Chapters 1-4: First thoughts.

So, that's the first installment done!  My first thoughts are that these first four chapters are a great set-up for whatever plot is coming.  Also much shorter and easier to read than I would have expected. We've had a devastatingly witty description of what I gather is one of the main antagonists of the piece - the ridiculously inefficient and pompous Courts of Chancery.*  We've been introduced to an intriguing female character - what did her mother do that caused her Godmother to barely speak to the daughter?  Why has she been looked after by a complete stranger since said Godmother's death?  What's the connection between her and the two other young people she meets at the court?  Overall: Good entertainment, plenty of questions, and not many answers...  I'm actually really looking forward to reading the next installment on the first of April.  I'm beginning to see why Dickens was considered a master of the novel...

* From my reading of the introduction, the Court of Chancery was a sort of civil court that was abolished not long after Dickens wrote Bleak House.  It was notoriously inefficient and some of the cases went on for literally decades, until they took on a sort of Kafkaesque life of their own, involving hundreds of people and thousands in costs, reaching a point where no one even really knew what the case was about in the first place.  'Jarndyce and Jarndyce', mentioned several times in the first installment, is a fictionalised version of a real case that had the qualities mentioned above... Dickens had been involved in a case in the Court of Chancery, and had a bone to pick with them...