SOURCE: Dolin, Kieran. “Reformist Critique in the Mid-Victorian ‘Legal Novel’—Bleak House.” In Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature, pp. 71-96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Dolin focuses on Dickens's criticism of the court of Chancery and its inheritance laws as exhibited in Bleak House.]

A reviewer of the first number of Bleak House anticipated that Jarndyce and Jarndyce would “doubtless be a famous cause—and take its future place beside the Common Pleas case of Bardell v Pickwick in the Law Reports of Fiction.”¹ This prediction has proved true in the long term.² When the serialization of the novel was completed, the same reviewer criticized Dickens for failing “to keep the mighty mystery of Iniquity and Equity perpetually before the reader,” and for giving, instead, “the first concern and sympathy … to Lady Dedlock's secret.”³ These remarks provide a compact starting-point for a critical and historical discussion of the representation of law in Bleak House. In the first section of this chapter I explore the mid-Victorian evolution of a subgenre based on “the Law Reports of Fiction,” and argue that although Bleak House emerged from this generic field, its critique of the English legal system and nomos is more profound than that of The Heart of Midlothian. The specific focus of this critique, the Court of Chancery, had become a national scandal, obstructing inherited notions of justice and resisting attempts at reform. The sense of contradiction expressed in the phrase, “the mighty mystery of Iniquity and Equity,” is emplotted in Bleak House, which presents the stories of the institution's victims as evidence of the need for reform, but which also recuperates part of the tradition of Equity as an alternative to Chancery. That alternative is best embodied in Esther Summerson. Esther's recovery of family represents, it is argued in the last part of the chapter, a type of world-building which is set against the destructive and entropic tendencies of Chancery.

I

The existence of two major Victorian connections between literature and law is indicated by these phrases, “the Law Reports of Fiction” and “the mighty mystery of Iniquity and Equity.” The former phrase expresses the reviewer's expectation of the realistic presentation of legal proceedings, while the latter evidences the contemporary dismay at the injustices wrought by the Chancery Court. The two phrases may be thought to point in opposite directions, one towards the law as it is, the other towards the law as it should be. However, such a dichotomy would be over-simplified, for the allusion to The Pickwick Papers suggests a realism alloyed with comedy and satire, while the wordplay of “Iniquity and Equity” bespeaks an awareness that error and evil may likewise be illustrated through comedy and satire. In this context, the “mystery” of Chancery is not insoluble: rather the institution may be understood and remedied.

As a formulation, “The Law Reports of Fiction” seems to derive from the title of The Pickwick Papers, chapter xxxiv, “Is Wholly Devoted to a Full and Faithful Report of the Memorable Trial of Bardell against Pickwick.” The hyperbole of this title, however, invokes an eighteenth-century tradition of fulsome titles not only of novels, but more importantly of sensational pamphlets and broadsides. Narratives of trials and criminal biography formed a notable species of publication in this medium.⁴ The restrained expression of “the Law Reports of Fiction,” by contrast, invokes the authority of professional and official case reports, which were largely a nineteenth-century development.⁵ As a genre, the law report combines discourse, legal reasoning from principle and precedent, with the narrative recitation of facts. To juxtapose such historical narrative with “fiction” is to play the same games with genre as Scott's advocates with their “Causes Célèbres of Caledonia.” The results of this juxtaposition are twofold: the law becomes an object of entertainment through the mimicry of stereotypes; and fiction becomes a medium for authoritative representations of law.

The Pickwick Papers employs mimicry not only of the forms of the common law trial, but also in its portrait of the judge. Dickens's Mr. Justice Stareleigh is a comic imitation of both the name and the manner of the real Mr. Justice Gazelee.⁶ This impulse famously reappears in the Skimpole-Leigh Hunt portrait in Bleak House, and also in the attributed link between Caroline Chisholm and Mrs. Jellyby. Lord Denman, who is reported to have read his copy of Pickwick on the bench, condemned the Jellyby portrait and Dickens's criticisms of Chancery in a pamphlet on Bleak House. Despite satirizing the law, for example, the sharp practices of Dodson and Fogg, or the absurdities of the rule that parties to a case were ineligible as witnesses, the Pickwick trial shares the geniality of the other sketches in the novel and presented no threat to the legal system or profession. Indeed Dickens made comic play of the “case” and its “report” in a speech to the United Law Clerks' Society dinner in 1849.⁷Pickwick was easily conscripted into a tradition of legal humour which stretches from Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities to A. P. Herbert's Misleading Cases, which depends upon detailed representation of institutional usages, of the peculiar, that is to say both the characteristic and the strange, features of the English legal system. Such stories, in consequence, offer increased delight to those familiar with the details alluded to, the legal community whose functions and knowledge are thereby invoked as well as imitated.

The mimetic impulse in the “full and faithful report” blossomed with the mid-Victorian novel's dominant aesthetic creed of realism, and fictional narratives involving legal proceedings or questions or actions occurring in a legal milieu flourished. Of this literary interest, Northrop Frye has commented that there is hardly a British novelist in the nineteenth century who does not make a major character out of the law.⁸ The cultural context for this literary interest will be examined shortly, but here it is proper to note that the law was strongly present in various conceptions of the real.

A significant example of this trend, and an important precursor of Bleak House, is Samuel Warren's best-selling novel, Ten Thousand A Year (1840-1). It concerns an upstart shop assistant's claim to a landed estate, engineered by fraudulent solicitors, Quirk, Gammon and Snap. The legal and social ramifications of their roguery are fully detailed. The law is presented as an effective underpinning to all actions and arrangements within society. The narrative is supplemented by numerous footnotes detailing the cases and statutes applicable to the actions described; thus verifying both the accuracy of the account and the meaning of the various events. The effect is to endow the legal (and other social) details with normative force. The law becomes a subject for approbation, not merely description: “Both were men of rigid integrity: 'tis indeed a glorious thing to be able to challenge the inquiry—when, for centuries, have other than men of rigid integrity sat upon the English Bench?”⁹ Such laudatory comments by the narrator and the use of authenticating notes to the text were devices of Scott's narrative. They reveal the part played by legal discourse in constructing conceptions of reality in the nineteenth century. Scott and Warren worked within this discourse, being lawyers as well as littérateurs. (Warren was the author of a standard text on The Duties of Attornies and Solicitors and A Popular and Practical Introduction to Law Studies.) Ten Thousand A Year was one of many novels that centred upon claims to estates, from Wuthering Heights to Orley Farm and others by Anthony Trollope. Bleak House is, therefore, illustrative of a general interest in both the law and the ideology of family succession in the Victorian novel.¹⁰

This interest is exposed in an anonymous review of Tales by a Barrister, of which two editions were published in 1844 and 1847. The reviewer suggests that the Tales herald a welcome new sub-genre of narrative fiction, “the legal novel.”¹¹ This is defined not merely by subject or milieu, but by its avowed inculcation of “some legal moral,” a narrow definition which, the reviewer recognizes, excludes the works of Fielding, Scott, Edgeworth and Warren! The article is interesting in its very proposal of a sub-genre and in its conservative didacticism. The reviewer argues that such fiction will acquaint readers with legal rules and thereby help to protect their property and reduce ignorance in a “nation … where the strict impartiality of the law is every one's boast.” This statement is comparable to Scott's posited connection between Waverley and the Union of Scotland and England in the way its paideic expression is so openly tied to the interests of the propertied classes, to an ideological position. The tales themselves concern the loss of property by generally imprudent owners who fail adequately to protect themselves against exploitation by unscrupulous agents. The accuracy in legal detail, the verisimilitude of character and manners, is emphasized by the reviewer as the foundation of a prescriptive commentary on social organization. He comments disparagingly on the Reform Bill (which “deluged the House with brisk Vestrymen”), but also on the “prolix and tautologous jargon” of the law.¹² In one of the tales, a solicitor advises against his client bringing a suit in Chancery, whereupon the reviewer considers the validity of complaints against the Chancery Court and offers his own plan for reform. Thus, the “legal novel” is conceived as a vehicle not merely for the representation of the law, but for its criticism.

