There are not one but two versions of Bleak House playing on Amazon currently. Some authorities believe that the Dickens Novel is the best of all the Dickens novels. I strongly recommend that you read the novel and then watch one of the film adaptions.

Bleak House is in the public domain and can be found at Project Gutenberg at the following location:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1023

This is one of the Dicken’s novels I haven’t read. So, I journeyed on the Internet to Wikipedia for a synopsis, and they provided not just a good but a very good and lengthy one. So, I will probably see one of them, maybe both.

But as a Business Ethics writer something caught my attention. The novel is in large part about a very, very long legal battle over an inheritance. And he based the story on a real case, Thellusson v Woodford, a very significant case about the accumulation of value during the life of a trust.

But his book produced legal change.

Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens’s satire as exaggerated, Bleak House helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.

It took its sweet time but pressure developed on policy makers to fix the law at the basis of the novel. And if you know anything about the law, you know reform both in Great Britain and the United States proceeds at a snail’s pace. But change happened and it was propelled by a novel, a piece of literature, a book of significance.

We shouldn’t be surprised that literature can have legal impact. Literature changes many things. The novels of Jane Austen made it clear that the intellect and observations of women were far more significant than the science of that era held possible.

Perhaps, today and now, one of my kind readers is creating an essay, a short story, maybe even a novel, that will result in a changed and improved America.

That would be good.

James Alan Pilant