Download or read book The Companion to 'Bleak House' written by Susan Shatto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1988, is the most comprehensive annotation of Bleak House ever undertaken. It provides authoritative background information about the topical issues of the novel that interested Dickens as a social critic and activist. It also describes the novel’s literary antecedents and identifies the sources of its hundreds of literary and historical allusions. The annotation is based on a wide range of nineteenth-century sources – from newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary papers to travel guides and cookery books – and gives the modern reader unprecedented access to both Bleak House – Dickens’s tract for the times – and the period when it was written.