Character guide

Esther Summerson

major

Also known as Esther, little Esther, Miss Summerson, Dame Durden, Carboy

Esther arrives at Bleak House as housekeeper and companion, quickly becoming the emotional center of the household — the one Ada confides in, Richard leans on, and Mr. Jarndyce calls his Dame Durden. Her self-effacing manner hides a sharp observer, and she notices everything, including the romance blooming between her two young friends, while deflecting attention from her own buried questions about her parentage. Her voice carries the novel, and her mystery quietly drives its central arc.

Lady Dedlock

major

Also known as Honoria, My Lady Dedlock, the fair Dedlock

Lady Dedlock reigns over Chesney Wold with impeccable composure, admired and envied by fashionable society, yet she is visibly bored by everything her position offers. When Mr. Tulkinghorn corners her with knowledge of her hidden history, her icy control barely conceals a woman who would rather leap from a window than face exposure. Her secret — and who else knows it — becomes the engine of the novel's mystery.

Sir Leicester Dedlock

major

Also known as Sir Leicester, Leicester, Dedlock

Sir Leicester Dedlock embodies the old aristocracy — punctilious, duty-bound, and utterly convinced that his name and his marriage are beyond reproach. His devotion to Lady Dedlock is genuine and absolute, which makes the whispers beginning to circulate about her all the more devastating to his world. He matters because his trust, once broken, will test whether pride or love runs deeper in him.

Mr. Tulkinghorn

major

Also known as Tulkinghorn, the Tulkinghorn

Mr. Tulkinghorn moves between Chesney Wold and his dusty London chambers with the same impenetrable stillness, a man whose clients need him but never quite possess him. He has uncovered something about Lady Dedlock, and rather than act on it, he holds it — watching, waiting, savoring the power of knowing. His cold patience makes him the novel's most quietly menacing presence, a man who collects lives the way others collect curiosities.

Mr. Bucket

major

Also known as Bucket, Inspector Bucket, Detective Mr. Bucket

Mr. Bucket appears late but takes command instantly — interpreting Sir Leicester's desperate slate-scratchings, pocketing expense money, and promising results before anyone else has finished processing the crisis. He is neither cruel nor sentimental, just relentlessly competent, treating a baronet's catastrophe with the same brisk efficiency as any other case. His arrival signals that the mystery is no longer a drawing-room secret but a manhunt, and his methods will determine who is found and what is exposed.

Richard Carstone

major

Also known as Richard, Mr. Richard Carstone, Carstone, Rick

Richard Carstone is bright, affectionate, and hopelessly scattered — trying medicine, then law, then anything, while the Jarndyce and Jarndyce inheritance glitters in his imagination as an easy answer to every question. He loves Ada genuinely, and Esther watches the romance bloom with quiet joy and quiet worry, because Richard's inability to commit to anything but the lawsuit is already visible. His slow surrender to Chancery's false promises becomes one of the novel's most painful trajectories.

Ada Clare

major

Also known as Ada, Miss Ada, Miss Clare, Cousin Ada

Ada arrives at Bleak House with her cousin Richard and Esther, and her warmth immediately draws the household together. She and Richard fall silently, deeply in love, a happiness shadowed by his restless pursuit of the Jarndyce inheritance. Her steadiness matters because she anchors the novel's domestic heart while the Chancery suit slowly threatens to consume the people she loves.

Mr. Jarndyce

major

Also known as Jarndyce, John Jarndyce, John, cousin John

John Jarndyce takes in Esther, Ada, and Richard with a fatherly warmth that is genuine but skittish, vanishing out back gates when thanked too effusively. He refuses to engage the ruinous lawsuit that bears his name, preferring to build a stable home against its slow erosion. His generosity and his dread of being made a fuss over shape the moral center of the early and middle chapters.

Harold Skimpole

supporting

Also known as Mr. Skimpole, Skimpole, Harold

Skimpole is Jarndyce's favored guest, a man of taste and talk who never pays a debt and never feels a pang about it. His pose of helpless aestheticism masks a cold indifference to the people he sponges from, including the desperate and the poor. He matters because he embodies the novel's suspicion of charm without conscience, and his presence tests Jarndyce's charity.

Mr. Guppy

supporting

Also known as Guppy, William Guppy

Guppy is a Chancery clerk with ambitions above his station, first smitten by Esther when she visits the office, later entangled with Tony Weevle in schemes around Krook's papers. His awkward courtship and his nervous, self-important plotting make him both comic and faintly menacing. He matters because his curiosity about the case keeps dragging ordinary people toward its secrets.