In the matter of Chancery reform, Tales by a Barrister and Bleak House are as different as they are similar. Where the former speaks of such reform in an overwhelmingly realist and normative representation of the English legal and social system, Bleak House abjures both discussion and the intricate details of legal process in favour of a dramatic and symbolic expression of Chancery's effects in society, of society imagined as a “Chancery world,” to use a phrase by Q. D. Leavis.

Though Dickens is associated with some of the most famous cases in “the Law Reports of Fiction,” he is not a writer of “legal novels” as conceived by the anonymous reviewer of Tales by a Barrister. He is considered disdainfully as a writer of “laboured” sketches.¹³ This criticism has affinities with the charges of exaggeration and simplification made against Dickens by Fitzjames Stephen and Anthony Trollope. Patrick Brantlinger argues that such criticism entails a dual commitment—aesthetic and political—to realism, or “things as they are.”¹⁴ In this argument, which will be more fully considered in the chapter on Trollope, the dominance of realism in English fiction from the 1850s onwards is related to the decline of what Brantlinger calls “the spirit of reform.” This spirit, which had prevailed since the 1820s, is defined as:

the belief that social improvement, and especially the improvement of the working class, can be brought about by some form of political action, whether through legislative and administrative channels, or through social work and private charity.¹⁵

Brantlinger notes how the novel came to be used in various campaigns for improved penal laws, factory conditions and treatment of the insane, along with journalism and official reports. Some such novels presented emotive rather than systematic cases for reform. Brantlinger notes, for example, how Lytton's Paul Clifford, a “Newgate novel,” advocates penal reform while ascribing criminality to individual moral, rather than social causes. Despite these defects, the “novel with a purpose” was an important literary mode, numbering among its practitioners Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, Harriet Martineau and Dickens.¹⁶

This tradition provides a more secure basis than the conservative “legal novel” for an examination of Dickens and the law. English law is not, for Dickens, the guardian of liberty, but a defective system kept in place by vested interests. In his journalism and his fiction, he campaigned against “abuses.” Looking back from Bleak House and Lord Denman's criticisms of it, he generalized this pattern:

The most serious and pathetic point I tried with all indignation and intensity to make, in my first book, (Pickwick) was the slow torture and death of a chancery prisoner. From that hour to this, if I have been set on anything, it has been on exhibiting the abuses of the Law.¹⁷

As the above discussion of Pickwick may show, the possibility of retrospective special pleading exists here.

Dickens was no blind follower of reformist programmes. The genealogy of law reform is, in nineteenth-century England, Benthamite in inspiration. The Royal Commissions into such aspects of the legal system as the criminal law and the Court of Chancery were attempts to rationalize their operation. Dickens's critical response to this approach is illustrated by his attack in Oliver Twist on the New Poor Law of 1834, one of the first achievements of the reformers in Parliament. If the critique of Utilitarianism in Hard Times is taken as the yardstick, Dickens appears ardently anti-Benthamite. Yet, as Marjorie Stone has demonstrated, the novelist and the philosopher could, on occasion, attack the same targets with the same weapons. Her example is the campaign against “legal fictions,” the presumptions and false averments by which the law adapted itself to new demands over the centuries.¹⁸ Bentham's insistence that such fictions were lies and absurdities is taken up by Dickens in many passages in the novels and journals and extended to include fictions operating in social life. However, Bentham's attitude to imaginative literature—his celebrated comparison of poetry to push-pin—is emphatically resisted by Dickens, as the famous satire on “Facts” in Hard Times shows: such facts are not self-sufficiently true and provide no adequate explanation of the world, much less any conception of how to reform it. Imagination and values are the discourses of Dickens's reformism, “the romantic side of familiar things.”¹⁹ The “abuses of the law” that Dickens exhibits may be targets of Benthamite critique; his radical attitude to social problems may be the product of his association with radical journals like the Daily News, as the legal historians Maine and Dicey suggest;²⁰ but the humanitarian and imaginative treatment of such problems highlight aspects of them that the Benthamite reformers never noticed, and locate problems in the operation of industrial society that the Benthamites had no means of seeing. Brantlinger summarizes this difference by arguing that the Benthamite radicals were strong in their systematic analysis of social institutions, but lacked a means of recognizing inequality and basic injustices, while the “sentimental radicals” like Dickens, possessed an awareness and a vocabulary for injustice, but were not systematic or intellectually coherent in their critiques of social institutions.²¹ This difference emerges most clearly in respect of Chancery, where, I shall argue below, Dickens adheres to a notion of Equity which Bentham rejected as irrational.

The “topicality” of Chancery Reform in 1851 has been demonstrated by Butt and Tillotson:

Dickens's indictment of Chancery … followed in almost every respect the charges already levelled in the columns of The Times. In both we read of houses in Chancery, and wards in Chancery, of dilatory and costly procedure, of wasted lives, and of legal obstructionism.²²

Bleak House was recognized, but by no means universally applauded, as a contribution to the reform of Chancery. While the Illustrated London News believed that Dickens's influence was, as always, “pure, beneficial and elevating,” many reviews criticized the lack of novelty, the lateness, of his exposé. For example, the Spectator regarded Jarndyce and Jarndyce as “stale and commonplace satire upon the length and expense of Chancery proceedings.” The Eclectic Review wrote that Dickens “only exhibits in a stronger and more romantic light what has been pretty well made known before through the earnest prose of plainer men.” For Bentley's Monthly Review, his lack of professional understanding was fatal: “so much energy spent in a vain attempt to crush the giant of Chancery”; and concluded that Lord St. Leonards would be a “more effectual” Chancery Reformer. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was more balanced: “even admitting that Mr. Dickens comes late into the field, it is not to be denied that, for the purposes of his story, he makes very effective use of his suit in Chancery.”²³ The charge of lateness is difficult to credit when it is remembered how long and hard the process of Chancery reform was: from Lord Eldon's inconclusive Chancery Commission of 1824 to the final establishment of a single system of courts exercising common law and equity powers in 1875; even Parliamentary Acts were resisted, such as that of 1833 abolishing the Six Clerks' Office, which required another Act in 1842 to achieve its aim.²⁴ Such obstructionism is revealed for readers of the novel not simply through the satire on Mr. Vholes, but in Dickens's Preface, which travesties a public defence of Chancery by the Vice-Chancellor, Sir William Page-Wood.²⁵ Dickens suggests that the Judge is so steeped in the usages of his court as to be blind to its faults. Chancery reform was still a matter of debate, despite the overwhelming (and eventually successful) movement for change. The criticisms quoted above may seem to repose little faith in the novel of reform (“a vain attempt”) but, from another viewpoint, the insistent demand for novelty suggests an expectation that the novel should be at the very front of social progress. Addressing this issue of the effectiveness of Bleak House in his Lincoln's Inn Essays, Sir Gerald Hurst K. C. concludes that while the legislative reform of Chancery had already begun, Dickens's work:

contributed in some measure at least to mould the minds of the men who mattered … its version, however extravagant, of the abuses of Chancery was sufficiently biting to stir even the complacency of vested interests and for this reason deserves a place among those classical works of fiction … which have helped practically to make a better England.²⁶

The ideal of “a better England” animates both the law reform movement in general and Dickens's Bleak House. This idealism is recognized in Butt and Tillotson's use of criminal discourse: “Dickens's indictment of Chancery” and “the charges already levelled in … The Times” capture the sense of positive wrong which it was the aim of reform to redress. Bleak House may be viewed then as a critical intervention in debates about social organization, rather than as a linguistic, revolutionist or pessimistic attack on all social structures.²⁷ That Chancery reform proceeds from an ideal is one of the implications of the word-play of the Athenaeum reviewer quoted in my introduction. The “mighty mystery of Iniquity and Equity” conjoins similarities in sound with opposites in meaning to express the paradox of Chancery: that the Equity court, in defiance of its name and its jurisdiction, delivers “Iniquity” or injustice. The result of the conjunction is to create two senses of equity, the ideal and the institutional. The former signifies justice and mercy, the opposite of the fixed rigour of the law. The latter signifies the Court of Chancery, established to give effect to the ideal, but by Dickens's day a by-word for injustice and as bound by precedent as the Common Law it was designed to supplement. The existence of equity as an ideal is important both for the novel and for Chancery reform.

