Bleak House, written by Charles Dickens is a dated text that commonly causes its readers difficulty in orientating the meaning behind it. Dickens writes in a seemingly periphrastic language style which causes ambiguity, making some of the decoding more challenging. The main narrative of Bleak House is surrounded by a court case and outlines the difficulties with the legal system. There are many complexities of the novel, such as the strict use of present tense, that portrays Dickens view of the world in a somewhat melancholy and whimsical fashion. Dickens uses techniques such as irony, inflectional morphology, personification, and syntax to write about his own reality. The obscure methods and writing style Dickens used can create distance between some readers as that …show more content…
Dickens uses a variety of interesting adjectives throughout the Bleak House. The central theme of the novel regards a court case, it highlights the upheavals within the ‘high court of chancery’ and depicts problems in the system of law. Other examples of Dickens use of adjectives is seen in lines 57-60:
‘This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress’
Dickens uses a grotesque mirror image to depict what the law pursuits are like. He distorts the reader's expectation of the law by comparing their mental state to a ‘lunatic’ and their appearance with ‘slipshod’ and ‘threadbare’. These adjectives contradict the uniform and respect of the law by degrading their professionalism using repugnant descriptions. The unusual descriptions used by Dickens subtly underlines the main themes of the narrative regarding society and