【商品详情】
书名：Bleak House 荒凉山庄
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1180
作者：Charles Dickens
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2011
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451531902
商品尺寸：10.7 x3.2 x 17.2 cm
包装：简装
页数：944 (以实物为准)
Bleak House《荒凉山庄》是查尔斯·狄更斯创作中后期一部很重要的作品，是作者文学技艺达到炉火纯青境界的重要标志。小说以两个家庭为基本架构，围绕两条线索展开，人物关系错综复杂，情节引人入胜，语言生动活泼。它清晰完美地展现了英国维多利亚中早期的社会生活整体风貌，揭示出了社会的发展变迁走向，尽管讲述的是一系列让人心碎的故事，但小说结尾营造出和谐宁静的气氛，我们从中可以感受到生活的希望和人性的温暖。
本版本为Signet Classics推出的简装便携全英文版，由伦敦大学维多利亚文学名誉教授、狄更斯研究专家Michael Slater作序，1996年国家图书奖获得者Elizabeth McCracken写后记，有助于理解作品及作者创作背景。
“Perhaps Bleak House is his best novel… When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.” —G. K. Chesterton
Bleak House opens in a London shrouded by an all-pervading fog that swirlsaround the Court of Chancery, wherelawyers areenriching themselves in endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. Considered one of Dickens’s greatest works,Bleak House scathingly portrays his belief:“The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.” His genius for characterization, dramatic construction, social satire, and poetic evocation is memorably evidenced in this work as in no other. Peopled with characters both comic and tragic—including one of literature’s first detectives and a case of spontaneous human combustion—in settings ranging from the mansion of a fear-haunted noblewoman to the squalor of the London slums, this superb narrative was hailed by Edmund Wilson as a“masterpiece.”
With a New Introduction byMichael Slater and an Afterword by Elizabeth McCracken
加迪斯家的后代们为了争夺遗产，消耗了青春，甚至郁郁而终。一晃几十年过去，诉讼费用耗完了所有财产，整个案件也就不了了之。很多人成了僵化死板的法律条文和墨守成规的国家机器的牺牲品。
In the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. A sterling example of Dickens’s genius for character, dramatic construction, and social satire, this novel was hailed by Edmund Wilson as a “masterpiece”.
查尔斯·狄更斯，19世纪英国批判现实主义小说家。狄更斯特别注意描写生活在英国社会底层的“小人物”的生活遭遇，深刻地反映了当时英国复杂的社会现实，为英国批判现实主义文学的开拓和发展做出了卓越的贡献。他的作品至今依然盛行，对英国文学发展起到了深远的影响。主要作品有《匹克威克外传》《雾都孤儿》《老古玩店》《艰难时世》《圣诞颂歌》《我们共同的朋友》等。
Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the best British novelist of the Victorian era, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. His happy early childhood was interrupted when his father was sent todebtors’ prison, and young Dickens had to go to work in a factory at age twelve. Later, he took jobs as an office boy and journalist before publishing essays and stories in the 1830s. His first novel,The Pickwick Papers, made him a famous and popular author at the age of twenty-five. This and subsequent works were published serially in periodicals and cemented his reputation as a master of colorful characterization, and as a harsh critic of social evils and corrupt institutions. His many books includeOliver Twist,David Copperfield,Bleak House,Great Expectations,A Christmas Carol, andA tale oftwo cities.
Michael Slater is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Past President of the International Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society of America. He is a former Editor of The Dickensian and his publications includeDickens and Women (1983),An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens (1999), and, most recently, his acclaimed biographyCharles Dickens (2009). From 1994 to 2000, he editedThe Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens's Journalism.
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of two novels,The Giant’s House (a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award) andNiagara Falls All Over (winner of the 2001 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award),as well as the collection of short storiesHere’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry and the acclaimed memoirAn Exact Replica of a Figment of MyImagination.
Chapter One
In Chancery
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. 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 foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the 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 aits 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 gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, 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. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time-as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here-as here he is-with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be-as here they are-mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be-as are they not?-ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their color, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give-who does not often give-the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”