In Bleak House the impersonal narrator's opening account of the court in session expresses outrage at the impenetrable technicality of the proceeding, with barristers “running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity” (p. 6). “So much has this public institution perverted its purpose,” John R. Reed observes, “that it begets injury and injustice instead of curing them.”²⁸ Listing the consequences of the Chancery suit, the people whom the “unwholesome hand” of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been able to “spoil and corrupt,” the narrator concludes that it has affected the mentality of those even “in its outermost circle of evil,” who “have been tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right” (pp. 8-9). The “shirking and sharking” sponsored by Jarndyce and Jarndyce are unambiguously “bad things” which must be corrected. This reformist imperative is underwritten by the narrator's rejection of any elevation of Murphy's law (“if something can go wrong, it will”) into a metaphysical principle. Bleak House is, therefore, imbued with “the spirit of reform.”

The paideic vision of the law reformer is illustrated by Brougham's six-hour speech to the House of Commons on 7 February, 1828 on the need for reform. In his peroration, Brougham cites Napoleon's boast that his greatest achievement was his Civil Code and urges England's sovereign to dream of a similar boast:

that he found the law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book—left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich—left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two edged sword of craft and oppression—left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence.²⁹

He specifically excluded equity from his speech because the 1824 Chancery Commission had already reported on some reform needs. Twenty years on, Chancery was still unreformed, and Dickens could work Brougham's antitheses into a more urgent critique. For Bentham the notion of a supplementary equity jurisdiction was irrational, a sign of the absence of a scientific system of legal rules.³⁰

The achieved reforms of the law imply a belief in the fundamental soundness of the legal system; but they also imply an acceptance that the ends and means of the law are under human control, and that a duty exists or social policy demands that the law be turned into an effective instrument of justice. An analogy may be drawn here between law reform and the repairs and renovations undertaken by John Jarndyce at his eponymous home. With all its successive additions, its design seems “delightfully irregular” (p. 62); yet it has been made habitable and becomes the setting for a new family life by Jarndyce's efforts after the neglect of the previous occupant, the distressed litigant, Tom Jarndyce. Chancery reform, then, is not only a procedural matter, but an attempt to reactivate the jurisdiction of equity, to overturn the warning of honourable Chancery practitioners, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!” (p. 7). One consequence of stressing the paideic element of Chancery reform is to reclaim as a critical issue “the general belief that Dickens's object in writing Bleak House was to get the Chancery Court reformed,”³¹ because the social as well as the symbolic significance of Chancery is necessary to an understanding of the novel's representation of law.³² As Cover argues, real and ideal are connected by the bridge of law. Chancery became a bitter jest, even the name of a wrestling hold, because it travestied its own promise of justice. Something of the manifold physical and spiritual, ethical and financial, experience of injustice is revealed in Dickens's response to his own abortive suit for injunctions and then common law damages against the piracy of A Christmas Carol:

I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the Carol case, wherein, asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed.³³

It is sometimes suggested that this righteous disappointment is the source of an irrational hatred of Chancery which devalues Bleak House.³⁴ This judgment denies the historical record of Chancery abuses, and rests on expectations of normative realism and perhaps on a deterministic psychology of literary creation. The opening of Bleak House displays a mimetic interest in the Chancery scene, but this mimesis competes for the reader's attention with the symbolism of the fog and the tone of portentous sonority of the narrative voice. The conventions of the “legal novel” appear to be invoked, but the respectful commentary of Scott and Warren is replaced by majestic irony: “And hard by Temple bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery” (p. 6). Likewise the details of legal office are presented with disdainful vagueness: “there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses or whatever they may be” (p. 7). However, this dialogical representation of Chancery also leaves Bleak House open to the larger discourse of equity. Specifically, I shall argue that Dickens's adoption of a reformist perspective entails a commitment to the ideal of equity. Accordingly, the next section suggests some ways in which the structure and rhetoric of the novel are informed by notions of equity that had developed in England. Importantly, in this view Bleak House is a product of legal history, as well as of literary history. It is impossible to say how much of the discourse of equity in the novel was intentionally used, but it is equally impossible, in view of Dickens's personal and journalistic experience of Chancery, to deny its significance in the design.

II

The classical notion of equity, defined by Aristotle as “a correction of law where it is defective owing to its universality,”³⁵ might be exemplified by the pardon of Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. The residuary power of the monarch “to administer justice outside the regular system” is usually cited as the foundation of the Chancery jurisdiction in England.³⁶ Originally a court of conscience, the equity it administered was gradually refined into a body of principles, partly as a result of clashes with the Common Law courts and partly from the recognition that without principles, parties would not be treated equally. Equality, as Baker puts it, “was a requisite of equity.” The eventual result of this development was a system rigid in its rules and procedures:

It is the height of irony that the Court which originated to provide an escape from the defects of common law procedure should in its later history have developed procedural defects worse by far than those of the law. For two centuries before Dickens wrote Bleak House, the word “Chancery” had been synonymous with expense, delay and despair.³⁷

This irony is underscored by the discrepancy between Chancery practices and the principles of the equity jurisdiction, set forth in the “maxims of equity.”³⁸ Among the maxims, the following are particularly telling for present purposes: equity will not, by reason of a merely technical defect, suffer a wrong to be without a remedy; he who seeks equity must do equity; he who comes into equity must come with clean hands; delay defeats equities; equality is equity; equity looks to the intent rather than to the form; and, equity acts in personam. These illustrate the conscientious, substantive and idealistic expectations which equity imposed on those seeking its assistance and the standard of justice which it set itself. With the defects of Chancery, some of the maxims began to function ironically. The Jennens case, the inspiration for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, was begun in 1798 and was still extant in 1915, when costs amounted to £250,000.³⁹ In such an example, the maxim, “delay defeats equities” ironically applies to the court's own dilatoriness, which denies its suitors' justice.

The amplitude of the maxims' application was also limited by the kinds of cases able to be brought before the court. From the sixteenth century most Chancery cases concerned land or “real property” and as the court rigidified its practice, this limitation became entrenched. In consequence, the equity jurisdiction protected the land-owning class, but not others. According to Blackstone's Commentaries, the Chancellor was “keeper of the King's conscience; … general guardian of all infants, idiots and lunatics; and [had] the general superintendence of all charitable uses in the kingdom.” This jurisdiction derives from the monarch's duty as “parens patriae,” parent of the nation.⁴⁰ Douglas Hamer comments that the “basic principle of the Court of Chancery, that the socially weak must have a protector-at-law in the monarch, operated only where real estate was concerned.” Lord Eldon ruled, as part of a policy of “crystallizing” the equity jurisdiction, that he should not exercise these powers unless a case of disputed property was before him.⁴¹ The Chancellor is guardian-at-law to Ada and Richard because they are heirs to the Jarndyce estate. He discharges no such responsibility with respect to Jo, or Charley, or Guster, or Esther. The apostrophe following Jo's death, “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my Lords and gentlemen,” invokes the consciences not only of all “men and women,” but especially the Queen as parens patriae and those in power under her. That the exercise of the parens patriae jurisdiction is seen in the Lord Chancellor's careful and kindly enquiry into the appointment of John Jarndyce as guardian of the wards serves only to emphasize the need for and existent limitations on such power. Jarndyce becomes guardian not only to Rick and Ada, but to Esther and, through her, to Charley and others. This extension of compassion and charity makes him a supplementary Chancellor-figure, one who is perhaps more effectual, though sometimes, when the “east wind” blows, as problematic as his prototype. The function of guardian is therefore drawn from the equity tradition, but is given a far wider range of operation than it had in Chancery.

