Complexities of Society and Judiciary in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

In the court of Chancery, there was a case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, based on Mr. Jarndyce’s will of reserving large sums of inheritance for his rightful ward. The predicament was that his will was not one but many, leading to different claims passed down through generations, with the case still unresolved. In the courts, absolute good and evil blur into the technicalities of correct or incorrect procedure; niceties with devastating human effects. Thus, the theme of law meshes with the observation of order—or rather, disorder endemic to society—which entails disease and despair.

Dickens was appalled by the chaos of British law, its accumulation of statute law, common law, and precedents in equity, its overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions, and its antiquated and mysterious rituals and procedures. In the novel, the august figure of the Lord Chancellor himself symbolizes the opaqueness of urban society and the ambiguity in deciphering its structure. The birds symbolize people, like Miss Flite herself, who were trapped by the Chancery system and who waited, suspended, for a verdict on their case so they could advance with their lives.

It would be ludicrous to neglect the solid basis of Bleak House in traditional “social criticism.” Tom-All-Alone, Chancery suits, crossing sweeps hounding to death, bricklayers’ babies dying of starvation, politicians stupidly perpetuating themselves no matter the cost—all are synonymous with the poisonous fog that has engulfed the city of London. The novel calls for social action, while simultaneously denying the possibility that any action arising from corporate society will better man’s condition. Dickens’s mentality distrusted political institutions because the social will had always been, and would always be, corrupt and self-centered. In such a society, where religion degenerates into perversions of its inspiration, culture into the cheating and cadging of Skimpole, and mere self-preservation into the portrayal of Grandfather Smallweed, Dickens provides both an anatomy of society and a fable in which its major influences are sharply individualized.

“The father of this pleasant grandfather… was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of spider, who spun webs to catch unwary flies, and retired into holes until they were entrapped.”

The long holidays of the Chancery court suggested that it was not vital to the running of the country, nor that it treated its cases with any urgency. The cases were suspended, and no progress was made with the suits. All these exemplifications were no longer subjects of local cure, as nothing would do short of the complete annihilation that they would ultimately provide by bursting into flames through their corruption.

Dickens’s satire does not merely attack abuses of the law; it attacks the fundamental postulates of the British legal system. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the case in which “every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, was represented over and over again,” encapsulates this critique. This was the reason Dickens despised the lawyers, as they drew their living from human misery without contributing significantly to alleviating it. Justice becomes a by-product of law, and the law itself assumes the character of an intellectual contest in which attack and counterattack and the play of knowledge are of transcendent interest, even when the result is a matter of indifference. It amounts to no paradox that the lawyer cares nothing for justice; he cares only for the law.

Chancery exemplifies the slow and circuitous processes of British jurisprudence. Its ritual was more intricate, its fictions more remote from actualities, and its precedents opaque. It provided a microcosm of the legal world of 19th Century England, magnifying the law’s essential features and reducing its flaws to absurdity. Therefore, Chancery is especially appropriate as an image of the kind of responsibility that Bleak House is really about. Robert A. Donovan, in his essay Structure and Idea in Bleak House, asks the reader a rhetorical question: “Who will take responsibility for Jo?” It won’t be the government, religion, the law, or charity. But his life depends primarily on the generosity shown by Snagsby, Captain Hawdon, and later by Esther and Allan Woodcourt. Jo’s character is an instrument of Dickens’s social protest.

In Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Legislation, he states:

“Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty. To determine the unity of law, a lawmaker needs to determine whether the actions which he undertakes to prevent are evils, and if the actions are to be prevented are evil, whether they are eviler than the action that the law employs to prevent them.”

In other words, the lawmaker needs to reconsider the evil of the offense and the evil of the law. The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce was an emblem of the acquisitiveness of lawyers. Its ramifications illustrated how social evil and its accompanying personal corruption represent personal greed and selfish irresponsibility, where materialistic ends insulate its participants in a kind of prison, shut off from a proper realization of mankind’s common humanity. Therefore, Chancery, with its obstructive ritual, callous unconcern, and poisonous degeneracy, is not only iniquitous in itself; it functions in the novel as a touchstone of the mortal realities of so-called “societies.”

Bibliography

• Fradin, Joseph I. “Will and Society in Bleak House.” PMLA, vol. 81, no. 1, Modern Language Association, 1966, pp. 95–109, https://doi.org/10.2307/461312.
• Johnson, Edgar. “‘Bleak House’: The Anatomy of Society.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 7, no. 2, University of California Press, 1952, pp. 73–89, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044295.
• Donovan, Robert A. “Structure and Idea in Bleak House.” ELH, vol. 29, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962, pp. 175–201, https://doi.org/10.2307/2871854.
• Jenks, Edward. “Bentham’s Theory of Legislation.” Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, vol. 14, no. 4, Cambridge University Press, 1932, pp. 289–91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/754204.