Bleak House is an antebellum Classical Revival style house in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
History
The house was first occupied by Robert Houston Armstrong and his wife, Louisa Franklin. It was built for the couple as a wedding gift by the bride's father, Major Lawson D. Franklin. Robert Armstrong's father, Drury Armstrong, gave them the land. The Armstrongs named the house after Charles Dickens' "Bleak House" novel of the same name. The bricks in the house were molded on-site using slave labor.
The home was used by Confederate Generals James Longstreet and Lafayette McLaws as their headquarters during the 1863 Battle of Knoxville. Three Confederate sharpshooters who were stationed in the house's tower were killed by Union cannonballs. Two of the cannonballs are still embedded in the walls, and Civil War-era sketches of the slain soldiers are displayed on the walls of the tower.
The home now belongs to local Chapter 89 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and is commonly called Confederate Memorial Hall.
Bleak House, a novel by Charles Dickens, was first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. Widely considered to be one of Dickens's finest novels, Bleak House has many characters and several sub-plots. The story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. Memorable characters include Lady Honoria Dedlock, the lawyer Tulkinghorn, John Jarndyce, Harold Skimpole, and Richard Carstone. At the novel's centre is the long-running legal case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This lawsuit revolves around the fact that someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens creates this fictional legal case to satirize of the English judicial system, using both his own experiences as a law clerk, as well as his experiences as a litigant seeking to enforce copyright on his earlier books.
Though lawyers and judges criticised Dickens's portrait of the English legal system as exaggerated, his novel helped to spur a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s. As Dickens wrote Bleak House, the need for legal reform was being widely debated in London.
Bleak House (1959) is the first BBC adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel of the same name. It was adapted by Constance Cox as an eleven-part series of half-hour episodes first transmitted from 16 October 1959.
It stars Andrew Cruickshank in the role of John Jarndyce, Diana Fairfax as Esther Summerson and Colin Jeavons as Richard Carstone. The complete series still exists.
References
External links
Bleak House is a novel.
Bleak House may also refer to: