Bleak House

Spontaneous human combustion! Evil lawyers! Detectives! Family intrigue! These all come together in Charles Dickens’s masterwork, Bleak House. This year, we will spend the year reading the 2026 Dickens Universe novel. Join Dickens enthusiasts and Pickwick Club members for a series of discussions about this beloved book.

Register once and choose the sessions to attend. If you would like to lead a discussion session, please email Courtney at cmahaney@ucsc.edu.

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Philadelphia Dickens Fellowship is also reading Bleak House this year. If you would like to join their meetings, please email Dickensfellowshipphila@gmail.com for Zoom details.

• October 18: “An Overview of Bleak House” with Dr. Carol Love and “Bleak House: Where It Happened” with Leslie Limon
• November 15: “Dickens in Film Adaptation” with Kirk Davis and “Illustrating Bleak House” with Pat Vinci

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Dickens-to-Go Bleak House Commentary:

• “Even Supposing” by Professor Renée Fox, UC Santa Cruz
• “The Dickensian Reader as Detective” by Michael Stern, Friends of the Dickens Project President
• “Dickens à la Carte” by Professor Ian Duncan, UC Berkeley
• “Mr. Tulkinghorn at Leisure” by Professor John O. Jordan, UC Santa Cruz

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Recommended Edition: We recommend the Penguin Classics edition of the novel for its appendices and notes, but other versions are fine. First-time readers should avoid the Introduction if they don’t want spoilers. Download the novel to read at Gutenburg.org or listen to it at LibriVox.org.

The Santa Cruz Pickwick (Book) Club, a branch of the Dickens Fellowship, is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. The Santa Cruz Public Libraries provide support for the reading group.