There are many themes in Bleak House, Dickens had more than his usual multitude, but one that didn't press me as prominently in prior readings, was the lassitude of men. There is really no good guy in Bleak House, only shades of bad, parasites who prey on, or who take advantage of, their domestic relations, women and, of course, children. All are like this except, perhaps, Inspector Bucket and John Jarndyce. There's the Chancellor, there are the multitude of lawyers, there is Harold Skimpole, a dead ringer say contemporaries of Dickens, for a real man. There is Sir Leicester Deadlock; there is Crook; there is, looming always like a vulture, Tulkinghorn; I am just reacquainting myself with Mr. Turveydrop. Coming is the unforgettable swine Grandfather Smallweed. The women are more a mixed bag. Esther Summerson is the saintly heroine; but Mrs. Jellyby an absentee mother and wife; Lady Dedlock is, to me, more gray, haughty to be sure, but clearly a victim.

Where Dickens got all of these characters, more in Bleak House than in any other of his books, all with such similar characteristics, suggests his imagination rather than his experience. However there had to have been, as with Skimpole, examples from which he created the template. Jarndyce and Jarndyce was based on a real case; as a one time court reporter, Dickens would have seen examples of the lawyer-as-leach. Bleak House the structure, has been identified to the satisfaction of Dickensians; Tulkinghorn's chambers likewise. Down to the present day, Bucket is the instantiation of the good English cop. He was the first. Did Dickens really create him without an example before him? Nabokov archly dismisses the idea that Dickens would have had any experience whatsoever with the lives and the living spaces of the minor aristocracy: created out of whole cloth per Nabokov. 

They are drawn so finely, each of the characters is, in such detail, in the way they look, the way they breathe, their coughs, their laughs, their dress, every peculiarity in their mannerisms is present, such that the characters have been brought to life on a Dickens street in a Dickens theme park. The characters personified are recognized instantly by goers to, are mistaken for no other. 

All great fiction is based on life, must be based on life if readers are to find it credible. Dickens had some, however fleeting, experience with the types that he fills in so brilliantly. He must have.