Bleak House 1-3

I am 'doing' Bleak House, with Zilla. I chose that phrase very carefully.

Today I had an hour to give over and managed to get to the end of chapter three, doubling the amount I had read since taking this on.

So far

Ch1:
London is a hell-hole. He doesn't mention the cholera outbreaks nor the numbers that used to die of the fogs, but he paints the atmosphere so well.

Lawyers are out to bleed you dry whilst using very long words and treating you like children. Don't tell me its an old joke, I don't suppose it was that old when this was written.
Merciless, scathing observations; pure joy.

Ch2:
A very bored, very proper fashionista who allows the Victorian version of the paparazzi to follow her every movement, is married to an old bloke with loads of money who can't get it up and can't be accused of conceit simply because he has such a total blind faith in his own rights and opinions that he's never stopped to anything as tawdry as comparing himself to others, who simply don't factor except as general populace needing his guiding hand and unimpeachable logic.
The lady wife may or may not be up the duff (in the family way), with her first ever fainting spell occuring just after her time at their country place, where she was very bored, watching virile employees. She left there after a particular virile employee looked happy to see his wife and child.

Even after laughing at the pomposity and fallibility of these two, now I am on tenterhooks and know now why this succeeded so well in its original format as 19 episodes for a London periodical.

Ch3: We meet Esther. She is, at least in her early days, a simpering twit, and I would like to slap her. However I forgive Dickens, because her unbelievable saccharrin piety (which reminded me of the act put on by Puss In Boots in the Shrek movies) was absolutely the best foil for his descriptions of the two women who dragged her up - both complete cows.

I wonder if he likes to cameo himself in his own books - I wonder if he was the man hidden by the outsized fur coat, being kind and observant yet 'floored' by his own creation. I wonder how long it took to get a pork pie shipped in from France, and what their shelf life was.

School was a narrative to explain her change from foil for the comedy of the old cows to Saint and frail heroine with shades of a backbone, and the bit in court is a filler to get her introduced to the cast and off to Bleak House.

I know some people like Jellyby, one of them was a local Magistrate. British eccentricity even hits the women, sometimes. Very intelligent and as batty as, well, a batty thing full of bats. (To quote Blackadder, I suspect.)


I am thus far and no further.

Zilla, am I doing this right, kind of?