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E-book Title: Bleak House
Author: Charles Dickens
Book Description: PREFACE
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a institution of several hundred and fifty men and women not drudging under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, although the shining subject of more popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was about 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 recently 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 another 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 fixed it to Speech Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or another of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I mightiness 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 will I were renewed!"
But as it is wholesome that the penurious public should cognize 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 well true, and inside
the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, ready-made public by a impartial person who was professionally acquainted with 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 acknowledged to appear at one time, in which price have been incurred to the figure of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than once
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 figure of seventy thousand pounds has been engulfed up in costs. If I wanted another authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of--a penurious public.More... | |
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