Yet even this is recognized as second best. The notion of surrogate parenthood is criticized from the beginning by Esther: “The Lord High Chancellor, at his best, appeared so poor a substitute for the love and pride of parents” (p. 31). Jarndyce himself hopes that his guardianship will “heal some of the wounds made by the miserable Chancery suit” (p. 43). The Chancellor's surrogacy is vitiated by its origin in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. As Ada writes to Richard, the suit “had its share in making us both orphans” (p. 466). Jarndyce and Jarndyce is largely responsible for Richard's unsteadiness: when the Chancellor reproves him as a “Vexatious and Capricious Infant” who does not know his own mind, Richard's riposte, “a pretty good joke … from that quarter,” is pertinent criticism (p. 300).

Ultimately, Bleak House idealizes responsible parenthood and family life while multiplying instances of abandonment, neglect, infertility, poverty, disease and death. Like the ideal of equity, family “love and pride” is the desired Other in a world of broken relations. The novel seeks to inscribe the care and protection of children into the nomos. The power of the Chancellor over guardianship is the one room in the “bleak house” of the law adapted to the purpose. Dickens's awareness of this power may be traced to The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, wherein the model for Harold Skimpole laments the removal of Shelley's children from their father's custody by the Chancellor:

the reader, perhaps, is not aware that in this country so justly called free on many accounts, and so proud of its “Englishman's castle”—of the house which nothing can violate—a man's offspring can be taken from him tomorrow who holds a different opinion from the Lord Chancellor in faith and morals.⁴²

The interest here is not the merits of Hunt's defence of Shelley (or of Dickens's disloyalty to Hunt), but the dialectical contrast with Dickens's view of the “condition of England” in general and of the value of the Chancellor's guardianship function. The passage gives to the novel's portrayal of Skimpole as parent a special sharpness, but most importantly it links the idea of parenthood with the image of the home as sanctuary. Esther betrays a consciousness of the rights of the house-holder and parent when, at the Jellybys', she is “in two minds about taking [the] liberty” of bathing Peepy (p. 46), but knows that nobody will notice.

Further, this legal cliché is shown to function negatively in Bleak House, through the forcible entry into houses by bailiffs and such self-appointed moral guardians as Mrs. Pardiggle. The fractured families are also those whose dwellings are most exposed or liable to invasion, which is not only a sign of the novel's socio-economic realism, but an image pattern of emotional, psychological and also political significance. Most precarious in this respect are the brickmakers' wives and children. This domestic setting is invested with political awareness: of the arrogant paternalism of Mrs. Pardiggle; of the brickmakers' radical resistance; of the “triple jeopardy” of the brickmakers' wives, poor, grieving, and battered; of the effects of economic depression and the lack of self-determination evident when brickmakers cannot house their families properly. The disturbing scenes in which Bucket arrests Gridley and later Trooper George by disguised entry into George's and the Bagnets' homes are further examples of this correspondence. By contrast, Charley's efforts to protect her siblings by locking them in is a telling image of determination and a successful adaptation, perhaps inversion, of the skills of a bailiff. Needless to say, her father has easily gained access to Skimpole's. If, according to the mythology of English law, an Englishman's home is his castle, then the novel's imagery of homes vulnerable to invasion and of “decaying houses” in Chancery forces a reconsideration of the security afforded by the law. In consequence, the decrepit slum of Tom-All-Alone's comes to stand not only for the deranged obsession of Tom Jarndyce, but for the rotting structure of Chancery. By extension, English law is not the protective walled city of Heraclitus, but a “bleak house” in which victims like Jo are “moved on” by officers of the state.

The distinction between Chancery practice and the ideals of Equity has far-reaching consequences for an understanding of Bleak House. A further illustration of this “pretense of equity” is afforded by the maxim, “Equity acts in personam.” Simply put, this refers to the nature of equitable remedies, which order named persons either to perform an action that, in conscience or justice, they ought to perform, or to desist from any unconscionable or unjust action. In Bleak House Chancery barely acts at all; instead it is presented as feeding off the estate, as concerned only with the self-maintenance of the suit and the profits to the legal officers. Dickens begins the action of the novel at a time when the only question in dispute in the legal action is that of costs. The reader is never informed what substantive orders were made in answer to the questions originally brought before the court. The equitable action ordered by the court is irrelevant when there is no estate left to be distributed after lawyers' and court costs have been deducted. The late discovery of a final will, which seems to supply the details upon which the court has ruled and the money has been spent, simply confirms the futility of the Chancery action. As D. A. Miller suggests, Jarndyce and Jarndyce is not resolved, merely ended by the exhaustion of the estate in costs.⁴³ This is the only appropriate outcome for a court obsessed by procedural issues and clogged by procedural inefficiency. The objective correlative of this wasteful system is, of course, Krook's rag and bottle shop, a business without turnover, much less profit, “‘of so many kinds, and all, as the neighbours think (but they know nothing), wasting away and going to rack and ruin, that that's why they have given me and my place a christening’” (p. 50).

The only exception to the substantive inaction of Chancery is the order appointing John Jarndyce guardian of the wards. The Jarndyce household, under the superintendence of Esther, is a model of sympathy and efficiency, in contrast to Krook and his eponym. In consequence, Jarndyce's role as supplement to the Lord Chancellor is extended, and Bleak House becomes an alternative Chancery. It becomes the centre of a network of fellowship and charity, in which Jarndyce's quiet generosity and Esther's unpretentious practicality provide conscientious and effective assistance to those of their acquaintance in need. The hallmark of this assistance is personal action and immediate relief. In its conversion of ideals into reality, it contrasts with the distant dream and present mess, the torrent of words and paper, of both Chancery and Telescopic Philanthropy.

This contrast recalls Cover's image of law as a bridge in normative space, stretching across a gap between a present reality and an envisaged ideal. The reactivation of equity by Jarndyce and Esther constitutes such a bridge. It is possible to trace an “alternity” in the structure and image-patterning of Bleak House in the contrast between the “fog” and the light and warmth connoted by the sounds of Esther's surname, “summer-sun.” Her activity and performance of her “duty” may be seen as opening up the possibility of a new world, especially as the emblem of that duty is her keys. Janus-like, keys have a double significance, of locking and unlocking. Esther and Jarndyce, by their actions, use the keys as instruments of opening, not closure. In this respect, their munificence is contrasted with the penny-pinching Smallweeds, with Tulkinghorn's locked boxes of aristocratic secrets and with the accumulated junk of Krook's shop. A variant of this pattern is provided by the closure of the right-of-way, which is the subject of a ridiculous dispute between Boythorn and Sir Leicester. The non-communication between these hyperbolical opponents, like that between the brickmaker and Mrs. Pardiggle, contrasts with the connections achieved by Esther with Jo and the brickmakers' wives.

