I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).

"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."