Jo

supporting

Also known as Joe Pouch

Jo survives on the streets of London, sweeping crossings for pennies and sleeping wherever he can, ignored by nearly everyone who passes. He knows a little about a buried secret, and that little makes him dangerous to those who need it kept quiet. He matters because his vulnerability exposes the human cost of the mystery and the indifference of the society around him.

Mr. Snagsby

supporting

Also known as Snagsby, young Snagsby

Snagsby runs a modest stationer's shop, loves to muse about old London and country brooks, and lives under the jealous eye of his suspicious wife. His timid decency makes him an easy mark for lawyers and conspirators who need a witness or a small favor. He matters because his ordinary shop sits at the crossroads of the novel's legal and criminal threads.

Mr. George

supporting

Also known as George, George Rouncewell, the trooper

George Rouncewell runs a modest London shooting gallery and moves through the city with a soldier's plainness and reserve. He is a man of conscience and few words, carrying an old estrangement from his family and an unspoken obligation that keeps him wary of explaining his past. His steady presence and willingness to serve others quietly make him a moral anchor amid Chancery's murk, and the slow revelation of who he really is becomes one of the novel's most affecting threads.

Caddy Jellyby

supporting

Also known as Caddy, Caroline Jellyby, Caroline

Caddy Jellyby grows up in a household where letters to Africa matter more than meals, ink-stained and resentful while her mother lectures on Borrioboola-Gha. Sharp-tongued and secretly tender, she falls for Prince Turveydrop and begins to imagine escape from her mother's neglect. Her small rebellion against being merely useful is one of the novel's most human counterpoints to grand, abstract benevolence.

Mr. Woodcourt

supporting

Also known as Allan Woodcourt, Allan, Woodcourt

Allan Woodcourt is a young doctor of high reputation and small income, the sort of man Mr. Jarndyce says the poor will be lucky to have. He is steady, self-effacing, and quietly devoted to Esther, though circumstances keep him from declaring himself. His medical rounds among the destitute and his eventual voyage abroad give the novel a moral center of practical kindness, set against the self-serving philanthropy and legal greed around him.

Mr. Vholes

supporting

Also known as Vholes

Mr. Vholes is a lawyer of pinched respectability who keeps his shoulder to the wheel of Jarndyce and Jarndyce with grim, unflagging patience. He presents himself as a man of duty and family feeling, yet his fees and his calm encouragement keep Richard Carstone tethered to a case that is bleeding him dry. His bloodless professionalism embodies Chancery's appetite for costs, and his office becomes the quiet engine of Richard's ruin.

Miss Flite

supporting

Also known as Flite, little Miss Flite

Miss Flite haunts the courts and Lincoln's Inn, dressed in faded finery and attended by a collection of birds she names after legal virtues and delays. She is a living warning of what the Chancery suit does to those who wait on it, yet she is also kind, ceremonious, and oddly hopeful, calling the wards her friends and dressing up for her Monday calls. Her birds and her patience make her one of the novel's most haunting figures, a small human emblem of the law's slow cruelty.

Mr. Krook

supporting

Also known as Krook, old Krook

Old Krook deals in marine stores and wastepaper, and his cluttered shop becomes a strange archive of documents nobody else wants, including papers tied to the great suit. He is suspicious, half-literate, and morbidly curious, forever hinting at knowledge he cannot quite articulate. His hoard and his peculiar end give the novel one of its most memorable images of how Chancery's paper rot spreads into ordinary London life.

Hortense

supporting

Also known as Mademoiselle Hortense, mademoiselle

Hortense moves through Chesney Wold as a servant whose intensity unnerves even her mistress, watching everything and forgetting nothing. Her devotion to Lady Dedlock is possessive rather than humble, and the smallest slight registers as an outrage demanding repayment. That volatile mixture of service and resentment makes her one of the novel's quietest but most dangerous presences, a figure whose grievances will not stay buried.

Mrs. Jellyby

supporting

Also known as Jellyby

Introduced as the London hostess where Esther and Ada first lodge, Mrs. Jellyby devotes every waking hour to coffee-berry cultivation on the Niger while her household literally crumbles around her. Her daughter Caddy runs ragged as an unpaid secretary, and Mr. Jellyby is so thoroughly eclipsed that he is described chiefly as her husband. Dickens uses her to skewer charity that loves the far-off and ignores the near, a theme that shadows Esther's own ideas about duty and usefulness.

Boythorn

supporting

Also known as Lawrence Boythorn, Mr. Boythorn

Boythorn arrives at Bleak House like weather, booming about misdirected travelers and swearing eternal war on his neighbor Sir Leicester Dedlock over a disputed patch of ground. Underneath the superlatives and the roar is a generous, loyal man whose affection for Jarndyce dates back to schoolboy fists and broken teeth. He brings warmth and absurdity to the middle stretch of the book, and his feud with the Dedlocks quietly links the Jarndyce circle to Chesney Wold.