The significance of seeing the Esther-Jarndyce principle as a bridge is confirmed by the gulf posited by the narrator between Jo and the cross on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, “so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach” (p. 243); an emblem not of religion, but of confusion. Jo is not the only character who experiences this: all the Jarndyces, and especially Richard, find that the “great suit” is a veritable maze,⁴⁴ the exploration of which only increases perplexity; Esther is mystified by her likeness to Lady Dedlock, as is Guppy; Krook does not understand the documents he collects or the letters he laboriously copies. On this basis, J. Hillis Miller has argued that Bleak House is “a document about the interpretation of documents,” in which reader, author and character are all interpreters of “signs and tokens.”⁴⁵ He argues, like Cover, that systems of law “give actions and documents a meaning,”⁴⁶ but, distrusting systems, concludes that Bleak House is poised between a traditional belief in them and a tendency to put all interpretation in question. This opposition pays insufficient attention to the presentation of Chancery's institutional failure to perform the required acts of interpretation.⁴⁷ The acquisition of meaning is expressed in the novel by the plot, which emphasizes anagnorisis,⁴⁸ and by the narrative scheme, in which a character whose existence was sought to be erased is elevated to the ontologically supreme status of co-author.⁴⁹ Esther's narrative, like the plot of the novel, opposes the hermeneutic failure of Chancery. Moreover the cognitive function of her narration is combined with affective developments: speaking of her own experience, she proposes a link between the quickening of the affections and of the understanding. By this process, in equity and in private life knowledge is connected with the novel's moral imperative of charity. Esther narrates the parallel growth of her emotional security and knowledge of her own identity. Part of her “duty” is to lessen the confusion of others by teaching them to read.

What the novel repeatedly calls “Esther's Narrative” not only describes her own “progress,” but also provides a new perspective from which the confusion wrought by Chancery may be judged. As autobiography, Esther's narrative represents a completely different storytelling practice from that adopted in the Court of Chancery. Evidence in Chancery was always written, not oral. Holdsworth describes the process by which Chancery obtained its formal “depositions”: witnesses were required to answer, without legal assistance, “lengthy and minute” interrogatories written by the plaintiff's lawyers; their answers were written down by commissioners, not verbatim, but in the third person and often rephrased. Holdsworth concludes “that there was every chance that in the course of this transcription its effect would be materially altered.”⁵⁰ The unusual “double narrative” of Bleak House may be seen in part as a reaction to this artificial and indirect form of testimony, an ironic commentary on, if not an intentional disavowal of it. Esther's narrative is a first-person statement, integral to, but part of a larger document, in her own words, preserving all her significant evasions, hesitancies, qualifications and avowals. Its inclusion has provoked much comment about the relative status of the two narrators, their contrasting voices and the consequential articulation by Esther of alternative values.⁵¹ What an evidentiary analysis of her narrative adds to the critical understanding of the novel is a sense of the importance of the individual witness. Esther's narrative asserts the value of personal expression over the formal reconstructions of Chancery. Moreover the elevation of the individual in the narrative system is an embodiment in the form of the value of personal action in the social system. Above all it endows the illegitimate orphan with the right to speak in the cause of her own life. Esther's narrative is a vindication of her identity, a proof that she is not filia nullius, the daughter of Nemo, nobody. It is a rewriting of the repressive history of Miss Barbary. Ironically, it effectively takes the place of the deposition she could not give in explanation of her interest in Jarndyce and Jarndyce.⁵² With the impersonal narration it supersedes the mountainous writing and rewriting of that case. As evidence, Esther's narrative also stands in condemnation of the rejection of Jo as a witness at Nemo's inquest.

III

Bleak House includes the evidence of Jo's grateful remembrance of Nemo, just as it includes Sir Leicester's grief at the death of Lady Dedlock. It is often praised for the comprehensiveness of its social analysis, for anatomizing the “condition of England.”⁵³ A similar, totalizing ambition is listed by Holdsworth as one of the “abuses” of Chancery: “the rigid rule that, if it acted at all, it must assume entire control. It would not, for instance, decide a single doubtful point … without administering the whole estate.”⁵⁴ The rule arose from a desire to do “complete justice,” but the result, for Holdsworth, was Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Does Bleak House replicate the plenipotentiary defects of its referent? Hillis Miller argues along this line in his discussion of the theme of interpretation. He suggests that the novel is “a model in little of English society,” but proceeds to examine not the society, but the structure of its literary model: “Bleak House has exactly the same structure as the society it exposes.”⁵⁵ Interpretation is a characteristic common to literature and law, and therefore a central concern of the “legal novel.” However, Hillis Miller's conclusion is predicated on a thematization of the world as a text, an approach that his namesake, D. A. Miller, points out is resisted by the novel itself. D. A. Miller avers that “the current critical fondness for assimilating form and content” must account for novelistic assertions of the difference between them. In this respect, as foreshadowed above, he emphasizes how Chancery profitably defers the work of interpretation rather than carrying it out. He himself considers the relationship between the length of Jarndyce and Jarndyce and the length of Bleak House and sites their qualitative difference in their endings, the case lacking and the novel supplying meaning through resolution. In addition, the pleasure of reading Dickens's account of Jarndyce and Jarndyce contrasts with the weariness of Chancery litigants wading through another round of paper-work in their protracted cause. In a similar way, the totality of Bleak House depends upon a selection of incidents and characters being carefully built up into a pleasurable and meaningful whole, of disparate scenes, the connections between which are gradually revealed; while the “monument to Chancery practice” begins with an entire property which it gradually wastes, with a cast of beneficiaries which it expands at will, and occupies an infinitely extensible duration.

While pointing to the novel's difference from the social institution which it represents, D. A. Miller nonetheless connects the literary form with the world. Specifically, he regards the novel as the product and agent of Foucault's age of “discipline.” In this argument the novel is one among many systems for the bureaucratization of power. The reading of novels, especially in the serial form of their first Victorian readers, “trains us to abide in Chancery-like structures.”⁵⁶ The novel cannot be read at one sitting, but must be laid aside for work, thereby helping to perpetuate the public-private, work-leisure dichotomies of industrial societies. The ending, finitely deferred but always promised, delivers gratification to subservient readers. (The existence of resistant, unsatisfied readers like Lord Denman or the anonymous reviewers quoted above cannot be explained by this model.) Miller relies on simile, rather than on historical exemplification: “Chancery-like structures” are illustrated by the queue, “getting us to wait, as it were in its very long lines,” and by the trust that the reader learns to place in the “machinery of distribution,” which will deliver the promised next instalment.⁵⁷ The invocation of queues seems so trivial as to be a parody of micropolitics. The use of the present tense elides current and Victorian readers.

The implication that nothing has changed, endemic in New Historicist criticism, contrasts with the claims of Hurst that the legal abuses have gone and that there have been revolutionary changes in the social and physical environments of the English courts: “To modern England, poor Jo speaks from a dead world.”⁵⁸ Each of these views is extreme and simplistic, one overly deterministic, one too sanguine in its belief in social progress. In their “defence,” it should be said that Miller recognizes that Bleak House demands a reformed Chancery, and Hurst acknowledges the effects of historical change. Hurst's complacency may be traced to his inability to see that Chancery is a symbol as well as a legal institution, the significance of which transcends historical time and place. His own historical situation, writing in the late 1940s, may have fostered the illusion that the only bleak houses then in England were those bombed by the external enemy. By contrast, Miller's limitation is that he sees Chancery too much in its symbolic, too little in its historical aspect. For him, Chancery functions less as a Court of Equity than as a thematization of the disciplinary system. In Bleak House Gridley's anger is directed at this deterministic and exculpatory invocation of “the system” by individuals working within it (p. 193). His violence exposes the coercive power of the court, which has imprisoned him. While Foucault makes the prison the prototype of the normalizing institutions diffused throughout society, its usage in the forced restraint of force should not be overlooked. Further, its disciplinary regime is unsuccessful, as is Chancery's. The power of the system, then, is great but not absolute. A fully political reading of Bleak House must attend not only to its inscription of disciplinary modes, but also to what David Suchoff calls “the oppositional force of narrative,” its critical representation of the nomos.⁵⁹

