I believe Bleak House, yes, I am reading it again, to be Dickens' finest work, and chapter one to be the finest chapter in his finest work. I lost my original, tattered paperback a month or so ago and bought a new one. The new had the effect of a first reading, without the underlining and dog-eared pages of my original copy. I saw different things. Thought I saw other things that weren't there. For somehow, I restarted reading not with chapter one and got all the way up to page 155. I thought I had found a mistake on the master's part, a mention of Mr. Tulkinghorn before he had been introduced. I realize that seems conceited on my part but. Dickens wrote this and other of his books in serial fashion in periodicals. That mode gives the book a herky-jerky feel, as if he forgot what he wrote two or three weeks before. There is no doubt that the mode of serialization does give that disjointed feel to Bleak House, also to account for its 850-page length but I was wrong, as I discovered re-reading from the beginning, that he had made the glaring mistake with Tulkinghorn.

What I have noticed on this re-read are certain consistent themes woven in and out of the various chapters. Children are a prominent, often dominant, theme in many of Dickens' works. Children are not, I would say, the red-lights-blaring dominant theme of Bleak House, as they are in, e.g. David Copperfield or Oliver Twist. Children are colored a bit more subtly in Bleak House. There is the man-child Harold Skimpole, a man who uses his child-like breezy carelessness as a mask for the devious man concealed beneath. Don't ever remember a real child in Dickens colored darkly with some black. 

There is Esther Summerson, of course, her surname a play on her disposition. But in Esther's mother, Lady Honoria Dedlock, all stern, elite mask, very early on Dickens' glimpses us a look at children and Lady Dedlock. From her window in Chesney Wold, "My Lady Dedlock (who is childless)..." sees a young child of estate workers running in the rain to greet her father as her mother gives chase. This puts Lady Dedlock "quite out of temper" and she says she has been 'bored to death'. For what reason she and her husband, Sir Leicester, go (flee) to Paris. That's on pages 10 and 11. Much later on, p. 152, in Paris, Lady Dedlock sees the poor "gay...playing with children" and is "bored to death". Even her own maid is having fun, for which Lady Dedlock "almost hated her". "She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris...the imperfect remedy is always to fly".Lady Dedlock continues to flee throughout the novel, flees to her own child, Esther, and then flees away from all, child and adult, to her death in the graveyard where Esther's father was buried.

I didn't notice on prior readings how subtly Dickens uses children to color Lady Dedlock's character.