I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).

The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.

Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.

You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.

The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".