Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a fictional court case in
ChanceryThe Court of Chancery was one of the courts of equity in England and Wales.-Overview:The High Court of Chancery was the court that developed from the Lord Chancellor's jurisdiction...
in the novel
Bleak HouseBleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon...
by
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens FRSA , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print...
.
The case concerns the fate of a large inheritance. It has dragged on for many generations prior to the action of the novel, so that, by the time it is resolved late in the narrative, legal costs have devoured nearly the entire estate. The case is thus a byword for an interminable legal proceeding.
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Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a fictional court case in
ChanceryThe Court of Chancery was one of the courts of equity in England and Wales.-Overview:The High Court of Chancery was the court that developed from the Lord Chancellor's jurisdiction...
in the novel
Bleak HouseBleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon...
by
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens FRSA , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print...
.
The case concerns the fate of a large inheritance. It has dragged on for many generations prior to the action of the novel, so that, by the time it is resolved late in the narrative, legal costs have devoured nearly the entire estate. The case is thus a byword for an interminable legal proceeding. Dickens used it to attack the chancery court system as being near totally worthless, as any "honourable man among its [Chancery's] practitioners" says, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"
All of the main characters are connected in some way through the case, though the actual legal proceedings appear only as background plot. Aside from the lawyers who prosecute and defend the case every character who directly associates with it suffers some tragic fate. Miss Flite has long since lost her mind when the narrative begins, and Richard Carstone dies trying to win the inheritance for himself.
From the first chapter:
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two ChanceryThe Court of Chancery was one of the courts of equity in England and Wales.-Overview:The High Court of Chancery was the court that developed from the Lord Chancellor's jurisdiction...
lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.
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