Bleak House incorporates this conflict by making the Chancery officials and practitioners respond to Gridley's demands with bemusement and intransigence. Between its injustice to litigants and its imperviousness to criticism, Chancery seems to hold no prospect of change. There is no reformist lawyer in the novel; the reform process forms no part of its plot. Yet the discourse of reform is implicit in the lawyers' very avoidance or denial of it, in their expressed consideration for Mr. Vholes's daughters, and in Conversation Kenge's embarrassed explanation of the end of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The case for reform is established in the novel through the narrators' discourses and through the dramatized misery of the litigants and self-interest of the practitioners. Dickens derives from the lawyers' travesty of professionalism the rule that “the one great principle of English law is, to make business for itself” (p. 482). Of this predatory attitude, the characterization of Vholes as a vampire seeking respectability is an expressive Victorian adaptation of an old satiric type. The altruism of Jarndyce is the ethical accompaniment of his distancing himself from the court. His refusal to take Chancery on its own terms provides the foundation for a counter-discourse and an alternative ethos. In its general orientation Jarndyce's Bleak House is one of Cover's “isolationist” nomic communities—but his intervention to protect Ada and Rick is a “redemptive” action. Rick's entanglement and death plots the partial failure of the redemptive enterprise. The conflict between him and Jarndyce and their eventual reunion confirms the value of isolationism: entanglement means death while isolation enables them to “begin the world” afresh (p. 763).

However, this desire must contend with the novel's valuation of practical charity and its insistence on the inescapability of the past. The latter is indicated in numerous related ways: in the psychological revelation of Esther's narrative as well as in her discovery of her parents; in the belated recovery of Nemo's identity as well as the exposure of Lady Dedlock's secret. The novel thus asserts the futility of attempts to erase personal history. This principle is also attested in the “genealogy” of Bleak House itself, the fact that architecturally and in its contents it allows the prosperity and decline of the Jarndyces to be traced. If John Jarndyce's presentation of a replica of Bleak House to Esther and Woodcourt seems to trap them in the past and to problematize his whimsical generosity, it must be remembered that the house and the family have changed before and will probably change again. Though there is an element of the conventional romantic ending of the attainment of love and stability, the new Bleak House enables Esther's history to be incorporated in their new life rather than superseded or made irrelevant.⁶⁰ As such, it provides an appropriate setting for the active amelioration of Esther's charity and Woodcourt's medicine. Their approach is less to “begin the world” afresh than to repair the old one. For this remedial work, a doctor is a more significant choice of agent than a law reformer.

Woodcourt's ministrations, like those of Jarndyce and Esther, work “little by little” and promise no appreciable effect on the powerful monolith of Chancery. “Deadlock,” or lack of progress, seems to dominate the social system. Coodle and Doodle have presided over ruinous governments, but according to Sir Leicester Dedlock no-one else is qualified to govern the country. Chancery is a monstrous source of inefficiency and injustice, but according to Kenge a great country cannot have a little system. Parliament and Chancery are stiff-jointed survivals, like Deportment: in Hillis Miller's analysis, metonyms for a society deadlocked by an archaic and self-serving ruling elite.⁶¹ Through this rhetoric of contiguity Dickens builds up a picture of the British Constitution and body politic. For example, Sir Leicester regards an interminable Chancery suit approvingly, as “a slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing” (p. 15). To countenance criticism of the status quo is to encourage revolution, personified as “Wat Tyler.” As Susan Shatto has noted, this and other expressions of Sir Leicester, such as “the floodgates are burst open” (p. 504), were part of the conservative reaction to the 1832 Reform Bill, expressing fear of the rising tide of democracy.⁶² In this light, it is significant that Chesney Wold is in flood when the novel opens.

The most explicit development of the body politic imagery occurs in the description of Sir Leicester's gout. In a satiric extension of the hereditary basis of aristocratic society, Dickens includes the disease in the Dedlock patrimony, something handed down throughout time “beyond which the memory of man goeth not to the contrary” (p. 196). This phrase, a misquotation from Blackstone's Commentaries, applies the language of custom sanctioned as law to the ills of the body. As an internal inflammation, the Dedlock gout is a variation on the “Spontaneous Combustion” of Krook, the pseudo-Lord Chancellor. The latter is overtly symbolic, “the death of all Lord Chancellors in all Courts, and of all authorities in all places … where false pretences are made and where injustice is done.” Like Jo's death, it is reported rhetorically not to the common reader but to the monarch, or to the reader as democratic ruler. It is not described but diagnosed: “inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself” (p. 403). This death has been interpreted as having revolutionary implications: for Edgar Johnson, it is a prophecy that society's injustices are so oppressive that they can only be cured by “the complete annihilation that they will ultimately provide by blowing up of their own corruption.”⁶³ Dickens's resort to Spontaneous Combustion, a fictitious natural process makes the death of the corrupt order an organic necessity, not the result of a political action. Krook's death therefore functions less as revolutionary prophecy than as apocalyptic warning. The death of the old and the birth of the new are alike imaginable only as nightmarish fantasy.

A more realistic nightmare, one that eventuates, is the smallpox infection passed from Jo to Charley to Esther. The prophetic future tense which imagines the pestilence moving from Tom-All-Alone's “up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high” (p. 553) dispels Sir Leicester's presumption that disease and death are levellers that yet respect class distinctions. Once again, disease is political:

There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society.

(p. 553)

The first figure whom the narrative finds moving through this portentous setting is, significantly, the physician. At first anonymously, he attends to the brickmaker's wife; then, seeing and chasing Jo, he is named. This meeting between the doctor and the diseased is important for the contrast it affords between Bucket's and Woodcourt's treatment of Jo. The former is feared for his unsympathetic “moving on” of the boy, while the latter helps him to find shelter and companionship. Though medically unavailing, Woodcourt's political and ethical action of attending the poor and treating them with dignity is of great significance. It represents an inversion of the analogy drawn by Socrates in Book V of the Republic between a just city and a healthy body: in such a city the legislator is like a doctor, healing society; but in an unjust city, the legislators are inactive, the people are sick and the doctor must dispense medicine, comfort, wisdom and law.⁶⁴ In Bleak House England requires not a reformist lawyer, but a physician and surgeon. The sickness motif is so thoroughly connected with the ethical concerns of the novel that Esther, in the most horrific nightmare of her illness, dreams of herself as one of a set of gleaming beads, from which she prays to be taken off (p. 432)—a reversal of her normal cultivation of helpful connection with others.

IV

The ideal society in this novel is defined by Esther as the family, a co-operative and loving union. As D. A. Miller has argued, family domesticity serves as a refuge from and alternative to the public world that is “in Chancery.”⁶⁵ Jarndyce and Jarndyce introduces conflict into the family: Richard, when he is absorbed in the case, loses the ability to see his guardian as anything but a competitor, an “interested party.” Esther forces him to see this: “‘Are division and animosity your natural terms, Richard?’” (p. 464). Rick's admission that the suit “puts us on unnatural terms” becomes only “another reason for urging it on!” For Esther it is a reason for abandoning it. It is possible to argue that Esther has it completely wrong, that the “Chancery suits have all originated in family quarrels—Jarndyces', Miss Flite's, Gridley's.”⁶⁶ This argument makes it easy to absolve Chancery and to blame the litigants for their own misery.⁶⁷ It also ignores the evident need for courts to determine real disputes: Jarndyce and Jarndyce really had its origin in an unclear will. The ambiguity of documents and the competition over financial and other resources are the sources of legal cases. The latter problem is evaded, indeed effaced, in Bleak House by the apparently illimitable funds of John Jarndyce. While there is a fount of generosity in the family, while the distribution of wealth extends to whoever comes under notice, the problem of scarcity and competition does not exist, and the reality of conflict can be displaced into the category of the unnatural. It is essential to note, though, that the Bleak House community has had to be created, by renovating the home, by intervention in Chancery, by paying for Esther's education. The novel therefore presents the ideal family as something retrieved from the social and moral chaos. The plot of Esther's life is one of finding and making her own family. Nevertheless, the task of building a family unit is made easier—and the experience of family life looks rosier—in the benevolent environment created by John Jardyce's wealth. As Bleak House elides the need for Chancery reform with the “natural” death of corrupt systems, so it replaces the fraught rejection of Esther's childhood with a “family romance.”