Mrs. Rouncewell

supporting

Mrs. Rouncewell has served the Dedlocks so long that she seems part of the house itself, handsome, active, and quietly indispensable to Lady Dedlock. Her pride is complicated: her son Watt has become a prosperous ironmaster invited to Parliament, a fact Sir Leicester finds an alarming blurring of ranks. Loyal to the family yet bound to a changing England, she embodies the old order's uneasy accommodation with the new, and her position gives her a front-row view of the mysteries gathering at Chesney Wold.

Mr. Smallweed

supporting

Also known as Smallweed, Grandfather Smallweed, old Smallweed

Grandfather Smallweed presides over a grim below-street parlor where he watches pots, roasts joints, and lends money at ruinous rates, attended by his monkey-like granddaughter Judy and his gibbering wife. His body is a broken puppet's, but his grip on other people's debts, and on the compromising papers those debts have bought, is iron. He matters because he is one of the novel's great repositories of hidden leverage, a creature whose greed makes him a conduit for the past to reach back into the present.

Judy Smallweed

minor

Also known as Judith Smallweed, Judy

The sharp-tongued granddaughter of Grandfather Smallweed.

Mrs. Bagnet

supporting

Also known as Bagnet

Mrs. Bagnet keeps the Bagnet household running with cheer and economy while her wooden-faced husband Lignum delivers his verdicts in monosyllables and lets her translate. She is devoted to George, the trooper, and her affection for him is unshowy but absolute, the kind that notices his shaking hands before he does. In a novel full of failed families, the Bagents offer a working model of loyalty and plain decency, and Mrs. Bagnet's steadiness becomes a quiet anchor for George in his hardest moments.

Matthew Bagnet

supporting

Also known as Mr. Bagnet, Mat, Bagnet

Bagnet is a retired artilleryman turned small tradesman, one of the few steady anchors in George Rouncewell's drifting life. His domestic code is comic on the surface—his wife's opinions arrive only through his own gruff translation—but it masks a fierce, unshowy loyalty that makes him the friend George can't shake off. In a novel full of broken obligations, Bagnet's plain reliability quietly indicts everyone who talks about duty without practicing it.

Phil Squod

minor

Also known as Phil

George's loyal, disfigured assistant at the shooting gallery.

Mr. Chadband

minor

Also known as Chadband, the Reverend Chadband

A hypocritical, oily preacher who lectures the poor.

Mrs. Snagsby

minor

Also known as the watchful Mrs. Snagsby

Mr. Snagsby's suspicious and jealous wife.

Prince Turveydrop

supporting

Also known as Prince, Mr. Prince Turveydrop, young Mr. Turveydrop

Prince Turveydrop runs the family dancing academy while his father, the Model of Deportment, poses in the drawing room and takes the credit. Shy, tireless, and quietly devoted, he sees in Caddy Jellyby a fellow creature starved of approval, and their courtship becomes one of the novel's few genuinely tender threads. His patient labor against his father's ornamental indolence makes him a small, sharp counterpoint to the book's grander parasites.

Old Mr. Turveydrop

minor

Also known as old Mr. Turveydrop, the elder Mr. Turveydrop

A vain, idle man who lives off his son's labor, a model of 'deportment'.

Mr. Weevle

minor

Also known as Weevle, Tony, Tony Jobling, Jobling

A young man who lodges above Krook's shop and assists Guppy.

Kenge

minor

Also known as Mr. Kenge, Conversation Kenge

A verbose lawyer from the firm handling the Jarndyce case.

Gridley

minor

Also known as Mr. Gridley, poor Gridley

A man driven mad by the Chancery suit, known as 'the man from Shropshire'.

Mrs. Pardiggle

minor

Also known as a Mrs. Pardiggle

An aggressive philanthropist who forces charity on the poor.

Mr. Bayham Badger

minor

Also known as Mr. Badger, Badger

A physician in Chelsea who employs Allan Woodcourt.

Rosa

minor

A young maid at Chesney Wold, devoted to Lady Dedlock.

Charley

supporting

Also known as King Charles, poor Charley

Charley arrives in Esther's life as a child who has already been a mother, raising her younger siblings on almost nothing. Her instinct to rescue a destitute boy near the brickmaker's cottage—because he might have been her own brother Tom—reveals the compassion that defines her. Loyal, watchful, and old before her time, she becomes Esther's shadow and, in the novel's darker turns, the instrument through which illness and sacrifice enter the Jarndyce household.

Miss Volumnia

minor

Also known as Volumnia

Sir Leicester's flirtatious, aging cousin who visits Chesney Wold.

