Dickens at his structural peak — a double-narrated novel built around Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a Chancery suit so old the original litigants are forgotten and the costs have eaten the entire estate. Esther Summerson's first-person chapters alternate with an anonymous third-person voice closer to documentary than fiction. T.S. Eliot called it the greatest of Dickens's novels; Harold Bloom put it among the dozen greatest in English. Sprawling, furious, and structurally daring.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.