The process of transformation is, in each case, entrusted to a guardian. A reformed Chancery would provide true, equal, effective guardianship. Esther's accession to a family of her own is presided over by Jarndyce. In each of these cases there is a problematic paternalism at work: the only alternative to the gouty and self-serving elite is the ironmaster, whose superintendence of the marriage of Watt and Rosa is the same species of patronage as the Dedlocks' and John Jarndyce's. The ruse whereby Jarndyce “transfers” (almost in the legal sense) Esther's plighted troth from himself to Woodcourt is arrant paternalism. Indeed it clarifies their relationship from that of lovers to that of father and daughter. Further, the presentation of the new Bleak House constitutes a dowry, given by a father through his daughter to her husband. If, as the rationale of the Chancery jurisdiction suggests, the need for guardianship is to ensure the protection of the young or insane, then this extension of the activities of guardian into the arrangement of marriage, whatever its generosity, replicates the legal subordination of women in Victorian society, and affirms paternalistic power.⁶⁸

To infer from this conclusion that nothing changes in Esther's life or in a reformed Chancery is too sweeping. For Esther to marry Woodcourt, not only does Jarndyce have to recognize the falsity of his “suit,” but Mrs. Woodcourt must undergo a change of values in a particular which ramifies throughout Bleak House, the importance of noble blood or aristocratic lineage. Esther's illegitimate birth would bar her from Lady Dedlock's admittedly worthless share in the Jarndyce estate, and closer to home, from a middle-class marriage with Woodcourt. Sir Leicester's ideology of class purity is a means of maintaining political hegemony, and one of its effects is to imbue the middle classes with a false consciousness of the value of gentility. Jarndyce's pertinent question to Mrs. Woodcourt, “What is the true legitimacy?” mounts a challenge to this ideology and hegemony, forcing her to choose between her prejudicial reverence for “blood” and her observation of Esther's evident loving and dutiful character. The question demands that Esther be valued not by her social status, but by her personal qualities. The structure of the novel underwrites this changed valuation by making Esther one of its narrators, ensuring that we see things from her “point of view” and more than this, that we experience her struggle to achieve a belief in the validity of her own perceptions. While her narration is still self-deprecating (“As if this narrative were the narrative of my life!” [p.27]) Esther progresses from burying her doll to marriage and motherhood, from the periphery to the centre of an emotional circle which changes its quality from disgrace to rich happiness.

The question, “What is the true legitimacy?” also applies to the body politic. The novel challenges social and political institutions to legitimate themselves rather than to rely on inherited authority. Law, fashion, parliament, all “things of precedent and usage” (p. 10), have their injustices, pretensions and irrelevances exposed. Even the fundamental law, the regulator of political power, is an unwritten and inherited body of practices, and is described with ironic invective as “that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution” (p. 198). Jo, to whom this passage applies, is as ignorant of the Constitution as the Constitution is of him. The rhetorical power of both the impersonal narrator and Esther is directed against the rhetoric of the ruling class: it questions the equitable professions of Chancery, the representativeness of the “representative government” and the sincerity of religious Missions and proselytes; it deflates Blackstone's eloquence by applying it to gout; it rewrites the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer to accord with realities (“here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption” (p. 137),⁶⁹ and it shows the anachronism of conservative clichés by investing Chesney Wold with the damp of the already-breached floodgates. Thus, in the year of the Great Exhibition, Bleak House seeks to inject into the self-congratulation of the British people a questioning of the comprehensiveness of their vision; amid the economic well-being it seeks to promote a “legitimation crisis.”⁷⁰

As an answer to “the Condition-of-England” question, Bleak House portrays English society “in Chancery,” dominated by and characterized by the dead hand of the court. Against this, Dickens sets the “progress” of Esther Summerson and, through her, the reclamation of the ideals of equity. The upshot of this two-fold presentation is to override any static assumptions underlying the “Condition of England,” to insist on the necessity of change by using the temporal properties of narrative. Thus Bleak House acknowledges the obstructive ambitions of institutions like Chancery and people like Sir Leicester, but in its representation of a succession of incidents it brings the Jarndyce case to an end, transforms Esther from orphan to mother, brings down the house of Dedlock and otherwise exposes illusions of permanence, restores lost children to their families and destroys attempts to bury the past.

Although the original Jarndyce will is said to have been made “in an evil hour” (p. 88), wills in general provide an opportunity to confer benefits on others and to link past, present and future. The nature of these benefits is expanded by the novel beyond the material: Jo and George make wills, while in her last chapter Esther writes of having little money but being rich in the love and praise of other people. George's will is an acknowledgment of the family ties he foresook for so long, and he guards against any possibility of cutting out others from his mother's estate. In this, one of the concluding episodes of the novel, the link between the law of succession and the ideal of the family is reaffirmed: not the division and animosity of the Jarndyce heirs, nor the exclusive and self-valorizing heritage of the Dedlocks, but the co-operative arrangements of the Dedlock servants and their progressive offspring are presented as a sign of what families can achieve under the law if, to use a slightly different sense of the word, they have the will.⁷¹

Dickens's choice of the story of a disputed will is, therefore, a significant vehicle for the promotion of an ideology of the family in the context of a general critique of society. It suggests, in particular, an older and more generalized sense of the word “estate,” meaning not property, but a state of life, one that incorporates both classes of society and personal well-being. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as noted on page 81, is based on the Jennens case. A sidelight of this case was the formation of the Jennens Society: payment of the membership fee entitled subscribers to investigation of any possible claim that might be made of their kinship with Jennens and hence a share in his estate.⁷² The opportunism, greed and fraud of this venture have their echo in Bleak House in Guppy's quest for “information” and the Smallweeds' visit to Sir Leicester. More importantly, however, the real beneficiary of the Jarndyce case is the orphan who finds her family in a most unexpected “connection” and who tells us that the money does not matter.

Notes

1. Athenaeum, 6 Mar. 1852, rpt. Bleak House: A Casebook, A. E. Dyson (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 49-50.

2. Generations of lawyers have written on these cases from the point of view of legal history. Whilst often neglecting the conventions of fictional discourse, they form a distinctive part of the novels' reception. Some such responses are engaged with below. A good recent example is K. J. A. Asche, “Dickens and the Law,” in The Happy Couple: Law and Literature, Turner and Williams (eds), pp. 81-93.

3. Athenaeum, 17 Sept 1853, rpt. in Dyson (ed.), Casebook, p. 55.

4. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), discusses the influence of such narratives on the development of the novel. Compare the “Last Speech etc. of Margaret Murdockson” in Heart of Midlothian and the broadside on the death of Billy Budd.

5. For a history of law reporting see J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (2nd edn., London: Butterworths, 1979), pp. 151-8.

6. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (1962; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 182.

7. The Speeches of Charles Dickens, K. J. Fielding (ed.) (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988), pp. 97-8.

8. Frye points especially to the trial in Alice in Wonderland and the inheritance plot in Wuthering Heights (“what Satan could do with the law of entail!”). See “Literature and the Law,” Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette, 4 (1970), pp. 70-7.

9. Samuel Warren, Ten Thousand A Year (1841; Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1854), p. 225.

10. On the ideology of “family” see Andrew Blake, Reading Victorian Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 52. See also Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 63.

11. Quarterly Review, 79 (1846), p. 61. An excerpt from this review containing the reference to the “legal novel” is printed in A Victorian Art of Fiction, John Charles Olmstead (ed.) (New York: Garland, 1979), i, pp. 527-30.

