Bleak House cover art

Bleak House

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Bleak House

By: Charles Dickens
Narrated by: Simon Vance
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 First published in monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853, this novel follows the fortunes of three pedestrian characters- Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. The story they tell embondies Dickens' merciless indictment of the Court of Chancery and its bungling, morally corrupt handling of the endless case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, giving the novel its scope and meaning.

Starting with Esther's account of her lonely, unhappy childhood, her role as protégée of the worthy John Jarndyce, Richard and Ada's guardian, the tale develops the relations between the three young people in the Jarndyce household. Numerous other characters contribute to the complex portrait of society which emerges from the novel. They include the romantic, effusive and unworldly Harold Skimpole (based on Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist, and critic, who published The Examiner in which he introduced the public to Keats and Shelley); the boisterous, short-tempered Boythorn (based on Walter Savage Landor, poet and essayist, mentor to Robert Browning); Krook, the rag-and-bottle shopkeeper who dies a hideous death by 'spontaneous combustion'; Gridley and the crazed Miss Flite, both ruined by Chancery; Mrs. Jellyby, neglectful of domestic responsibilities in favor of 'telescope philanthropy'; the greasy Mr. Chadband, a parson 'of no particular denomination'; and Conversation Kenge and Mr. Vholes, lawyers both.

Of particular importance to the moral design of the novel is Jo, the crossing-sweeper whose brutish life and death are the instruments for one of Dickens' most savage judgments on an indifferent society.

Click here to see all the titles in our Charles Dickens collection.(P)1998 Blackstone Audiobooks Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Classic Starts® cover art
Little Dorrit cover art
Nicholas Nickleby cover art
The Christmas Stories of Charles Dickens cover art
The Pickwick Papers: Dickens on Dickens cover art
Our Mutual Friend cover art
Hard Times cover art
A Tale of Two Cities cover art
Great Expectations cover art
Barnaby Rudge cover art
Martin Chuzzlewit cover art
Sketches by Boz: Volume 1 cover art
David Copperfield cover art
The Old Curiosity Shop cover art
Dombey and Son cover art
Middlemarch cover art

Critic reviews

"Dickens could not have performed better than Robert Whitfield does here....His brilliant dramatizations range from a homeless street urchin to an arrogant barrister, from a canny old windbag to a high-minded heroine who deserves the happy ending Dickens affords her....This may be one of the most Dickensian novels Dickens ever wrote." (Library Journal)
All stars
Most relevant
In my view, this is Dickens at his best. Well plotted, superb charaters, brilliant depiction of Victorian England with some vey fine comedy (Don't be put off by the title).
A great reading with lively and well distinguished charaterisations.
Loses one star because sound quality is poor in some early chapters (the original tapes have print through which is audible throughout).
Don't miss this - and enjoy comparing your vision with BBC1's interpretation.

a Dickens Masterpiece

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Brilliant narration. Simon Vance is always a great listen and one of my favourite dickens books.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Simon Vance is always reliable. As with many of his narrations something sometimes goes wrong with the editing and a line is repeated twice. But it isn’t really a problem.Sometimes in fact it's quite interesting - when he has decided to change the inflection of how he is reading the sentence!

Bleak House is my favourite of all Dickens's novels, and Vance does it justice. His characters's voices are never too exaggerated and his background narration always has the pauses in the correct places. Not something that is always true of narrators!

The best narration I could find of Bleak House

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In all respects a wonderful experience. It took me many years to get round to Dickens. This book exemplifies his great storytelling. The reader also could not be faulted. In all, this Audible book, is highly recommended to those who want to bathe in the English language and be lost in a wonderful story for a few hours .

Wonderful experience

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Is a thoroughly good read and I had some concerns at how I would find the audio version but I need not have worried, the reader choosen does full justice to this marvellous mysterious novel from little Esther's first appearance to Miss Flyte's birds flying free

Bleak House

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews