of what is narrated. 

It follows that the overall effect created reflects the sensations evoked by the title. Dickens through the rhetorical language depicts the image of the Victorian Age with his problems and contradictions.  

Since the novel represents a way to denounce the social condition, it may be addressed someone that does not care about poor classes.