Mrs. Chadband

minor

Also known as Chadband

The wife of Mr. Chadband, formerly Miss Barbary's servant.

Mrs. Smallweed

minor

The bedridden wife of Grandfather Smallweed, rarely seen.

Watt

minor

Mrs. Rouncewell's grandson, a young ironmaster who loves Rosa.

Mr. Rouncewell

minor

Also known as Rouncewell, Young Mr. Rouncewell

Mrs. Rouncewell's son, a successful ironmaster and reformer.

Guster

minor

Also known as Still Guster

The Snagsbys' epileptic maidservant, prone to fits.

Jenny

minor

A poor brickmaker's wife who befriends Esther and Lady Dedlock.

Captain Hawdon

supporting

Also known as Nemo

Known to his neighbors only as Nemo—Latin for nobody—Hawdon writes legal documents by candlelight in a squalid room and drinks himself toward an early grave. His death is the first crack in the novel's surface, drawing the coroner, the law, and eventually Mr. Bucket into a chain of inquiry that reaches the highest circles. His buried past, and the letters he left behind, make him the hinge on which the mystery of Esther's origins and Lady Dedlock's secret quietly turns.

Little Swills

minor

Also known as Swills

A comic singer at the Sol's Arms tavern.

Mr. Tangle

minor

A barrister who argues before the Lord Chancellor in the Jarndyce case.

Old Tom Jarndyce

minor

Also known as Tom Jarndyce

The previous owner of Bleak House who died by suicide over the suit.

Mrs. Piper

minor

Also known as young Piper

A neighbor in the court who gossips about the Krook affair.

Mrs. Guppy

minor

Also known as Guppy

Mr. Guppy's mother, who lives with him.

Peepy

minor

The youngest Jellyby child, often neglected and getting into scrapes.

Miss Jellyby

minor

Caddy's younger sister, who eventually runs away with a lover.

Coavinses

minor

Also known as The Coavinses, little Coavinses

A debt collector who arrests Skimpole; his children later appear.

Mrs. Blinder

minor

Also known as a Mrs. Blinder

A kind landlady who helps the poor in Tom-all-Alone's.

Mrs. Bucket

minor

Also known as Bucket

The wife of Inspector Bucket, who assists him in his investigations.

Mr. Quale

minor

An enthusiastic but ineffectual philanthropist friend of Mrs. Jellyby.

Mr. Jellyby

minor

Also known as poor Mr. Jellyby

Mrs. Jellyby's meek, neglected husband.

Mrs. Woodcourt

minor

Also known as Woodcourt

Allan Woodcourt's proud mother, who values her Welsh ancestry.

Miss Barbary

minor

Also known as the late Miss Barbary

Esther's stern aunt who raised her in secrecy.

Mrs. Rachael

minor

Also known as Rachael

Miss Barbary's servant, later Mrs. Chadband.

Lady Jane

minor

Also known as Jane

Krook's ill-tempered cat, often associated with his death.

Mr. Sladdery

minor

A fashionable society tailor who gossips about his clients.

Mr. Pardiggle

minor

The henpecked husband of Mrs. Pardiggle.

Mr. Gusher

minor

An enthusiastic philanthropist who works with Mrs. Jellyby.

Miss Donny

minor

The head of the boarding school where Esther was educated.

Professor Dingo

minor

A scientist who marries Mrs. Bayham Badger after her first husband's death.

Mrs. Skimpole

minor

Harold Skimpole's long-suffering wife, rarely mentioned.

Miss Dedlock

minor

Sir Leicester's spinster cousin, a gossip at Chesney Wold.

Joshua Smallweed

minor

A relative of the Smallweed family, a moneylender.

Lignum Vitae

minor

Also known as Lignum

A woodworker who makes George's walking sticks.

Mr. Bogsby

minor

Also known as Mr. J. G. Bogsby, J. G. Bogsby

The proprietor of the Sol's Arms tavern.

Mr. Grubble

minor

Also known as Mister Grubble

The landlord of the Dedlock Arms in the village.

Captain Swosser

minor

Mrs. Bayham Badger's first husband, a naval captain.

Alexander Piper

minor

Also known as Alexander, James

A young boy in the neighborhood, often mentioned with his mother.

Mr. Sangsby

minor

A minor character, possibly a misprint for Snagsby.

Mercury

minor

The Dedlocks' footman, known for his speed and silence.

Peffer

minor

A former partner of Snagsby in the law-stationery business.

Fitz-Jarndyce

minor

Also known as Fitz Jarndyce, Miss Fitz Jarndyce

A distant relative of the Jarndyce family, a claimant in the suit.