But one of the themes running through the novel already is the importance of looking beneath the surface presentation. I mention John Jarndyce’s kindness and generosity because Dickens does, all the time. £10 (Richard) and £15 (Esther’s life savings) would be worth over 100 times as much in today’s values. After his usual references to the hostile ‘east wind’, he lets them calm him, so he never actually asks how much they have lost. So he gives it back to them, yes? Not at all. For example he is appalled when he finds out that Skimpole, the supposedly innocent guest, has borrowed money from both Esther and Richard. He’s one of the characters that Dickens presents as habitually delightful, but even Dickens is alerting us to the possibility that you can’t turn your back on every difficulty through sheer warm-heartedness.

She immediately becomes linked to the same case: Richard and Ada, the two young people she joins up with, are ‘wards in Jarndyce’, and they go to stay with one John Jarndyce, who tries to avoid any contact with the case. The other story, in the chapters containing Esther’s first-person narrative, is also full of lawyers.

We’ve already learnt in the first chapter about its legendary status as the longest-running case ever, so it’s no surprise that Lady Dedlock’s eyes are glazing over before she notices the handwriting. The lawyer, Tulkinghorn – file him away for later as well – is there to bring them up to date on the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. She wonders who wrote it…? File that one away for later. One arrives at the Dedlocks’ pile in Lincolnshire – or is it after they move on, in their pointless way, to London en route for Paris? – and the only thing Lady D is interested in is the handwriting of a document he has brought. It’s mood music, of course, but not only that, surely? It isn’t fog that keeps her indoors, it’s incessant rain… and there are so many biblical references in these early chapters that we are bound to wonder what punishment it might represent.

Don’t get Dickens started on the aristocracy. But if those waiting for a final judgment – I’ll come back to a later riff on that idea – are trapped, they are no more so than Lady Dedlock is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man who seems as pointless as the English judiciary. On the first page, famously, Dickens imagines a dinosaur making its way through the London fog, and… no further comment is needed, beyond the fact that the proceedings of the courts feel as antediluvian as that lumbering monster. The titles of the first two chapters, ‘In Chancery’ and ‘In Fashion’ are a signal: each is as English, as hidebound, and as pointless as the other.

A bleak house