Dickens’ often dark and haunting classic set in the courts of Chancery in Victorian London, where the dancing days of the Regency are still a lingering memory and where fortunes shift and change for a fascinating range of characters. The novel has as many crooked steps and period details as Bleak House itself, producing a brilliant and exacting historical portrait of London. A superb exposé of the double moral standard for men and women, rich and poor, and the only nineteenth century novel I can think of where someone spontaneously combusts – with a fittingly gruesome Dickension description of the aftermath!