Bleak House is set in England in the mid-1800s, a time of enormous social change. Rapid advancements in science, the arts, travel, locomotion, and medicine in the Victorian period meant the world was shifting at an astonishing rate. Dickens both celebrates and criticizes this, as he describes the lives of rich characters who benefit from it and poor characters whose conditions don't change in spite of general betterment.
The novel takes place largely in the city of London, a setting so important to the plot that it's basically a character. London is described by Dickens as a place of social extremes. It contains dingy, falling-down slums like Tom-All-Alone's, which are placed in opposition to (and geographically startlingly close to) the melodramatically opulent residences of the wealthy. A great deal of the book centers around the Court of Chancery, a bloated representation of London's hub of property law. It's located within the Inns of Court, most often at Lincoln's Inn. These Inns are venerable institutions walled-off from the rest of the city, where barristers (England's version of attorneys) conduct their business.
The streets of London are sites of mystery and unease throughout Bleak House, as the fog swirls around and obscures deeds both good and bad. London is dark, cramped, and unstable for most characters in this novel. Its streets, like life within it and like the plot itself, are branching and confusing, hard to navigate, and full of perils. Not all of the novel takes place in the city, however. Chesney Wold, the chilly and imposing estate residence of the Dedlock family, and Bleak House itself are set apart from London in wealthy areas of the English countryside. The darkness of the city only enters them via the novel's legal dramas and the travels of its characters. The counties of Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire, where these houses are located, are not close to London, but are infected with both the torpor and gloom of it by their legal problems and by gossip that comes and goes. Notably, the new Bleak House which appears at the end of the novel is built in Yorkshire, which is about as far away as one can get from London while remaining in England.
