Rouncewell.


HAROLD SKIMPOLE, a brilliant, vivacious, sentimental, but thoroughly selfish man.


BARTHOLOMEW SMALLWEED, grandson of Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed.


GRANDFATHER SMALLWEED,a superannuated old man.


MR. SNAGSBY, a law-stationer; a mild, timid man.


PHIL SQUOD, a man employed in Mr. George’s shooting gallery.


LITTLE SWILLS, a red-faced comic vocalist.


MR. TULKINGHORN, a solicitor of the Court of Chancery, and legal adviser to Sir Leicester Dedlock.


MR. TURVEYDROP, a very gentlemanly man, celebrated for deportment.


PRINCE TURVEYDROP, his son; a fair man, of youthful appearance.


MR. VHOLES, Richard Carstone’s solicitor.


ALLAN WOODCOURT, a young surgeon.


MRS. BAYHAM BADGER, a middle-aged lady, who dresses youthfully.


MRS. BAGNET, a soldierly-looking woman; wife of Matthew Bagnet.


MALTA AND QUEBEC BAGNET, her daughters.


MRS. BUCKET, the acute wife of Mr. Inspector Bucket.


MRS. CHADBAND, a stern, silent woman; wife of the Rev. Mr. Chadband.


ADA CLARE, a ward of Mr. John Jarndyce.


LADY HONORIA DEDLOCK, a proud and ambitious woman; the wife of Sir Leicester Dedlock.


VOLUMNIA DEDLOCK, a lady of sixty; a cousin of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s.


Miss FLITE, a little, half-crazed old woman, a suitor in Chancery.


GUSTER, a maidservant of the Snagsbys.


MADEMOISELLE HORTENSE, Lady Dedlock’s waiting-woman.


MRS. JELLYBY, a lady devoted to public duties, to the neglect of her home.


CAROLINE JELLYBY (‘CADDY’), her eldest daughter and amanuensis.

JENNY AND Liz, brickmakers’ wives.


CHARLOTTE NECKETT (‘CHARLEY’), a womanly, self-reliant girl, elder daughter of a sheriff’s officer.


MRS. PARDIGGLE, an active member of many general committees.


ROSA, Lady Dedlock’s maid; a dark-haired village beauty.


MRS. ROUNCEWELL, the handsome, stately old housekeeper to Sir Leicester Dedlock.


GRANDMOTHER SMALLWEED, an old woman, fallen into a childish state.


JUDY SMALLWEED, her granddaughter.


MRS. SNAGSBY, a short, shrewish woman.


ESTHER SUMMERSON, the protégée of Mr. Jarndyce; a prudent and wise woman, and a self-denying friend.


MRS. WOODCOURT, a handsome old lady; mother of Allan Woodcourt.

CHAPTER 1

In Chancery

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.e Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,1 and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.2 Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.3 Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aitsf and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwalesg of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, h wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck.