YMMV / Bleak House

• Alternate Character Interpretation: A criticism that is almost as old as the book itself is that rather than the modest humble, honest narrator Dickens intended Esther to be, she comes across as unbearably pious, priggish, disingenuous and self-serving. Her attitude towards Ada sometimes seems more morbid, controlling obsession that the simple sisterly affection Dickens meant, and her actions sometimes seem willfully self-harming. However, even her harshest critics could hardly lose all sympathy for her, as the parts of the book which concern her relationship with her mother or her heartfelt sympathy for the unfortunates she encounters, show her in a much better light.
  • The BBC adaptation made no bones about overhauling Esther, keeping her charitable and kind nature, but granting her a sense of humor and a sensible, rather than pathologically self-effacing, attitude to her own virtues and vices.
  • Did Nemo commit suicide or was his death an accident?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: This novel's first paragraph is notable for containing the very first mention of a dinosaur in modern fiction, where the omniscient narrator describes the streets of London as being so muddy he could imagine a Megalosaurus lumbering up them just as it did in its time. It doesn't affect the story in any way, and was probably just mentioned because dinosaurs were a popular subject in Victorian Britain when Dickens wrote that passage.
• Fridge Brilliance: Allan Woodcourt is Welsh. In that time and place, this would have made him a member of a persecuted minority. Who better to ignore prejudice and see Esther for who she really is?
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mr. Bucket offhandedly mentions a man named Michael Jackson late in the novel.
  • The 2005 series has Anna Maxwell Martin as Esther, Charles Dance as Tulkinghorn, and Burn Gorman as Guppy. Ten years later all three would appear in And Then There Were None (2015), as Mrs. Rogers, Wargrave, and Blore.
  • Charles Dance (Tulkinghorn) and Phil Davis (Smallweed) had previously played in two different versions of Nicholas Nickleby. Dance was Ralph in the 2001 miniseries, and Davis was Brooker in the 2002 film.
  • From the more obscure 1985 miniseries: Peter Vaughan played the villainous Mr. Tulkinghorn. Thirteen years later he played the kindly Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend.
  • Another Nicholas Nickleby-related example: Donald Sumpter (Brooker in 2001) played Nemo in the 1985 version of Bleak House.
  • Gillian Anderson (Lady Dedlock) went on to play Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (2011).
  • Charles Dance and Gillian Anderson both appeared in The Crown (2016), as Louis Mountbatten and Margaret Thatcher.
• Moral Event Horizon: The revelation, late in the novel, that Skimpole was the one who revealed Jo's whereabouts.

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