12. Review of Tales by a Barrister, p. 63.

13. Ibid., p. 68.

14. See Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform, pp. 215ff.

15. Ibid., p. 1.

16. Another discussion of the use of novels in the advocacy of reform is Joseph Kestner, Protest and Reform (London: Methuen, 1985).

17. Letter to Mrs. Cropper, 20 Dec. 1852. See The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, vi (1850-2), Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 827.

18. Marjorie Stone, “Dickens, Bentham and the Fictions of the Law: A Victorian Controversy and its Consequences,” Victorian Studies, 29 (1985), pp. 125-54.

19. The concluding sentence to Dickens's Preface to Bleak House. See the authoritative Norton Critical edition of the novel, George Ford and Sylvère Monod (eds) (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 4. All future references will be included parenthetically in the chapter. On pushpin, see Jeremy Bentham, “The Rationale of Reward,” Works, John Bowring (ed.) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), ii, p. 253.

20. A. V. Dicey, Law and Popular Opinion in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 419, quoting Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government, p. 153.

21. Brantlinger, Spirit of Reform, p. 41.

22. John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, “The Topicality of Bleak House,” in their Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 187; rpt. Dyson (ed.), Casebook, p. 116.

23. These quotes are taken from contemporary reviews excerpted in Dyson (ed.), Casebook, pp. 62, 56, 82, 69-70, and 87 respectively.

24. Sir Gerald Hurst K. C., “Arising out of Bleak House,” in his Lincoln's Inn Essays (London: Constable, 1949), p. 112.

25. See Bleak House, p. 3 and Susan Shatto, The Companion to Bleak House (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 14.

26. Hurst, “Arising out of Bleak House,” p. 113.

27. See for example, J. Hillis Miller, “Introduction to Bleak House,” Bleak House, Norman Page (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 11-34; Jack Lindsay, Charles Dickens: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Andrew Dakers, 1950); and Mark Spilka, “Religious folly,” in Dyson (ed.), Casebook, pp. 204-23; as respective examples of these approaches.

28. John R. Reed, Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), p. 208.

29. Quoted in W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, xiii (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 306.

30. See, e.g., his strictures on “split jurisdiction” in “Justice and Codification Petitions.” In Jeremy Bentham, Works, John Bowring (ed.), v, pp. 481-4.

31. Q. D. Leavis, “Bleak House: A Chancery World,” in F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 123.

32. Many critics have insisted on the dual, social and symbolic, function of Chancery: see, for example, Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (London: Secker and Warburg, 1970), p. 232; and James M. Brown, Charles Dickens: Novelist in the Marketplace (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 10.

33. Quoted by W. S. Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), p. 80. For a full account of this case and its influence on Bleak House see E. T. Jaques, Charles Dickens in Chancery (1914; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1972).

34. Douglas Hamer, “Dickens and the Old Court of Chancery,” N& Q [N.S.], 17 (1970), pp. 341-7, argues thus.

35. Quoted by Baker, Introduction to English Legal History, p. 90.

36. Ibid., p. 84.

37. Ibid., p. 95.

38. See Snell's Principles of Equity, 8th edn. (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1887), chap. ii.

39. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 2 vols; ii. p. 771; excerpted in Dyson (ed.), Casebook, p. 145. Johnson refers to the case under the name “Jennings” but the correct name appears to be “Jennens”: see Hurst, “Arising out of Bleak House,” pp. 116-17.

40. See Robert A. Donovan, “Structure and Idea in Bleak House,” ELH, 19 (1962), p. 181 for a discussion of the appropriateness of a Chancery suit as a vehicle for Dickens's exploration of the theme of the human responsibility to care for others. On the Chancellor's parens patriae jurisdiction see D. M. Kerly, An Historical Sketch of the Equitable Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery (Cambridge University Press, 1890), p. 225; and for a modern discussion see R. E. Megarry and P. V. Baker, Snell's Principles of Equity, 25th edn. (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1960), p. 482.

41. Hamer, “Dickens and Chancery,” p. 342.

42. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (1850; London: Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 267-8. On the question whether Dickens knew Hunt's book, see R. D. Altick, “Harold Skimpole Revisited,” in The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt (Iowa City: Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1985), pp. 1-15. Altick shows numerous connections between Hunt's circumstances, personal qualities and literary works, and the novels of Dickens.

43. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 90.

44. Irene E. Woods, “On the Significance of Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” Dickens Quarterly, 1 (1984), pp. 811-17 argues that Dickens derives this trope, through Carlyle, from the German Romantics.

45. J. Hillis Miller, “Introduction,” Bleak House (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), pp. 11, 17.

46. Ibid., p. 34.

47. This argument by D. A. Miller is further discussed below.

48. Donovan, “Structure and Idea,” p. 189, so characterizes the plot of Bleak House.

49. Jeremy Hawthorn, Bleak House (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 57-8, insists that the combination of “diegetic” and “extradiegetic” narrators is “a problem.”

50. Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian, pp. 92-3.

51. For an important review of this literature, arguing that the novel is “an extension and a critique of the sexual division into separate spheres,” see Virginia Blain, “Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House,” Literature and History, ii (1985), pp. 31-46.

52. For a different interpretation of this aspect of the text, see Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. five.

53. See for example Edgar Johnson, note 39 and Q. D. Leavis, note 31.

54. Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian, pp. 105-7.

55. J. Hillis Miller, “Introduction,” Bleak House, pp. 11, 29.

56. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, p. 92.

57. Ibid.

58. Hurst, “Arising out of Bleak House,” pp. 118-19.

59. David Suchoff, Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 25.

60. Contrast Franco Moretti's argument that the English Bildungsroman, shaped by a restorative and not a transformational “culture of justice,” is characterized by a plot of loss and recovery in which the ending restores the hero(ine) and so renders much of the plot and aberration: The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987). Michal Peled Ginsburg argues that transformational plots can be traced in Dickens, though less so in Bleak House than in Our Mutual Friend. See “The Case Against Plot in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend,” ELH, 59 (1992), pp. 175-95.

61. Hillis Miller, Introduction to Penguin Bleak House, pp. 14ff.

62. Shatto, Companion, p. 35.

63. See Dyson (ed.), Casebook, p. 156.

64. Plato, The Republic, F. M. Cornford (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), chap. xiv (iv.441-4). This allusion is made in a slightly different argument by Judith S. Koffler, “Injustice as Disease: the Homeless in Bleak House,” Dickens Project—Law and Humanities Institute Conference, Santa Cruz, 6 August 1988.

65. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, p. 101. A more general account of the representation of the family in reformist fiction is given by Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, chap. five.

66. P. J. M. Scott's phrase, from Reality and Comic Confidence in Charles Dickens (Fulham: Vision Books, 1979), p. 109, is quoted by Hawthorn, Bleak House, p. 32.

67. Hamer, “Dickens and Chancery,” p. 361: “The world was full of Gridleys trying to save a few pounds against a brother and finding themselves penniless in the end. …”

68. See Patricia Hollis (ed.), Women in Public: Documents of the Victorian Women's Movement (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), Part Six, for contemporary accounts of the legal status of women.

69. Note also “the valley of the shadow of the law” (chap. 32) with its echoes of the 23rd Psalm: see Garrett Stewart, “Epitaphic Chapter Titles and the New Mortality of Bleak House,” in Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Harold Bloom (ed.) (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 86.

70. See John O. Jordan, “Bleak House and the Crisis of Legitimacy,” Dickens Project/Law and Humanities Institute Conference, Santa Cruz, 5 August 1988. For a different reading of Esther's illegitimacy, see Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Representing Illegitimacy in Victorian Culture,” in Victorian Identities, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 138.

71. The significance of will in this latter sense is explored in Timothy Peltason, “Esther's Will,” ELH, 59 (1992), pp. 671-91.

72. See Hurst, “Arising out of Bleak House,” p. 117.