On The Detective Elements In Charles Dickens' Bleak House

In 1852, Dickens' ninth novel-Bleak House was made available to the public. Structured with a daring double narrative and centered upon institutional satire, Bleak House is, technically, Dickens' most ambitious work and widely held to be his masterpiece. The novel distinguishes itself by the involvement of elements, which constitute a brand-new literary genre-detective fiction. This thesis probes into these elements in Bleak House so as to throw light on the features of this novel that make it unique in all of Dickens' works.Bleak House takes London as its background and develops around the unraveling of Lady Deadlock's secret. As to the narrative method, it engages not only the omniscient narrator, but also the first person narrator. And the plot moves on following a fixed pattern of action mainly performed by Inspector Bucket. In a word, all these elements that are typical of a hard-boiled detective story combine together to make Bleak House an everlasting sample of literary creation.