Bleak House was written about a century and a half ago. Prose style, like almost everything else, has changed. Naturally today's reader may find Dickens' manner rather unfamiliar and in some ways a bit difficult. In order to see Bleak House in the right perspective, it is necessary to pursue this point. Many people today are no longer well-practiced readers. Television and film are the preferred pastimes, and what people do read is more likely to be journalism (or the captions under pictures) than the prose of a literary artist like Dickens. Dickens wrote for an audience that loved to read and was unafraid to tackle a work of serious literature. Such a receptive and well prepared, or at least cooperative, audience freed Dickens to pitch his writing at a level that satisfied his artistic conscience.
In other words, Dickens was not forced to use only a very limited vocabulary or to forego subtleties of tone and emphasis; nor did he feel obliged to keep all his sentences short and simply constructed when emotion or the complexity of an idea cried out for longer or more complicated ones. He also knew that his readers were responsive to playfulness in words and hence would not insist that he keep coming bluntly to the point and "get on with things"; and so he was free to play one of his favorite roles: the entertainer — here a verbal entertainer, as elsewhere a mimic or theatrical entertainer (Dickens was an active public reader, actor, and practical joker as well as an author). In Bleak House, Dickens turns a "classical allusion" into a joke — but only because his readers, far more literate than today's readers, would recognize the allusion and therefore appreciate the twist.
