Author: Charles Dickens
Release Date: August, 1997 [EBook #1023] [Most
recently updated: January 30, 2006]
Edition: 12
Language: English
Character set encoding: Us-ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK, bleak house ***
This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, Toronto,
Canada (charlie@idirect.com), with revision and corrections
by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
by Charles Dickens
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me,
as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men
and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy,
that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject
of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judge’s eye had a cast in my direction),
was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted,
a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but
this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to
the “parsimony of the public,” which guilty
public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in
the most determined manner on by no means enlarging
the number of Chancery judges appointed—I
believe by Richard the Second, but any other king
will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted
in the body of this book or I should have restored
it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one
or other of whom I think it must have originated.
In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets:
“My nature is subdued
To what it works in,
like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish
I were renewed!”
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public
should know what has been doing, and still is doing,
in this connexion, I mention here that everything
set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery
is substantially true, and within the truth.
The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from
one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested
person who was professionally acquainted with the
whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end.
At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit
before the court which was commenced nearly twenty
years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have
been known to appear at one time, in which costs have
been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds,
which is A friendly suit, and which is (I
am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when
it was begun. There is another well-known suit
in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced
before the close of the last century and in which
more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds
has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other
authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain
them on these pages, to the shame of—a
parsimonious public.
